Creating a virtual machine manually is straightforward but too time consuming if you regularly need to set up many virtual machines. The BoxGrinder and VMBuilder programs let you automate this process.

A lack of information about your infrastructure can result in faulty system configuration and other difficulties. Automatic discovery of all hosts and services would seem to be the best solution – but can it also prove itself in practice?

Microsoft’s Windows Server 2012 offers numerous improvements in Active Directory, as well as better and easier management.

You don’t have to buy Windows 8 Enterprise Edition to create a Windows To Go USB drive, nor do you have to buy an expensive, certified USB disk to make it work.

Ngrep is a pattern-matching tool that sorts the wheat from the chaff and doubles as a lightweight packet sniffer.

If the Linux server crashes, not only do you need to restore operations, you also need to analyze the problem. A kernel crash dump at the time of the crash can be a big help.

In the old Hyper-V hypervisor from Microsoft, many features for professional use were missing. The new version 3.0 has been significantly improved and is slowly catching up to VMware.

Expect is a unique scripting language that emulates keystrokes by responding to expected responses from a local or remote system. Think of Expect as an automated, virtual you.

A honeypot is a specialized security tool that pretends to be an ordinary system to attract and identify attackers. Experienced intruders, however, are not so easily fooled. An experimental new technology known as HoneypotMe moves honeypot functionality to real systems on the production network.

For once, admins and users agree: They want more resiliency and higher bandwidth on the network. Link aggregation, in line with IEEE 802.1ax b-2008, offers both – with some minor restrictions.