Some personal news...

biwirth — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 03:24:00 GMT

Hello Dear Blog Readers,

(hmmm....that kinda sounds like the beginning of one of those SPAM emails)

I wanted to let you all know I am moving on from Microsoft and shall no longer be blogging here. I'll be moving an archive of these posts to my website http://www.greenitstrategy.com and shall continue blogging there on Green IT.

So what will I be doing now?

Well, I have decided to take some time off, write a book and maybe look into starting my own business. Regardless, you can always catch me through my website and please do feel free to visit me there.

Thank you to everyone who contacted me with their Green IT questions over the past two years and gave me feedback. I really appreciate your support and good luck with your own Green IT initiatives.

Kind Regards,

Bianca AKA Little Miss Enviro Geek

HOW TO: Green IT & Visio: Monitoring HVAC & Virtualisation with data connections

biwirth — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 00:41:00 GMT

So I am pretty sure we all use Visio to do our network diagrams & map out of architecture, however I recently found out about how Visio can be used to map out Green IT initiatives. The Visio Toolbox site has all the goodies for Visio. There are two particularly helpful tools in relation to Green IT specifically:

Rack Server Virtualization - this is an add-in you can download for free. There is a good PDF as well explaining How to analyse Rack Server Virtualization.
HVAC Monitoring with Visio - using a partner HVAC tool, you can setup monitoring inside Visio. For instructions on this DOWNLOAD the PDF.

Linking Data with Visio

The key to start using these tools are to know how to link data to a Visio diagram (you need Visio Professional for this functionality):

For developers, check out this MSDN article on how to do this both programmatically: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb743267.aspx
For IT Pros, open Visio, press F1 (Help), then search for "Create a detailed network diagram by using external data in Visio Professional"

Rack Server Virtualization: A planning scenario tool

Some key points on this add-in are:

Identify the candidates for virtualisation from a rack & server view
You can source data on elements like usage-over-time CPU utilisation direct from System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) or WMI to get current CPU utilisation (snapshot in time only)
Before & After visual analysis
Ability to export your report afterwards

For more Visio Green IT resources, go to: http://visiotoolbox.com/en-US/visio_greenit.aspx

Little Miss Enviro Geek : HVAC

Some personal news...

**HOW TO: Green IT & Visio: Monitoring HVAC & Virtualisation with data connections**

Linking Data with Visio

Rack Server Virtualization: A planning scenario tool

HOW TO: Green IT & Visio: Monitoring HVAC & Virtualisation with data connections