Shut up, Windows 10! Here is a free must-have tool to protect your privacy.

If you install Windows 10 with the default "Express Settings" then it will collect a plethora of data from you and send it to Microsoft and "trusted partners": Not only whatever you ask Cortana (Microsoft's version of Apple's Siri or Google Now), but also what you type or write by hand, where you are, what networks you connect to, what you search for and more...

Sure, they are not alone with this: Google does it with Android, Apple with iOS devices, and - if you ask them - they all collect the data only to optimize the personalized services that they offer you for free. Really for free? No, you pay with your data ... However, more and more people are concerned about data privacy and want to have a choice about what data they disclose. Recently I stumbled over a great tool that helps those people when using Windows 10.

A fix for Intel i211 and i350 adapters not being detected by ESXi

Recently two readers of my blog asked me for help with a strange issue that they encountered when trying to install ESXi on their whitebox hardware. The one was a Shuttle DS57 barebone, and the other one was a Compulab Fitlet-X (an interesting tiny fanless industrial PC with 4 onboard NICs). Both have Intel i211 Gigabit Ethernet adapters that were not detected by ESXi, although they are officially supported by the ESXi 6.0 built-in igb driver (see VMware HCL entry).

Looking for a solution I found that this seems to be a common issue. Multiple reports found in the VMware Communities and other forums convinced me that resolving the issue would help a lot of people. Time for some late night troubleshooting ...

Troubleshooting VM network performance using vsish

Long time, no post ... I'm currently busy with several support requests that I opened with VMware. These keep me busy but they are also good opportunities to learn something new.

One of the cases involves troubleshooting the network performance of Lync 2013 servers running on top of vSphere. It turned out that the VMkernel system information shell (better known as vsish) is a great tool for this.