John Clayton's questions

I'm working with a Tyan S7010 motherboard, which has a built-in AST2050 IPMI module with KVM-over-IP functionality. The board has 2 physical NICs built in. There appears to be 3 MAC addresses on the system...each NIC has its own, but according the BIOS the IPMI module has a MAC that belongs to neither NIC.

I'm running XenServer 5.5 on the system, and the only way I am able to connect to both the IPMI and XenServer is to have both NICs plugged in. Where I'm confused is that in XenServer it sees both physical NICs and their correct MAC addresses, and it properly identifies which are connected. Even more unusual is if I have only the NIC connected where the IPMI works but XenCenter doesn't I am able to ping some addresses from XenServer but not others.

The only explanation I can come up with is that the IPMI takes over one of the NICs, so you only end up with 1 usable NIC on-board. Does this sound reasonable? Is there any better explanation? Tyan's documentation pretty much sucks.

Simple question that I've yet to find a simple answer for: do you need a domain in order to use the new features in Hyper-V Server 2008 R2? Using the Remote Server Administration tools? Using SCVMM?

All the demos and documentation of live migration, cluster shared volumes, & failover clustering have used a domain, but have not explicitly said it was requried. Can these features be used within a workgroup?

I'm planning on building a file server using OpenSolaris and ZFS that will provide two primary services - be an iSCSI target for XenServer virtual machines & be a general home file server. The hardware I'm looking at includes 2x 4-port SATA controllers, 2x small boot drives (one on each controller), and 4x big drives for storage. This allows one free port per controller for upgrading the array down the road.

Where I'm a little confused is how to setup the storage drives. For performance, mirroring appears to be king. I'm having a hard time seeing what the benefit would be of using RAIDZ over mirroring would be. With this setup I can see two options - two mirrored pools in one stripe, or RAIDZ2. Both should protect against 2 drive failures, and/or one controller failure...the only benefit of RAIDZ2 would be that any 2 drives could fail. The storage should be 50% of capacity in both cases, but the first should have much better performance, right?

The other thing I'm trying to wrap my mind around is the benefit of mirrored arrays with more than two devices. For data integrity what, if any, would be the benefit of a RAIDZ over a three-way mirror? Since ZFS maintains file integrity what does RAIDZ bring to the table...doesn't ZFS's integrity checks negate the value of RAIDZ's parity?

I work from home via VPN. In the past when my domain password is close to expiring I simply connect to the VPN and do the regular change password routine and everything seems to work fine.

I recently got a new laptop for work and want to use it in addition to the existing one. I've not yet authenticated the new one to the domain because I don't know what will happen when it's time to change the password. It seems like if I change it on one computer, the second computer will still use the cached credentials since that's all it knows about. I assume if this is the case then I'll get lots of password prompting when connected to the VPN and that the only way to change the cached credentials on the second computer is to authenticate against the domain the next time I'm in the office (about once a month).

The computers are XP & Vista x64, using the Cisco VPN client & the NCP Secure Entry Client, respectively.

Am I able to change my domain password on 2 computers via the VPN?