It has been far too long since I’ve made a blog posting. Today is day 73 of the #occupyvi movement so I have to give a shout out to Ripper the Entertainer‘s VI rendition of the Slap Chop infomercial.
Finally! Microsoft added MSMQ to Server Core in Windows Server 8
Server Core was first introduced with Windows Server 2008 then refined in 2008 R2 but in both editions they forgot a key component of their “Core” OS in MSMQ. That meant if you wanted to install IIS on a machine that could write to an MSMQ queue you had to put it on a full install even though IIS is fully supported on Server Core as part of R2.
A little peeved at this discovery I loaded up a Server Core instance of Server 8 Developer Preview in VMware Workstation and did a feature list and was happy to see that MSMQ was finally available to Server Core in vNext.
Test Post from iPad
Looks like the station is fully operational 
Test Post from Nexus One
Just testing out posting to my self hosted site from my phone.

We Have Liftoff
Ok I will keep the first blog post extremely short suffice to say I have managed to get VMware ESXi 5.0 up and running on my old Dell OptiPlex 740 desktop after I upgraded the ram to 8GB. I am now actively in the NAS market I have pretty much decided upon the QNAP TS-859U-RP Turbo NAS as it appears to be the best mix of features (VMware compatible, iSCSI, 8 drive bays, Rack Mount, & RAID options) and price point (< $2,000) that I am looking for. I am however open to suggestions.
Anyways this is my WordPress home running on a WIMP (Windows, IIS, MySQL, & PHP) stack. I am currently planning on creating a series of posts going from installing ESXi and greenfielding a series of VMs mostly on Windows Server 2008 R2 Server Core for Active Directory, IIS, SQL Server 2012, etc.