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24 December 2010
Microsoft Exchange Server 2010: High Availability Deep Dive (including changes introduced by SP1)
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22 December 2010
Windows Phone 7 Guides for IT Professionals
The Windows Phone 7 Guides for IT Professionals is a series of articles intended to help you evaluate how to integrate and support Windows Phone 7 in your organization.
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16 December 2010
Microsoft releases update that enables Exchange 2010 Archive access for Outlook 2007
Microsoft released a cumulative update for Outlook 2007 that provides access to Exchange 2010's Archive mailbox. A long awaited feature, Outlook 2007 users previously had to rely on Outlook Web Access to access their archive. Some organizations have held off deploying Exchange's archive feature because they had Outlook 2007 deployed. Now, the wait is over.
Hotfix 2458611 is now available for the download for the x86 platform. Among the features that will become available to Outlook 2007 users are:
- Accessing messages in the archive
- Moving messages into the archive
- Accessing the archive of a manager when granted delegate access
There are some known limitations when compared to Outlook 2010 and the archive. Among them are the lack of support for archive policies and the ability to search independently of the mailbox and archive.
For more information on Exchange 2010's personal archive feature, see:
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11 December 2010
Lync 2010 RTM Documentation available on Technet
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05 December 2010
21 November 2010
25 years of Windows!
Twenty-five years ago, on Nov. 20, 1985, Microsoft introduced its first version of Windows to the world. Not many people outside the technical press or the tech industry took notice. Product launch events that cost hundreds of millions of dollars were still years away.
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08 November 2010
Now Available: Microsoft P2V Migration for Software Assurance
Microsoft P2V Migration for Software Assurance automates the delivery of an updated and personalized Windows 7 operating system while backing up and converting the legacy Windows XP or later desktop and its applications for seamless use within Windows 7. P2V Migration supports both native Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) Lite Touch Installation as well as Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2007 Zero Touch Installation.
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28 October 2010
Microsoft Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 Release Candidate Is Now Available
Review Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 system requirements and the frequently asked questions (FAQ) | |
Register for evaluation | |
Download and install RC software | |
Receive an email with resources to guide you | |
Question on the RC? Please visit the SP1 Forum for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 or the Windows Server 2008 R2 Migration & Deployment Forum for additional guidance |
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27 October 2010
26 October 2010
25 October 2010
21 October 2010
Balancing the number of mailboxes across Exchange 2010 and 2007 databases
In Exchange 2010, we now have the option to allow mailboxes to be automatically distributed across databases. However, the algorithm used simply randomly allocates the new mailbox to our chosen databases - rather than ensuring the mailbox count is balanced, and doesn't do anything about re-distributing mailboxes if you add new databases.
To help with this, and of course to help with any situation where you want to balance the number of mailboxes across a set of databases, Steve Goodman has written a simple script that help with moving mailboxes to balance out your databases.
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12 October 2010
Live@Edu - New Deployment Video Series
- Verify domain ownership
- Plan and prepare for Live@edu deployment
- Test and integrate
- Launch Live@edu
Step 1: Verify domain ownership
The first step to successfully deploying your Live@edu services is to verify your domain ownership. Senior Program Manager for Live@edu, Steve Webb, walks you through the process.
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27 September 2010
Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 is now available!
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26 September 2010
How to: Connecting the Disconnected in Exchange 2010
Since Exchange 2010, and the introduction of the document retention period it has been much easier to recover mailboxes, disconnect or connect mailboxes to users, and disable mailboxes. Exchange 2010 has introduced the personal archive, which adds a slight complication.
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25 September 2010
P2V Migration for Software Assurance Beta 2 Now Available!
P2V Migration adds documentation and support of System Center Configuration Manager 2007 Zero Touch Installation!
What is better than spending a moment to kick off a completely automated process to redeliver an existing operating system as a virtual machine within a new build of Windows 7?
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23 September 2010
Free Windows Server 2008 R2 E-book Offer
Learn about the features of Windows Server 2008 R2 in the areas of virtualization, management, the web application platform, scalability, reliability, and interoperability with Windows 7.
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22 September 2010
Presentation: Windows Server 2008 R2 Clustering and High Availability
Hello Everyone, Just wanted to let you know about a session on Windows Server 2008 R2 Clustering and High Availability that I'm going to present today for WITPro (Winnipeg IT Pro community). Doors open at 5:30 PM, session to start at 6 PM.
Misha
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20 September 2010
v12.3 of the Exchange 2010 Mailbox Server Role Requirements Calculator
Microsoft has released are some serious updates to the Exchange 2010 Mailbox Server Role Requirements Calculator, including one piece of functionality that you all have been asking for since the first version been released back in November!
Please go to Mailbox Server Role Storage Requirements Calculator updates tracking page to see what is in this new version! A blog post explaining the calculator (updated for this new version) is here and or you can download the calculator directly.
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How to Troubleshoot the Key Management Service (KMS)
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17 September 2010
Video: TechEd 2010 – Unlock the Awesome Power of Group Policy Preferences in your Environment
In this session introduced Group Policy Preferences and showed a number of demo's as to how it can be used in your environment to eliminate logon scripts.
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16 September 2010
Finding Group Policy Settings through Windows 7 Search Connector
Since the release of Windows 7 and Server 2008-R2 we have about 3000 Group Policy Settings available to centrally configure and manage Windows clients and servers. Though some among us might have worked with GPO settings from the early days on, knowing about the existence of each and every available setting is nearly impossible. It still happens to me that while I am configuring a specific GPO setting, I do come across other GPOs I didn't knew of yet.
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Introducing Microsoft® Lync™
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15 September 2010
What Ports whould be opened on the firewall for SQL Server on Windows Server 2008?
Windows Firewall on Windows Server 2008 helps prevent unauthorized access to computer resources. However, if the firewall is configured incorrectly, attempts to connect to an instance of SQL Server may be blocked. To access an instance of SQL Server that is behind the firewall, you must configure the firewall on the computer that is running SQL Server.
This article helps you open the firewall ports for SQL Server on Windows Server 2008.
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How to: Getting started with OMPM 2010
Microsoft released the Office Migration Planning Manager (OMPM) for Office 2010 and this tool is "Must to Have" tool when you migrate organization from previos version of Office XX to a new one, aka Microsoft Office, Office 2010.
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14 September 2010
How to Sequence Adobe Acrobat Reader 9.0
Don't worry, we still can Sequence Adobe Acrobat Reader 9 :). To do that we need to find MSI package of Adobe Acrobat Reader 9. Wait, wait, wait, don't go to Adobe's FTP server, you will not find there MSI file for English version :).
To get it you have 2 options:
- Request this file from Adobe, by subscribe to distribution program
- Extract it from AdbeRdr90_en_US.exe file :).
- Run the installer, and wait until the setup dialog appears asking you for a destination folder to install to.
- Without closing that dialog open, run Windows Explorer and navigate to C:\Documents and Settings\usernamel\Local Settings\Application Data\Adobe\Reader 9.0\Setup Files\READER9 .
System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007 How Do I? Videos
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13 September 2010
Parent Memory Reserve with Dynamic Memory
The former solution for this issue usually was to stop the last virtual machine that they started, to reduce its memory, and then start it up again.
This solution has worked in the past – but is no longer an option with dynamic memory. The reason why this will not work is because if you stop the last virtual machine – you just leave the memory available for your other virtual machines to use – getting you straight back where you started.
For this reason, with dynamic memory Microsoft has implemented a new "Parent Memory Reserve" for Hyper-V. Here Microsoft attempt to calculate an appropriate amount memory to keep for the parent partition and ensure that virtual machines with dynamic memory enabled cannot eat into this reserved memory.
Specifically – it only accounts for the memory requirements of Hyper-V in the parent partition.
To help mitigate this issue – Microsoft is also providing a new registry entry that lets you override our parent memory reserve with your own static memory reserve. This registry entry does not exist by default – but if you go to the HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Virtualization registry key and create a new DWORD entry with a name of memoryreserve – you can then set the value to the static amount of memory that you want to reserve for the parent.
You should be warned – if you set this value too low; virtual machines will be able to use too much memory and cause performance issues for you. Equally – the higher you set this the fewer virtual machines you can run.
By setting this value to 2048 (on my laptop with 8GB of RAM) I can run multiple virtual machines and know that they will not cause Outlook / Internet Explorer in the parent partition to be affected.
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12 September 2010
Details on what can be done with the VMM and Failover Cluster cmdlets
VMM 2008 R2 Cmdlet Reference
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Improve your Hyper-V Virtual Availability - Live Migrate VMs on Shutdown
But if you shut down a cluster host, say, because you're deploying a Windows Update, or a new version of a backup or monitoring client, the situation is different. Windows will use Quick Migration to move the virtual machines from one host to another - and Quick Migration is nothing like VMotion and Live Migration.
Instead of copying the VM memory and processor state across the network, the virtual machine is saved (to your SAN) on one host, then restored from that saved state on another. The difference is obvious:
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Virtualization Stencil
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08 September 2010
DPM backup of Exchange databases can fail because of Exchange circular logging
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Microsoft Exchange Server Jetstress 2010
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28 August 2010
Hyper-V R2: Dynamic Storage
Duration: 6m 51s
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Hyper-V R2: Initial Installation & Configuration
This video walks through the installation of Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 R2, and also looks at some of the key changes in this release, such as Processor Compatibility, Core Parking, and more.
Duration: 17m 37s
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25 August 2010
Exchange Server 2010 SP1 Is Available for Download
Microsoft released the SP1 beta at Tech Ed North America in June. Since then, almost 500,000 SP1 mailboxes have gone into production in Technology Adoption Program (TAP) customer environments.
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22 August 2010
How to Backup Exchange 2010 for Free
And now is a very surprising point. Many sysadmins are willing to pay over for complex backup solutions which they don't necessarily need.
As "Exchange Dinosaur" (I still remember Exchange 4.0 :))) I would like to say that one of the best backup (and what is more important, restore solution) always was Microsoft NT Backup. Since Windows 2008 Microsoft has removed NT Backup and replaced it with "Windows Server Backup Feature"
First, I need to mention the aspect that Microsoft has enabled Windows Server Backup to take VSS backups of the Exchange databases, so the following can work on Exchange 2010 and Hyper-V, on Windows 2008 or Windows 2008 R2.
As an additional note, Microsoft has extended Windows Server Backup Feature in Windows 2008 R2, and I really recommend to install Exchange 2010 on Windows 2008 R2 and not on Windows 2008. The reason why I say that is because of a new feature that's come with the Windows Backup Server of Windows 2008 R2. On Windows 2008 R2, backups can be taken from both the Active and the Passive databases of a DAG (Database Availability Group). This is very cool news because, in Windows 2008, backups could only be taken from the Active Node.
Ok, I should stop taking and should start to show you how to implement a FREE Backup of Exchange 2010 :) ...
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20 August 2010
Cached Exchange Mode in a Remote Desktop Session Host environment
Cached Exchange Mode in a Remote Desktop Session Host environment: planning considerations is a technical whitepaper recently released by Microsoft.
Historically, Microsoft Outlook has only been supported in an RDSH environment when it is deployed in Online Mode and connected to a Microsoft Exchange Server. This is still the recommended configuration for Microsoft Outlook 2010 when it is deployed in an RDSH environment. However, customers who deploy Outlook 2010 now have the supported option of enabling Cached Exchange Mode when Outlook 2010 is installed in a Remote Desktop environment. Cached Exchange Mode might be ideal for deployments in which Outlook is connecting over a high latency connection to an Exchange server that is located remotely. For the relatively few users who access Outlook through a remote desktop, this might be the ideal configuration. However, Online Mode against the Exchange server is still the most scalable and optimized configuration for large deployments.
This white paper covers three major areas that you should consider when you deploy Outlook 2010 with Cached Exchange Mode in a Remote Desktop environment:
- Storage footprint
- Performance impact
- Networked Storage
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TechNet Magazine – August 2010
The August 2010 edition of the TechNet Magazine is now available for online reading.
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Fully Unattended Windows 2008 and Windows 7 - 1227 Lines of scripts
Now I can say that this project is coming to the end :).
I was concentrated on building a solution for fully unattended deployment procedure of Windows Server 2008 Servers and Windows 7 Workstation.
In total this project covers 200 Servers and about 1000 Workstation. I've used a lot of tricks and tips in this project and built a lot of scripts to automate EVERYTHING :).
Today I asked myself, "How many lines of code you wrote in all scripts for this project?"
So, after very simple maths I can say, all my scripts for FULLY UNATTENDED Windows 2008 and Windows 7 system contain 1227 lines :).
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How to Disable IPv6 via Group Policy (GPO)
In today days, I really don't see a reason to have it enabled (maybe in next few years, but not now).
If you search my site you will find few ways how is possible to disable IPv6. Personally, I'm preferring to disable it systemwide, it means I disable IPv6 as a component. Here is how I do that.
Let's see today how to disable / enable IPv6 via Group Policy (GPO)...
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19 August 2010
Interview Questions … To Ask The Interviewer
I'm totally agreed with Adam and decided to republish his post here, at CuruIT.com :)
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Hyper-V Backup and WAN Replication
In VMWare world one of the best applications for replication is Veeam, but they have nothing for Hyper-V.
Continue at CuruIT.com
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18 August 2010
What happens when you Sysprep a system running Hyper-V on Windows Server 2008 R2?
The long answer is as follows:
Prior to Window Server 2008 R2 (namely in Windows Server 2008) you could run into a couple of problems. In Windows Server 2008 R2 Microsoft has implemented a Sysprep provider to ensure that everything goes smoothly. This provider does work during two of the phases of Sysprep:
Generalize
The generalize phase of Sysprep is where an installed version of Windows is prepared to be duplicated – and all installation specific information is removed. During this phase Hyper-V makes a couple of key changes:
- The installation date information for Hyper-V cleared. It will be automatically regenerated when the system image is deployed to a new system (or rebooted locally).
- The dynamic MAC address range is cleared. This will also be automatically regenerated when the system image is deployed to a new system. This step is necessary to ensure that you do not get duplicate MAC addresses on multiple Hyper-V servers if they are all deployed from the same base image.
Specialize
The specialize phase is run after the system image has been deployed to a new computer. Hyper-V makes the following change as part of this phase:
- Enable automatic launching of the hypervisor in the boot configuration data (BCD) store. Because a new boot configuration data store is created as part of the image deployment process, and because Hyper-V stores information in the boot configuration data store – we need to make sure this information comes across to the new system.
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17 August 2010
iSCSI: Building a Private Cloud with StarWind and your Hypervisor
During this session, StarWind will explore the role of iSCSI Shared storage as part of a SharePoint implementation. As organizations begin to adopt the cloud computing model, the private cloud utilizing technologies like SharePoint is rapidly becoming the technology of choice for the SMB.
On this webinar we will cover the following:
• Role of Share Storage in the private cloud
• The Software needed and how to use it
• Data protection
• Disaster Recovery
• High Availability
13 August 2010
The App-V 4.6 for RDS whitepaper is now available
This whitepaper discusses the benefits, configurations and considerations when planning a Microsoft® Windows Server® Remote Desktop Services solution with Microsoft Application Virtualization (App?V®), and while I could probably write up a big long summary and post it here, probably the best way to let you know what's in it is to show the table of contents:
If you run App-V 4.6 on your Remote Desktop Session Host (RD Session Host) servers then you definitely owe it to yourself to check this one out. You can download the whitepaper here.
10 August 2010
Microsoft vs. VMware: Who's better at disaster recovery?
virtualization. Any good virtualization platform these days will find
a way to restart a virtual machine in the event of a hardware failure.
But which vendor excels more than any other at getting critical
applications back online after failures, and making sure the most
important virtual machines are given priority in the restart process?
Hyper-V Fixed VHD Creation
However Chris, a developer on Hyper-V team, has posted up a utility called VHDTool which can create large fixed VHDs in seconds. The utility is available with source code and can be downloaded here.
09 August 2010
SYSPREP ERROR - "hrResults = 0x8030000b"
After hours of investigations I managed to find a solution, and now I'd like to let you know what to do. Here are steps:
Continue at my site: www.curuit.com
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2002 Audi TT Limitted Edition
This is my favourite car, unfortunately I have to sell it because of my health problem.
So, in case you know somebody who is looking for a nice car :)
http://winnipeg.kijiji.ca/c-cars-vehicles-cars-2002-Audi-TT-Limitted-Edition-W0QQAdIdZ221546372
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06 August 2010
Hyper-V: Enable Sleep / Hibernate
Currently, I am using Windows Server 2008 R2 as my primary laptop. When I added a Hyper-V role I discovered that "Sleep Mode" on my laptop just stopped working.
After some tests and investigations, I've come up with a partial solution to this problem. The trick to use a Sleep Mode on a system where a Hyper-V installed is to have Hyper-V NOT started.
To set a Hyper-V to "Manual Start", I did a script with a following registry setting:
Full story at: CuruIT.com
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23 July 2010
Resetting IP stack in Vista / Windows 2008
Continue @ my site, www.curuit.com
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15 July 2010
Windows 7 / 2008 SYSPREP ERROR
Right now I've been working on a project where we are going to deploy Windows 2008 Servers in about 200 sites across Canada. As you can guess, this project also contains workstations and there are going to be Windows 7 Professional.
Since Microsoft released Windows Vista, the only supported way to "clone" windows systems become SYSPREP. Personally, I've been using sysprep since Windows NT 4, but there were other solutions that many professionals used to use.
So, as I said, I've been involved in a new deployment project :)...When we finished installing and customizing our Windows 7 system, I've executed a following command:
Continue at my site, CuruIT.com
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19 June 2010
StarWind is in Xen Server HCL
http://hcl.xensource.com/ProductDetails.aspx?ProductType=Storage&ProductName=iSCSI+SAN+Software+5.3.5
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17 June 2010
Windows 2008 Clustering - The Cluster Log
This simple and short answer is its no longer there...
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Introducing Remote Desktop Connection Manager (RDCMan) 2.2
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13 June 2010
Windows Server 2008 and 2008R2 Failover Cluster Startup Switches
More info about that on my site, www.curuit.com
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10 June 2010
Hyper-V R2: Building a Hyper-V R2 Cluster
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06 June 2010
Microsoft Tech-Ed 2010 Starts
I just arrived at the New Orleans and registered myself at Tech-Ed 2010 :).Continue at CURUIT.COM
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02 June 2010
TheSystemAdministrator.com moves to CuruIT.com
My old project "TheSystemAdministrator.com" has been moving to the new home :). The new domain for this project will be www.CuruIT.com. I've already moved all content to the new system and now trying to save all external links to the TheSystemAdministrator.com.
If you are using old links to my site and for whatever reason you are getting to the wrong page on CuruIT.com, please use the CuruIT's search engine.
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