Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 is now available!

Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 (which includes the Microsoft iSCSI Software Target 3.3) has been released to manufacturing (RTM).

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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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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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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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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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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)

As part of deployment, many enterprise customers set up the Key Management Service (KMS) to enable activation of Windows in their environment. It is a simple process to set up the KMS host…and the KMS clients discover and attempt to activate on their own. But what happens if it doesn't work? What do you do next? The most common issues seen by our customers (and how to resolve them) are outlined in the Volume Activation Operations Guide, under Volume Activation Troubleshooting. This blog will walk you through the resources you need to troubleshoot, while the information in the Guide st arts with the problem to be solved and the possible ways to fix it. The details of event log entries and the SLMGR.vbs script can be found in the Volume Activation Technical Reference Guide.

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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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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™

Introducing Microsoft® Lync™, formerly Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS) and Microsoft Communicator. Lync™ ushers in a new connected experience, transforming every communication into an interaction that is more collaborative, engaging and accessible from anywhere.

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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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How to Sequence Adobe Acrobat Reader 9.0

If you try to sequence Adobe Acrobat Reader 9 (I've tried to do this in SoftGrid 4.5 RC) you will get a error and inside error report you will find "Code: 0x0000000000000000" and a lot of other, not very usefull information about this error.

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:

1. Request this file from Adobe, by subscribe to distribution program
2. Extract it from AdbeRdr90_en_US.exe file :).

So, as you can understand, I extracted MSI from AdbeRdr90_en_US.exe :). To do that you need:

1. Run the installer, and wait until the setup dialog appears asking you for a destination folder to install to.
2. 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 .

Bingo :), we have the extracted setup files we will need for sequence. All other steps is straight forward :).

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System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007 How Do I? Videos

How To Videos are brief walkthroughs of specific features in System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM). Product experts from the VMM team demonstrate basic tasks within the product.

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Parent Memory Reserve with Dynamic Memory

Most people who have spent a lot of time with Hyper-V have had the experience of accidentally taking too much memory away from the parent partition.  This happens when they start too many virtual machines – and all of a sudden the performance and responsiveness of the parent partition goes down significantly.

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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Details on what can be done with the VMM and Failover Cluster cmdlets

If you are dealing a lot with a VMM and / or Failover Clustering, here are some details on what you can do 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

Hyper-V clustering is a pretty rock solid thing, and Live Migration is virtually identical to VMWare's VMotion technology - pick up a running VM, and move it to another host in the cluster without users noticing. Generally speaking you might see a small hiccup - one ping lost as the machine stops on one host and starts on another.

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

A lot of people have been looking for virtualization stencil with good and usefull icons for quite a while. Well, Jonathan Cusson has decided to create one himself and he is now sharing it with us. This stencil is made of icons derived from Hyper-V and other virtualization images. Each image was trimmed and optimized to be used in Visio...

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DPM backup of Exchange databases can fail because of Exchange circular logging

Just a quick note on an issue in DPM and Exchange Server. Backup administrators who have scheduled System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) backups for Microsoft Exchange databases might run into backup failures if circular logging is turned on for those Exchange databases. In such cases, DPM incremental backups fails with VSS error 0x800423f4 and a retry of the backup job does not resolve the problem.

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Microsoft Exchange Server Jetstress 2010

Simulate disk I/O load on a test server running Exchange to verify the performance and stability of your disk subsystem before putting your server into a production environment.

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