SP1 went RTM today which means it will be widely available soon. According to the Microsoft server division blog, the service pack will be available to Microsoft's TechNet and MSDN subscribers, as well as to Microsoft volume licensing customers, on Feb. 16, 2011. It will be generally available via the Microsoft Download Center and Windows Update on Feb. 22 You can see the blog and news here: http://blogs.technet.com/b/...
Microsoft introduced TCP/IP Auto tuning with Vista and Windows 2008 server. Its also a part of Windows 7 and 2008 R2. This feature resizes IP packets which can improve network performance. Older network devices, however, like Cisco PIX firewalls do not support Auto tuning and can cause connection issues. I had a client that was getting email undeliverable errors from a certain domain while successfully sending to various others. After investigating OBL listings and various other possible culprits,...
One of the great sessions I sat in on at Tech Ed this week was stretching a Windows 2008 R2 Hyper-V Failover Cluster across sites. With this ability, you could actually implement a Hyper-V cluster where you could migrate or even Live Migrate VMs across sites. With this area’s propensity for Hurricanes, this will be a very popular topic for me over the next few months. While this technology is possible today, it’s also very complicated and can be very expensive to implement. First your WAN connection...
Recently while making some changes for a client, I accidently dug myself into a pretty deep hole. I was trying to explicitly deny a certain user from reading a few group policies including the Default Domain Policy. When I went in to make the change I accidently denied Authenticated Users rather than the AD user object. This of course made the GPO inaccessible to all users including any with domain admin rights. The policy could no longer be modified in the GPMC and worse, changes could not be made...
In the last few months, we moved our Active Directory to Windows 2008 R2. We also recently deployed ISA 2006 to front end for all of our internet facing web services including SharePoint, Team Foundation Web Services, and a few others. To allow employees the ability to change passwords externally or after an expiration using ISA, we implemented LDAPS pre-authentication. We have ISA deployed in the single NIC configuration where it lives in the perimeter network (DMZ) since we are already using a...
IPv6 can be an issue for certain applications running on Windows 2008. A quick way to completely disable IPv6 on any flavor of 2008 including Server Core is to run the command below at an elevated privileged cmd prompt then reboot your server. c:\>reg add hklm\system\currentcontrols... /v DisabledComponents /t REG_DWORD /d 255...
Today I’m adding some redundancy to the storage paths in our Hyper-V environment. We have 2 Windows 2008 R2 Server Core host servers running the Hyper-V role attached to an Equal Logic iSCSI SAN. Each host has 3 network cards attached the iSCSI VLAN but only 2 are used for host connections. The third NIC is being used as a Microsoft Virtual Switch Adapter on the iSCSI VLAN for the VM guest operating systems to make direct connections to the SAN and use host invisible storage. NOTE: Host invisible...
The best practice for publishing an Internet facing SharePoint site is to use ISA as a reverse proxy solution to provide an additional layer of security between the SharePoint portal and the end user. This eliminates any traffic originating from the Internet from ever reaching the internal protected network. Instead the traffic terminates in the DMZ at the ISA server and it in turn performs Active Directory or Forms Based authentication through LDAP, LDAPS, or Radius. It then proxies the content...
This week I had a customer who was experiencing service loss on one of the VMs in their 2008 R2 Hyper-V environments. We initially started looking at disk as the source of the issue since the customer was using a Fiber Channel SATA SAN. I moved the LUNS into their own raid groups to assure each had their own spindles. I also converted the data drives to fixed length VHD files attached to the synthetic SCSI controller. While these changes did drastically increase performance, the server would still...
With the release of Windows 2008 R2, highly available Hyper V deployments have increased in popularity. One of the big questions during these deployments is what to virtualize and what to leave on physical hardware and in particular when it refers to domain controllers. Domain controllers are basically highly transactional database servers which service most basic network functions including authentication, name resolution, replication, and of course many secondary services like DHCP or Radius. In...