A great new feature in Windows Server 2012 is data deduplication. Data deduplication uses sub-file variable-size chunking and compression, which together deliver optimization ratios of 2:1 for general file servers and up to 20:1 for Hyper-V virtualization data. Microsoft has some great articles on dedupe, such as this one and a...
In Part 1 of this short series of configuring Windows Server 2012 SMB transparent failover we configured two VMs using the vSphere 5.1 web client to access shared RDMs. Then mounted and formatted on one node with a 16KB allocation size, to better optimize shadow copies for share folder performance. Now that...
Windows Server 2012 is Microsoft's biggest server OS release since Windows 2000. The number of features, enhancements, and optimizations is mind boggling. One major area of focus was SMB, which is Server Message Block. SMB is the protocol used to access file shares across the network. SMB 3.0 was introduced with...
Today Microsoft made a huge announcement. Their entire Office 2013 stack RTM'd today!! What all does that include do you ask? It includes Office 2013 (duh), Exchange 2013, SharePoint 2013 and Lync 2013. According to Microsoft "This is the most ambitious release of Office we've ever done. It spans the...
O'Reilly Media has released a free eBook version of their "Introducing Windows Server 2012" book. I quickly flipped through the beta version, and found it quite informative. There are so many new features, literally hundreds, in Windows Server 2012 that this is a must read for anyone going to use...
Speakers: Michael Cory, Jeff SzastakThis session was by far the best this week! 160 slides in 60 minutes, packed to the gills with actionable information on properly virtualizing your SQL server. In short, there's no reason why you can't virtualize SQL and have it meet business performance requirements. 80% of SQL performance...
Microsoft System Center Service Manager 2012 is an integrated platform for automating and adapting an organization's IT service management best practices. It has built-in processes for incident and problem management, change management, service request fulfillment, release management, service level management and configuration management. As part of the System Center suite...
Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 have a number of brand new boot-time security features to help combat malware. While this article is not going to discuss them in depth, I will briefly describe them so you understand what they are and how to configure one feature, Secure Boot. Microsoft...
WARNING: This blog post has been superseded by my updated post here. Do not use the article below, as it is outdated. WARNING: This blog post has been superseded by my updated post here. Do not use the article below, as it is outdated. ---------- Based on my popular article (#1...
One of the new features added to Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and R2 is the ability to slipstream a service pack into the installation. This streamlines the installation, and reduces human error. Now that SQL Server 2008 R2 SP2 is officially out, here's how to slipstream SQL Server 2008 R2...