Bart Timmermans

Source: Scott Schnoll’s (MSFT) weblog.

High availability in Exchange 2010 SP1. The following new features for high availability and improvements to existing high availability features are available in SP1:

• Continuous replication – block mode
• Active mailbox database redistribution
• Improved Outlook cross-site connection behavior and experience
• Enhanced datacenter activation coordination support
• New and enhanced management and monitoring scripts
• Improvements in failover performance

Read more at the source.

Within two weeks I will post two how-to guides.

• How to setup a high availability SQL Server 2008 R2 cluster (HA clustering and mirroring).
• How to create a highly available SharePoint 2010 farm.

Requests for other how-to guides are always welcome.

SharePoint Foundation 2010 is the new version of Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services. It is the essential solution for organizations that need a secure, manageable, web-based collaboration platform. ​SharePoint helps teams stay connected and productive by providing easy access to the people, documents, and information that they need to make well-informed decisions and get work done. Use SharePoint Foundation to coordinate schedules, organize documents, and participate in discussions through team workspaces, blogs, wikis, and document libraries on the platform that is the underlying infrastructure for SharePoint Server.

Search Server 2010 Express: If you’re using SharePoint Foundation, you can easily add search capabilities to your collaboration environment across SharePoint sites, file shares, web sites, Exchange Public Folders, and third party repositories using Microsoft Search Server 2010 Express. Click here to download.

Download the software here.

Source: Microsoft System Center Operations Team Blog

I am pleased to announced that the collaboration of the Visio and Operations Manager teams has shipped two deliverables for the Office 2010 wave immediately following last Friday’s Office 2010 RTM. This release consists of two downloads:

1. Visio 2010 Add-in and Operations Manager 2007 R2

2. SharePoint 2010 Visio Services Data Provider

What’s new:

In addition to all the great functionality we added in the original Visio 2007 add-in, this adds,

• The Visio 2010 Add-in fully integrates the Visio 2007 add-in functionality into the Visio 2010 ribbon for a seamless user experience.
• The SharePoint 2010 Visio Services Data Provider leverages the power of Visio Services to provide the ability display Visio diagrams as live dashboards in SharePoint pulling health state directly from Operations Manager.

User Scenario:

The user can create a Visio-based view of an application, service or infrastructure – either based on an exported Operations Manager diagram view or a Visio diagram that was linked to Operations Manager managed objects (computers, web site, perspectives, etc.), just as with the Visio 2007 Add-in.

Visio diagram in Visio 2010:

After this, the user can now save the publish the diagram to SharePoint 2010 as a web drawing, and when you browse to the document in SharePoint, you’ll get the same experience of a seeing a live Visio based dashboard pulling health state from Operations Manager:

Same Visio diagram in SharePoint 2010: Wow!

At MMS…

Stay tuned at MMS, as the SharePoint Visio Services Data Provider will have some quick exposure in Kenon’s demo during the BobMu keynote. Also Rory McCaw’s and Maarten Goet’s sessions will feature this, and we are preparing to add this to the live monitoring of the labs.

Here’s a Visio diagram, shown in SharePoint 2010, hosted in an Operations Manager web page view from Bob Muglia’s keynote:

See http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/infrastructure/videoGallery.aspx?contentID=xinfra_MMS2010_day1Keynote to watch this keynote.

Links:

· These downloads are now live from the Visio Toolbox site at http://visiotoolbox.com/downloads/addins/Visio_2010_Add-in_for_System_Center_Operations_Manager_2007_R2_961.aspx.

· The documentation is available in the Operations Manager tech center.

Resources from the Visio 2007 add-in:

· http://blogs.technet.com/momteam/archive/2009/07/31/visio-2007-add-in-for-operations-manager-2007-r2-released.aspx

· http://blogs.technet.com/momteam/archive/2009/05/08/video-released-for-visio-add-in-for-system-center-operations-manager-2007-r2.aspx

Today is a great day! Microsoft finally released the complete Office 2010 experience on Technet and MSDN.

Source: Microsoft System Center Team blog.

System Center Data Protection (DPM) 2010, meantime, delivers unified data protection for Windows servers such as SQL Server, Exchange, SharePoint, Virtualization and file servers — as well as Windows desktops and laptops. Microsoft has re-engineered DPM 2010 to be more scalable so that both midsize and enterprise-class organizations can take advantage of it.

Key additions in DPM 2010 include:

• The ability for roaming laptops to get centrally managed policies around desktop protection, so that your laptop data is protected, whether you are connected to the corporate network or remote
• Enhanced virtualization protection, including Hyper-V R2 LiveMigration scenarios and the ability to recover single-files from within host-based backups
• Additional protection and recovery capabilities for Windows application servers like SQL Server, Exchange or SharePoint
• Native site-to-site replication for disaster recovery to either another DPM server or an off-site cloud provider
• Significant enterprise-scalability increases for deploying DPM in large environments
• Centrally managed System State and Bare Metal Recovery

We are very excited about two offerings because we think they address a critical need among midsize businesses: the struggle to find great IT management solutions that are tailored to provide that elusive combination of rich features and ease of use.

Read more at the source.

Download a trial here.

Source: Microsoft System Center Team Blog

System Center Essentials 2010 (SCE 2010) provides IT professionals in mid-sized organizations with a unified physical and virtual management experience. It enables you to better secure, update, monitor, and troubleshoot from a single console, so you can efficiently and proactively manage your IT environment.

The main addition to this second System Center Essentials release is the seamless integration of Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 technology, making it quick and easy for midsize business to begin realizing the cost-cutting benefits of server consolidation using virtualization. SCE 2010 will enable you to rapidly move from a physical to virtual server environment while maintaining the control and simple management you have come to expect from the product.

Read more at the source.

Download trial here.

Download management packs here.

Source: Microsoft SQL Server team blog

We are very excited to share that today, Microsoft released SQL Server 2008 R2 to manufacturing! Customers can expect availability in the next few weeks through Microsoft’s distribution channels. For more information, visit www.sqlserverlaunch.com.

SQL Server 2008 R2 enhancements continue to support mission-critical workloads providing a trusted, scalable platform, increased developer and IT efficiency and managed self-service business intelligence reporting and analytics. It is for these very reasons that SQL Server 2008 R2 is setting records for performance and price/performance on industry standard benchmarks.

Read more at the source.

Source: Microsoft Download

Download the guide here.

Within this blogpost I want to demonstrate how easy it is to migrate users from one group to another by using Powershell. If you want to use Powershell in conjunction with Active Directory it is recommended to use PowerGUI and the Quest Active Roles Management Shell for Active Directory.

Finally. SharePoint 2010 and FAST Search Server can be downloaded from Technet.

Download it at your Technet or MSDN subscription.

Microsoft Commerce Server 2009 code name “R2″ – October 2009 CTP is the fourth pre-release build of the next version of Commerce Server. Please note that this pre-release build is not feature complete.

Important We invite you to install this pre-release version of Microsoft Commerce Server 2009 code name “R2” into a non-production environment to learn how Commerce Server 2009 “R2” provides an improved business management experience, enhanced cross-channel enablement with multi-tier development and deployment support, and a more streamlined deployment experience. It is recommended that you install this pre-release on a clean machine and consult the Quick Installation Guide for manual steps required.

This release includes several breaking changes that will impact your development environment. Please consult the Commerce Server 2009 “R2″ Readme and Quick Installation Guide for more information.

Note: Given the pre-release nature of this release, not all functionality is currently available. The release is for evaluation purposes only and is not intended to be used in a production environment. The October CTP will stop functioning on June 6, 2010.

Download here.

This book is targeted primarily at Windows server administrators who are responsible
for hands-on deployment and day-to-day management of Windows-based
servers for large organizations. Windows server administrators manage file and
print servers, network infrastructure servers, Web servers, and IT application
servers.

They use graphical administration tools as their primary interface but
also use Windows PowerShell commandlets and occasionally write Windows
PowerShell scripts for routine tasks and bulk operations. They conduct most
server management tasks remotely by using Terminal Server or administration
tools installed on their local workstation.

What This Book Is About

Covering every aspect of Windows Server 2008 R2 in nine chapters and approximately
200 pages is clearly an impossible task. Rather than try to cover everything,
we’ve focused on what is new and important, while giving you the context
from Windows Server 2008. Read more…

Source: Microsoft Clustering and High Availability blog

What is Extended Affinity?

 To understand how NLB does load balancing, please refer to this TechNet article about various forms of affinity and their impact on load balancing decisions.

 Extended Affinity is an extension to the Single and Network affinity.  NLB does not rely on any network protocol’s state to make its load balancing decisions.  As a result, NLB will work with a wide variety of protocols, documented and undocumented, stateless (HTTP/UDP etc.) and stateful (RDP/SSL etc).  This makes NLB more flexible in deployment and easier to manage since we don’t have to configure the load balancer to work with every protocol that it needs to handle.  However, some applications would benefit from being able to explicitly associate a connection to a server.

 An example would be using IIS by online retailer using shopping carts.  When a customer shops at their store, they save the intended purchases in a shopping cart which is stored on one of the nodes in the cluster.  To keep the products in the shopping cart, the customer must stay connected to that same node.  However configuration changes to the cluster (such as adding a new VIP or node) which cause cluster convergence may then directed customers to another cluster node, and they have lost the purchases saved in that shopping cart.  Now the customer may become frustrated and the retailer may lose money.

 Another instance could be with SSL where the SSL session can consist of multiple TCP Connections.  In normal operations, if single affinity is used, NLB will guarantee that all connections coming from the same source IP will hit the same server.  This would include multiple TCP connections of the same SSL session.  However, configuration changes might cause NLB to accept different connections of the same SSL session by different servers during the convergence.  As a result, the SSL session is broken.

Read more at the source.

Source: Microsoft SharePoint 2010 site.

Pre-register today and get notified when SharePoint 2010 Beta becomes available in November. ​

Find out how this integrated suite of server capabilities can help your organization by providing comprehensive content management and enterprise search, accelerating shared business processes, and facilitating information-sharing across boundaries for better business insight.

Please review the preliminary system requirements to prepare for the beta release. For a comprehensive list of readiness resources and the right steps to take today, check out SharePoint 2010 Get Ready.

Click here to register.

Source: Microsoft Download Center

The SharePoint 2010 Developer Platform wall poster (PDF format) shows a colorful view of SharePoint 2010 developer tools, community ecosystem, execution environment, Sharepoint Server 2010 workloads, and target application types. The poster is intended to be printed at 24 inches x 36 inches (61 centimeters x 91 centimeters).

Download it here.

Source: Microsoft MSDN

Today Microsoft releases beta 2 of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0. The beta can be downloaded here.

On Channel 9 I found a nice movie about downloading and installing Visual Studio 2010.

Please visit this site to view Visual Studio 2010 walkthroughs.

Keynote Steve Ballmer (Download presentation here)

Keynote Jeff Teper

The (Beta) SDK for SharePoint Foundation 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010 is now online.

The Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Software Development Kit (SDK) includes documentation and code samples for Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010 and for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, which builds upon the SharePoint Foundation 2010 infrastructure. The documentation includes detailed descriptions of the technologies that SharePoint Server 2010 and SharePoint Foundation 2010 provide for developers, reference documentation for the server and client object models, and step-by-step procedures for using and programming with these technologies and object models. This SDK also includes best practices and setup guidance that will help you get started with your own custom applications that build and extend upon the SharePoint Foundation 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010 platforms.

You can view the SDK here.

Microsoft releases a new poster with SharePoint 2010 topologies. No big changes compared with SharePoint 2007.

Read more…