Spamming about Information Technology (System Center, Exchange, PKI, Unified Communication and Virtualization)
Posts tagged Windows Server
Service pack 1 for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 released
01 year ago
Source: Microsoft
Microsoft released service pack 1 for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.
Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 helps keep your PCs and servers on the latest support level. It also provides ongoing improvements to the Windows Operating System (OS), by including previous updates delivered over Windows Update as well as continuing incremental updates to the Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 platforms based on customer and partner feedback. This enables organizations to deploy a single set of updates.
Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 will help you:
- Keep your PCs supported and up-to-date
- Get ongoing updates to the Windows 7 platform
- Easily deploy cumulative updates at a single time
- Meet your users' demands for greater business mobility
- Provide a comprehensive set of virtualization innovations
- Provide an easier Service Pack deployment model for better IT efficiency
DFS Operations Guide: Migrating from FRS to DFS Replication
02 years ago
Source: Microsoft Download
This document guides you through the process of migrating from File Replication Service (FRS) to Distributed File System (DFS) Replication.
File Replication Service (FRS) is a technology originally introduced on Windows 2000 Server to replicate Distributed File System (DFS) folders and the SYSVOL folder on domain controllers. FRS was replaced in Windows Server 2008 R2 by DFS Replication for replicating DFS folders and for replicating the SYSVOL folder. This guide provides instructions for migrating replication from FRS to DFS Replication (for folders other than the SYSVOL folder).
Free ebook: Introducing Windows Server 2008 R2
02 years ago
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. (more…)
Network Load Balancing in Windows Server 2008 R2: Extended Affinity
02 years ago
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.
Infrastructure Planning and Design Guide for Windows Deployment Services updated for Windows Server 2008 R2
02 years ago
The Windows Deployment Services guide, updated to reflect the new features and functionality that Windows Server 2008 R2 introduced, outlines the critical infrastructure design elements that are crucial to a successful implementation of Windows Deployment Services. Following the six steps in this guide will result in a design that is sized, configured, and appropriately placed to enable rapid deployment of Windows operating systems, while also considering the performance, capacity, and fault tolerance of the system.
Failover Clustering Performance Counters – Part 2
02 years ago
Source: Microsoft Clustering and High Availability blog.
Hi Cluster Fans,
In Part 1 of this blog series we discussed Performance Counters and their interaction with the Network, Multicast Request Reply, Global Update Manager and Database clustering components. This post will look at monitoring some additional cluster components: the Checkpoint Manager, Resource Control Manager, Resource Types, APIs and Cluster Shared Volumes.
Checkpoint Manager
Checkpoint Manager is a component that helps you to make sure that data of the clustered application is available on all the nodes. Failover Cluster supports two kinds of checkpoints. Crypto Checkpoints allow you to keep your secret protected and available on all the nodes. The secret is used to create protected containers, generate keys in the containers, and encrypt data using the keys. If your application uses Crypto API and keeps secrets in the crypto container then you can associate a Crypto Checkpoint with your resource, providing it with information about the crypto provider and the container name. The cluster will export the keys from this container, export the container with data and will save all of this information to the cluster database. After offlining the resource on a node, the Checkpoint Manager will update the snapshot.
Failover Clustering Performance Counters – Part 1
02 years ago
Source: Microsoft Clustering and High Availability blog
Hi Cluster Fans,
In Windows Server 2008 R2 we have added performance counters for Failover Clustering. Performance counters are like meters you have on some devices in your house. For instance, your electrical or water meter tracks what utilities you have consumed or your thermometer shows you the current temperature. They all have at least one thing in common – they show you aggregated information about the current state. However, they would not show you every event that contributes to that state. Some components in the cluster deal with lots of calls or traffic going through them and some buffer information in memory before it can get processed. We have added performance counters to several such components. This post will discuss each counter set and in future posts we will look at a couple of practical examples showing several issues resolved with the help of the performance counters.
