The official blog of the Windows and Windows Server storage engineering teams
This Monday we added another member to the Storage Blogs family. The Storage Blog at Microsoft is an executive level channel with updates and commentary, pointers to high-impact other storage blogs, articles on trends and other interesting content. Gabriel Broner, General Manager for the Storage Solutions Division, kicked it off with a post around… Read more
I have been in the IT server technology space for about 17 years – with a majority of that time focussed on data protection, high availability, disaster recovery and business continuity. I have worked at tape backup manufacturers and replication/failover vendors – and have been in the integrator channel, small and large ISV’s and now… Read more
Have you ever felt your DFSR infrastructure wasn’t quite replicating up to your expectations, but didn’t know where to begin diagnosis? If this is the case, we recommend taking a look at this recent post by Ned Pyle, our resident DFSR expert: Top 10 Common Causes of Slow Replication with DFSR. It’s a great starting… Read more
Windows Server 2008’s Hyper-V has been in public beta for a while now and lots of people have been experimenting with it. One aspect that I am focusing on is storage for those virtualized environments and more specifically the options related to SAN storage.This includes directly-attached storage (SATA, SAS) or SAN storage (FC, iSCSI). In… Read more
In our first post in this series, we examined the SYSVOL migration process and understood how things work at a high level during the process of migration of the SYSVOL share from the FRS service to the DFS Replication service. Windows Server 2008 includes a command line tool called dfsrmig.exe which can be used by… Read more
Automated System Recovery or ASR as it is more commonly known is the Windows API set to capture the configuration of disks and volumes on a system and restore them in bare metal recovery scenarios. During such recoveries, backup applications (requesters) invoke ASR to restore the disks and volumes prior to putting back the operating… Read more
The File Replication Service (FRS) is used for replicating the contents of the SYSVOL share between Windows domain controllers. However, Windows Server 2008 domain controllers, which are operating in the Windows Server 2008 domain functional level, can use the DFS Replication service for replicating the contents of the SYSVOL share. A new Windows Server 2008… Read more
Jose Barreto joined Microsoft in 2002, working for 5 years as the Systems Architect with the Cisco Systems Account Team in Northern California. In 2007, he moved to the Redmond campus to join the Storage Solutions Division (SSD) as a Senior Technology Evangelist with the Storage Partners Team. He currently works as a Principal Program Manager… Read more
This is a summary of recent revisions to the VSS documentation on MSDN. 1. IVssBackupComponents::AddNewTarget has an error in the remarks section fixed. 2. The “Usage Conventions” topic has expanded information about binary compatibility for VSS applications across Windows versions (including a handy table) 3. The “What’s New in VSS in Windows… Read more
In Windows Server 2008, the DFS Replication service can be used for replication of the SYSVOL share between domain controllers operating in the Windows Server 2008 domain functional level. The DFS Replication service supports replication of the contents of SYSVOL share between Read Only Domain Controllers (RODC) as well. This blog post explains how the… Read more