The official blog of the Windows and Windows Server storage engineering teams
Is part of the Storage Solutions Marketing team. Brandon manages outbound marketing for Storage Solutions, including Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager 2007. Brandon’s experience includes various projects with Microsoft Partner Portal, True Fabrications, VMC and ArrayComm. Outside of the office, he is a semi-professional improvisational comedian with Jet City Improv in Seattle…. Read more
Our friends in the AskDS blog promised, and here it is: The KB article on how to configure DFSR file-type compression in Windows Server 2008 is live! On Windows Server 2003, there was a pre-defined list of file extensions that DFSR didn’t compress in the staging folder before replicating to other members in… Read more
An ‘under the hood’ change on Windows Server 2008 A previous blog post mentioned some of the more end-user visible new features in Windows Server 2008. There is another less visible design enhancement on Windows Server 2008. Let us explore this change and find out how it can be beneficial to Server 2008 based… Read more
Recently, the Failover Clustering team released several White Papers about High Availability and Clustering in Windows Server 2008: § Microsoft High Availability Overview § Overview of Failover Clustering with Windows Server 2008 § Quick Migration with Hyper-V § Windows Server 2008 Failover Clustering Architecture Overview § Failover Clustering in Windows… Read more
Recently, Microsoft Support released an update for Windows Server 2003 SP2 that allows Chkdsk.exe tool compact the NTFS security descriptor stream (a.k.a. $secure file). Depending on the file system usage, this descriptor can consume a lot of disk space. After getting to a certain size, no more security settings can be configured in NTFS…. Read more
The Storage Solutions Division Test Team is looking for several new Software Design Engineers in Test (SDET). Interested? Visit http://members.microsoft.com/careers/default.mspx and search for Job Codes 202273, 206181, 207061, 208832, 210633, 212350, 217023, 217629, 217630, 217978, 219525 and 219528. Where do you save your loved ones pictures, or your favorite tunes? Where does your company save… Read more
I joined Microsoft in 1999 to work on testing the Disk Management feature for Windows 2000. While the team I joined evolved from being a part of the Base OS group within Windows, to a division on its own, I stayed here and honed my knowledge of storage by working on several different features. Through… Read more
SQL Server 2008 introduces new options to store unstructured data, in addition to the current BLOB support in SQL Server 2005. In this post, I examine two previously existing options (IMAGE, VARBINARY(MAX)) and describe two new ones (VARBINARY(MAX) with FILESTREAM and RBS). See the complete post at http://blogs.technet.com/josebda/archive/2008/03/17/sql-server-2008-and-unstructured-data.aspx. Jose Barreto… Read more
Some customers ask why parallel SCSI support was removed from Windows Server 2008. Failover Cluster in Windows Server 2008 intents to achieve the highest standard of reliability. For that, every hardware component has to be marked as “certified for Windows Server 2008”, and pass all tests in the Failover Clustering Validation tool. One of… Read more
The previous article in this series explained how to migrate replication of the SYSVOL share to the ‘REDIRECTED’ state. In this article, we examine how to complete migration of all domain controllers to the ‘ELIMINATED’ state. Before we begin … Remember that the migration process to the ‘ELIMINATED’ state cannot be reverted under any… Read more