I spent last week in Orlando, Florida, working at the Microsoft booth in the Storage Networking World. I delivered one of the demos there and my demo included the following technologies: Windows Unified Data Storage Server 2003 iSCSI Software Target Windows Server 2008 Core Install Windows Server 2008 iSCSI Initiator Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V Windows Server 2008…
Site Directory in MOSS 2007 via a custom Search Scope
In a Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007, you will likely need to provide your users a list of sites you host. There are a few ways to do this. First, you can leverage the out-of-the-box Site Directory template, coupled with a few settings in Central Admin to force users to select one or two…
How the Test-StorageHealth.ps1 script checks for Storage Cluster health
I recently published the Test-StorageHealth.ps1 script to the TechNet Script Center, which checks for the health and capacity of a Storage Cluster based on Windows Server 2012 R2 Scale-Out File Servers. This blog post explains the portion of the script that checks for Storage Cluster health, which is labeled “Phase 1”. To assess health, the…
The Basics of the Windows Server 2008 Distributed File System (DFS)
Overview In this blog post, we’ll cover the basics of the Distributed File System (DFS) in Windows Server 2008, which offers users simplified access to a set of file shares and helps administrators easily maintain the file server infrastructure behind those file shares, including options for load sharing, replication and site awareness. Many File Servers…
Using PowerShell and Excel PivotTables to understand the files on your disk
Introduction I am a big fan of two specific technologies that usually don’t get mentioned together: PowerShell and Excel PivotTables. It started when I was explaining PivotTables to someone and the main issue I had was finding a good set of example data that is familiar to everyone. That’s when it hit me. People…
Multiple names for one computer – Consolidate your SMB file servers without breaking UNC paths
Overview This blog post covers a few different ways to consolidate multiple SMB file servers and keep exposing the consolidated file shares under the old share paths. Scenario Let’s say you currently have 3 file servers named file1.contoso.local, file2.contoso.local and file3.contoso.local and you want to consolidate them into a single Windows Server computer called cfile.contoso.local….
Windows Server 2008 Training for Microsoft MVPs
I will be starting an MVP-targeted course on Windows Server 2008 on August 1st. This is something Microsoft offers to the MVPs and I will be monitoring that class. If you’re interested in the MVP program, there are details at http://mvp.support.microsoft.com. The course uses Microsoft eLearning, plus discussions via private newsgroups for Q&A. We’re using…
Testing Windows Server 2008 using Virtual PC (step-by-step)
Windows Server 2008 is just around the corner. The Beta 3 bits are publicly available, “release to manufacturing” should happen by the end of the year and the launch event date has been announced: February 27th, 2008. There are plenty of new things to investigate. The installation process is completely different from Windows Server 2003….
Troubleshooting File Server Networking Issues in Windows Server 2012 R2
In this blog post, I’m sharing a few troubleshooting tips related to File Server Networking in Windows Server 2012 R2. For each one, I first describe the issue that is commonly reported, followed by a quick explanation of the root cause of the issue and finally a way to solve it. Let me know if…
Windows Server 2012 File Server Tip: New per-share SMB client performance counters provide great insight
Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8 include a new set of performance counters that can greatly help understand the performance of the SMB file protocol. These include new counters on both the server side and the client side. In this post, I wanted to call your attention to the new client-side counters that show the…