Useful Administrator Resource - Microsoft Reliability Workbooks

Today I learned about a resource available for administrators of many of Microsoft's most popular products.  For those who are tasked with day-to-day management of such products as Active Directory or Exchange, it's sometimes difficult to know what needs to be done on a daily/weekly/monthly basis.  It's also difficult to know whether you've considered everything before implementing a change.  To help with this, Microsoft produces a series of "how to" guides called Reliability Workbooks.  These workbooks address the specific questions that administrators need to think of as they manage their IT environments.  Each Reliability Workbook is focused on a single Microsoft technology and considers the following topic areas:

  • Monitoring Activities
  • Maintenance Activities
  • Health Risks
  • Standard Changes

To be clear, not every Microsoft technology is represented by these Reliability Workbooks (hopefully more will be released in the future), but these seem like excellent information for those technologies that are represented.  As of this writing, the following are covered:

  • Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS)
  • Active Directory Certificate Services (AD CS)
  • DirectAccess
  • Exchange 2010 Client Access and Transport
  • Exchange 2010 Mailbox Services
  • Forefront Unified Access Gateway
  • Hyper-V
  • Internet Information Services (IIS)
  • System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM)
  • Application Virtualization (App-V)
  • Network Load Balancing
  • SQL Server 2008
  • System Center Operations Manager (SCOM)
  • System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM)
  • User State Virtualization
  • Windows Server 2008 DNS Server
  • Windows Server 2008 R2

To download these Reliability Workbooks, go to this link:

 

MOF Technology Library

 

And check back frequently for updates!