VM-Aware

Server, Storage & Application Virtualisation!

A very nice article regarding Exchange 2007 server sizing can be found here at msexchange.org.
It talks about how to size depending on the amount of mailboxes, mailstores and users.

Brian Madden has created an article that walks you through using Microsoft’s SoftGrid product to sequence or virtualise Microsoft Office 2007 in 30 easy to follow steps.
It is worth a read even if you don’t own SoftGrid as the concepts can be applied to other Application Virtualisation products. I used the section about tweaking the [...]

I’ve found a multitude of blogs that point out that significant performance enhancements can be attained by disabling the File Last Access Time Check registry key in Windows Server 200x& XP.
I tried it and it does indeed make a difference, but don’t just take my word for it as Microsoft have disabled it by default [...]

I stumbled across this great pdf, call it Microsoft Licensing for Dummies or whatever you want, but it has a great breakdown of how licensing should be undertaken to be fully legit.

Server & CAL Licensing
Enterprise CAL Suite
Core CAL Suite
Server Licensing
Licensing Exchange Server

It even has a stab at Sharepoint, but I think that this is better [...]

The guys over at PSS SQL Blog have written a short but really sweet article about how to really detect whether you have a bottleneck with SQL Server implementations.
It gives a few pointers of what to look for if you really start digging including:

PAGE I/O Waits (select * from sys.dm_os_wait_stats where wait_type like ‘%PAGEIO%’)
Virtual File [...]

I found a bunch of great cmdlets that have now been bundled into the free Quest ActiveRoles Management Shell for Active Directory package.