VM-Aware

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.  It also discusses role sizing including:

• Mailbox Role
• CAS Roles
• Hub Role
• Edge Role
• UM Role

A very well thought out document indeed.

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 virtual registry (step 24in ThinApp and it worked a treat.

Read it here. Thanks Brian!!

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 in Vista & 2008.

Check out these blogs for various discussions about it:

• How To Geek
• Microsoft CAB Site
• PCTools
• VMwareInfo

Give it a go, unless of course you run an application that depends on this parameter being updated.

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 handled by reading one of my earlier posts. Thanks to vinf.net for the original spot.

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 Stats (select * from sys.dm_io_virtual_file_stats(-1, -1))
• Stalled I/O Warnings
• Additional disk based performance counters and available hardware utilities

I found this useful recently when SQL Server was virtualised and all other methods of monitoring looked fine (perfmon, vCharter), but couldn’t find the problem.

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

• Add-QADPermission
• Get-QADObjectSecurity
• Get-QADPermission
• Get-QADRootDSE
• Get-QARSAccessTemplate
• Get-QARSAccessTemplateLink
• New-QARSAccessTemplateLink
• Remove-QADPermission
• Remove-QARSAccessTemplateLink
• Set-QADObjectSecurity
• Set-QARSAccessTemplateLink

These helped no end in the management of AD permissions with PowerShell.  I found the original post discussing the package here, but you can download the Quest AD cmdlets here completely free of charge.