VM-Aware » Microsoft

Microsoft Exchange 2007 Sizing Chart

Paul Shannon — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 17:52:39 +0000

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.

Virtualising Office 2007 In 30 Steps

Paul Shannon — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 11:39:51 +0000

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!!

Speed Up Windows (VMs & Physical)

Paul Shannon — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 11:59:50 +0000

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:

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

Microsoft Product Licensing Clarified

Paul Shannon — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 19:42:14 +0000

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.

SQL Server Bottlenecks

Paul Shannon — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 09:23:56 +0000

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.

PowerShell Active Directory Cmdlets

Paul Shannon — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 13:48:09 +0000

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

Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server Licensing For Dummies

Paul Shannon — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 11:23:58 +0000

I’ve been on a bit of a mission of late to find articles that make the sometimes complex seem more simple.

I don’t know about you, but I find navigating around the Sharepoint licensing model a complete and utter nightmare. So how pleased was I when I found Lady Licensing. Simple diagrams covering the following scenarios:

Intranet Portal
Intranet/Extranet
Internet

Brilliant! It even comes with pictures. Need I say more? I thought not, check it out here.

PowerShell v2 To Ship Mid 2009?!?

Paul Shannon — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 06:16:07 +0000

For those of you that are interested in PowerShell to the point that you’d be curious as a possible release date then Jeffrey Snover may be your man.

A blog post of his indicates that v2 is feature complete and although he cannot explicitly mention a release date he intimates that mid 2009 is a good guess.

I think PowerShell is the best thing that Microsoft have done for many a year so I’m pretty excited by a big feature update.

PowerShell For Dummies

Paul Shannon — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 09:03:57 +0000

I don’t know about you, but not being a programmer means I sometimes struggle with some of the concepts. I hope you find this article by Jeffry Snover over at the MSDN PowerShell blog as useful as me.

It gives a very nice analogy of how you can equate objects and their functions to riding a bike.

Nice and simple, just how I like my explanations.

Customising RDP Dialogs

Paul Shannon — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 07:33:59 +0000

Firstly, let me start by saying that not everyone is going to want to ‘tweak’ with the bowels of RDP, but if you are so inclined then check out this article.

I stumbled upon it when wondering how I could get people to stop simply disconnecting sessions and logging off properly.

The article helps you to change the disconnect dialog from looking like this:

To looking more like this:

As I said at the top of this post, not everyone should be poking around with this kind of thing in production, but it is very very handy for persistent offenders.

This tool obviously has many uses beyond RDP dialog customisation, so use your imagination.