Test Layout

Throwing this one out there in case anyone hits a similar issue. This one confused the heck out of me but was simple in the end. We have a customer with a Dell T310 server with an H200 RAID adapter. The performance on the H200 is pretty poor. In part because the drive cache is disabled by default. But, search around and you'll see no one has much nice to say about the H200. To improve performance for this server, we ordered an H700i card from Dell. We ordered from Dell rather than aftermarket to avoid issues with compatibility. And so that it would be supported. There are several sets of instructions out there for doing this upgrade. Here is the one I thought was the best: https://practicalsbs.wordpress.com/2014/08/06/upgrading-dell-perc-h200-raid-card-to-h700/ We went through the guide, installed the card, installed drivers, and then went to connect the drive backplane to the card. Uh oh, wrong connector type. You can see above that the new card has a two prong connector that does...

A brief plug for the latest book writing project that I've completed. Brian Svidergol and I have completed Virtualizing Desktops and Apps with Windows Server 2012 R2 Inside Out . Here's a quick synopsis of the book. First, I want to be clear that this book is about planning and implementing virtualization technologies. It's not just an overview.  Much of the content is similar to what's in Microsoft Course 20694 which I was also a co-author on. This book starts with an overview of Microsoft virtualization technologies. For many of you, this is just review, but if you haven't seen the full range of technologies, then this is useful. It also highlights when you would use each of the virtualization technologies. The first set of virtualization technologies we explore the details of are for user state virtualization. Basically technologies that support roaming. The newest of these from the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) is User ExperienceVirtualization (UE-...

Microsoft typically releases some free ebooks when new versions of Windows come out. For the most part, they tend to be a high level overview of the new features. So, they won't help you implement much, but they will let you know what's possible. True to pattern, they have released a new free ebook for Windows 10. You can get it here. Introducing Windows 10 for IT Professionals, Preview Edition I've downloaded this book, but haven't had a chance to read it yet. I'll update with a synopsis later on.

You may or may not know that I am a business partner in Conexion Networks. We just updated our web site. So, if you read the blog but have never checked out the company, you can see the new web site here: www.conexion.ca

My shocker for the day was finding out that SSD drives start to lose data when they are powered off. It depends on the environmental conditions but, worst case, an unpowered SSD drive will start to lose data in a week. The big takeaway for me on this is to not use SSD drives as external USB drives. I have an SSD drive in an external enclosure that emulates an optical drive based on ISOs stored on the drive. I use this every once in a while, but could conceivably go for several months without using it. During this extended period without being powered up, it could lose data. So, if you're archiving data on external drives for an extended period of time make it a traditional spinning disk. More info: https://blog.korelogic.com/blog/2015/03/24#ssds-evidence-storage-issues

Had a client with some odd DNS resolution issues recently. The clients were not using the primary DNS server and they should have been. These pages helped identify why that was: http://blogs.technet.com/b/stdqry/archive/2011/12/02/dns-clients-and-timeouts-part-1.aspx http://blogs.technet.com/b/stdqry/archive/2011/12/15/dns-clients-and-timeouts-part-2.aspx http://blog.johnruiz.com/2011/12/windows-does-not-always-honor-dns-order.html?m=1

We have a client with a 100Mbps link between sites. They replicate a large mailbox database (600GB) across this link and due to some errors need to reseed the database. The reseed process takes about 13 hours on this link at full speed. Which is long enough that it impacts production activities and can't be done during the week. Exchange Server 2010 and Exchange Server 2013 do not have any built in mechanism to throttle reseeding of databases. If you do some searching, you'll probably find links recommending that you implement QoS at the network level. Unfortunately in some cases that is difficult to implement. I recently had a similar issue with Hyper-V replication and solved the issue by using a little known feature in Windows Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012 R2. Both of these operating systems include network QoS in the operating system. No need to involve the network team. And you can do the QoS based on ports and applications. During the reseeding process, msexchangerep...