Test Layout

Many of our smaller customers use OEM versions of Microsoft Office. Dell has not been shipping installation media for these versions. Office has been included in the image from Dell. So, what to do when you want to reinstall the OS? Go to this web site to download OEM installations of Microsoft that you can use for reinstall. It includes downloads for Office 2007, Office 2010, and Office 2013: http://office.microsoft.com/en-ca/products/download-back-up-restore-microsoft-office-products-FX103427465.aspx

I do a lot of work with Hyper-V virtual machines in a test environment. My Hyper-V host is a white box kludged together cheaply, but with reasonable hardware. The VMs that are used for Microsoft courses use base drives for the core OS and then differencing drives for each individual VM. The bouncing back and forth between the base drive and the differencing drive tends to drag down performance. In addition, I often use snapshots to give me a backout point when developing labs. Which reduces performance even more. I've got the storage system setup as four 7200 RPM SATA drives in a RAID 10 array using the Intel Storage Technology enterprise that is built into the motherboard. This gives far better performance than a single drive, but still not enough when I'm running many VMs. Storage speed is the bottle neck in this system. Today I bought a Kingston 240 GB HyperX SSD drive to improve performance. Since the drive is not very large, I though I'd start by moving only the base d...

I work with Hyper-V a lot for Microsoft training and we've starting to use it as our standard virtualization platform for clients. I've seen a lot of improvements in it since it was first introduced and honestly think that for smaller organizations it's easier to work with than VMware. For larger organizations, I think it's a contender. One of the biggest impediments to implementation is knowledge. Microsoft is making online training for Hyper-V in Windows Server 2013 R2 available for free. They're also kicking in a certification exam. Check it out: http://www.virtualizationsquared.com/

I recently ran into a computer using Windows Live Mail in conjunction with AOL. This resulted in some emails with embedded pictures not forwarding. It generated a warning about this when you went to send. What seemed to fix it was disabling the option in Windows Live Mail to convert emails with pictures to picture emails. However, this conversion happened when the messages were received. For existing emails that have already been converted, right-click and forward as attachment seemed to do the trick. To disable picture emails: File > Options > Mail > Compose > Convert messages to photo e-mail when adding photos

I have an client with an existing Office 365 implementation and a separate on-premises Exchange organization. As part of linking these two together into hybrid mode, the local AD account became a Mail User. A Mail User is a local AD account with an external SMTP address configured. This allows the user to have an email address in the GAL, but is not a local Exchange mailbox. To move mailboxes, this Mail User needs to be configured as a Remote User Mailbox. A Remote User Mailbox also has a proper remote routing address property configured. I couldn't find any documentation on performing this process. However, I did find a script that indicates it fixes up user accounts when a mailbox move to Office 365 does not complete properly. I used this script to identify the changes that needed to be made. The script is here: http://exchangeservertips.com/powershell/script-to-fix-office365-mailboxes-not-getting-displayed-as-remote-mailbox/ The changes that need to be made are: Configure the us...

In previous versions of Windows Server and AD FS, it was not recommended to install AD FS on a domain controller due to security issue cause by running IIS on a domain controller. In Windows Server 2012 R2, AD FS does not use IIS. So, it is now possible to run AD FS on a domain controller. I"m not sure whether is was possible in previous versions of AD FS, but AD FS in Windows Server 2012 allows you to run the service by using a group Managed Service Account (gMSA). The main benefit of using a gMSA is automatic password changes. The account password is changed automatically in the background to enhance service security. It turns out that if you run AD FS on a Windows Server 2012 R2 domain controller and use a gMSA for the service, it prevents the service from starting. When you do the initial installation, it will look fine, but after you do a reboot, the service will have a status of Starting and hang. There are no events in the event log to indicate what the issue is. I first no...

Just got the following from Microsoft: Introducing Windows Server 2012 R2 Download PDF PDF is here (108 pages, 5 MB) ePub EPUB format is here Mobi (Kindle) MOBI format is here Print If you prefer a hard copy of the book, you can order it here from our official distributor, O’Reilly Media, for $9.99 Description This book is intended to provide you with an overview of the new features and enhancements introduced in Windows Server 2012 R2. The intended audience for this book is IT pros who deploy, manage, and maintain Windows Server workloads in data center, private cloud, and hosting provider environments. We assume that you are at least somewhat familiar with the features and capabilities of the previous platform Windows Server 2012. If you are not familiar with all the new features and enhancements Microsoft introduced previously in Windows Server 2012, we recommend that you first read Introducing Windows Server 2012 RTM Edition (Microsoft Pre...