May 31st marked a special day for Microsoft and our customers worldwide. Our Windows team announced the release of our latest preview of Windows 2012 - Windows 2012 Release Preview (RP). This includes Windows 2012, Internet Explorer 10, new Windows 2012...

Windows Server 2012 provides a dynamic, highly available and cost-effective server platform for the modern datacenter and the cloud. Its impact scales from a few servers all the way to multitenant-aware, multisite environments in the largest organizations...

Today’s blog is going to cover some issues regarding the installation of MS12-034 (2686509).  When installing this update you may encounter the following error message: Setup cannot continue because one or more prerequisites required to install KB2686509...

One of my colleagues here at Microsoft wrote a couple blogs on managing Exchange networks on a cluster so I thought I’d post the links since they are tied into behavior you would see in a clustered environment. Exchange 2010: Mapping DAG network states...

My name is Naziya Shaik and I am a Support Escalation Engineer with Windows Core team @ Microsoft. I would like to share information about enabling BitLocker while deploying operating system via MDT and the group policies that are required to be configured...

With each new release of Windows, it's a challenge to balance keeping the OS footprint small with maintaining forward compatibility for applications and devices. The .Net Framework is at the heart of this challenge. In Windows 8, Microsoft decided to...

My name is William Effinger, and I am a Senior Support Escalation Engineer with the Windows Core team at Microsoft. Some of the most common questions we get here at the storage team center around CHKDSK. If you have ever come across any event ID 55s in...

One of the most common questions I get is “What logs should I look at if my deployment fails?” So here is a little summary of the logs you will be most concerned with when troubleshooting a failed Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2 install that are being...

How VSS Tracing Works! Where to start? Well this depends on your current level of knowledge on the topic. So let’s start with a basic understanding of what VSS is. If you are just starting to work with VSS I suggest reading the articles below...

Today, I am going to discuss how to troubleshoot a scenario where the system does not boot in normal mode; however, boots up fine upon selecting F8 -> Disable Driver Signature Enforcement. In 64-bit operating systems starting with Windows Vista...

Hello, my name is Steven Graves and I am a Support Escalation Engineer (SEE) in the Platforms Support group here at Microsoft. One of the technologies I support is Windows Server Failover Clustering. I’d like to take a couple of minutes to share some...

A fix for the above titled problem has been released. If you are running into this problem, please downlaod and install the following fix on all Clusters running McAfee and wanting the updates they provide. 2674551 Redirected mode is enabled unexpectedly...

My name is Flavio Muratore and I am a Sr. Support Escalation Engineer with the Windows Core team at Microsoft. If you ever find yourself analyzing storage performance with Performance Monitor, this post is for you. We will go beyond very brief descriptions...

My name is Sean Dwyer and I am a Support Escalation Engineer with the Microsoft CORE team. I’d like to share a quick tip for handling Windows Server Cluster administrators. There may come a time, for whatever reason, that a Cluster managed...

Thursday morning Bill Laing, Corporate Vice President of Server and Cloud Announced the beta release of Windows Server “8” . I think it is really important for anyone who is interested in hearing more about what is coming in this beta with Hyper-V and...

Today is a big day here at Microsoft.  This morning at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, it was announced that Windows 8 Consumer Preview (beta) is now released. At the conference, several key points were discussed and demonstrated....

Hello everyone. Today’s topic deals with a behavior you’ll notice on Windows 2008 Failover Clusters when there are networking issues between nodes of the cluster. I’ve simulated a loss of network connectivity between two nodes of...

My name is Flavio Muratore and I am a Senior Support Escalation Engineer with the Windows Core Team. One subject we haven’t written much about in the Core team blog is “disk performance”. Today I would like to talk a little bit about measuring Physical...

There is an issue with Cluster Shared Volumes and McAfee VirusScan Enterprise that I wanted to pass along. When installing McAfee VSE 8.7 Patch 5 or 8.8 Patch 1, the CSV drives will go into redirected mode and will not go out of it. The reason for...

There might be times on Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V host when the snapshots will not merge, the virtual machine disappears from the Hyper-V management console or the virtual machine goes into a Critical-Saved or Paused state for what seems to be no...

Are you ready for the Microsoft Private Cloud?   On February 21 & 22 Microsoft Learning is running a 2-day virtual training event to help the world learn about the upcoming enhancements with the Creating & Managing a Private Cloud with System...

My name is Himanshu Singh and in this blog I will talk about an issue seen on Windows Server 2003 64-bit servers running File Server Resource Manager (FSRM), where, when you run a dirquota command to modify notifications using a configuration file, you...

When creating a system state backup with Windows Server 2008 or Windows Server 2008 R2 you may encounter the following error: “One of the source volumes specified has an invalid format and cannot be protected using Windows Backup. Only volumes formatted...

Hello, My name is Himanshu and I work with the Windows Core Support Team. Recently, I worked on a patch installation issue known internally at Microsoft as a servicing issue. I thought this would be a great customer example as to how a specific error...

When creating a system state backup with Windows Server 2008 or Windows Server 2008 R2 you may encounter the following error: “One of the source volumes specified has an invalid format and cannot be protected using Windows Backup. Only volumes formatted...