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Our readers are simply the best! One of the benefits of having great folks that read what we post on the Ask PFE Platforms Blog are the questions we sometimes receive. One such recent question you will find below that came to us this week. If you have a question for us, don't forget that you can contact...

Hello folks, its Rick here. In a previous post Michael gave you nice overview of Windows Azure Services and helped you setup your own VMs in cloud using the free trial thru the Azure portal. Today I would like to walk you through building a VM in Windows Azure using your favorite management tool ‘PowerShell...

Some months ago, I shared a PowerShell script to enumerate the membership of privileged groups (including membership in nested groups) and report membership as well as password ages. Like most scripts, it works well in most environments, but has some limitations. One glaring limitation that I’ve found...

Greg here with a quick post where the new DNS PowerShell cmdlets in AD made a task much easier. Many of our customers use Microsoft DNS and a feature of Microsoft DNS is the ability to remove stale records. By default this feature is disabled and some people never enable it, and others disable...

If you've read any of my prior posts, you know I like to be able to do things without a lot of prep, in a short amount of time. Yes, I like the K.I.S.S principle – Keep It Simple, Stan. I also enjoy the sense of accomplishment that comes when I can leave work and know that I actually made progress...

Here’s an interesting question that came to us from one of our readers. If you have a question for us, don't forget that you can contact us using the Contact tile just to the right of this article when viewed from our TechNet blog . Question: I am setting up multiple Windows Server 2012 and...

Hey y’all, Mark here with a quick post. A while back Tom Moser and I wrote a powershell script to help backup and remove ADM files. http://blogs.technet.com/b/askpfeplat/archive/2011/12/12/how-to-implement-the-central-store-for-group-policy-admin-templates-completely-hint-remove-those-adm-files...

Hey y’all, Mark here again. Another year has come to an end, the Mayans were wrong and we started to look back on what our most popular post of the last year were. For you long time readers (AD MVP Mike Kline , our very first comment) this will be a trip down memory lane. For any of our new readers...

Hey y’all, Mark here with a quick post that all you PowerShell slackers should check out. Ashley McGlone aka GoateePFE (I've seen his goatee in real life and it is magnificent) has written up a nice little doc to help you finally let go of all your old commands for Active Directory and how to do...

Rick Bergman here with a post on gathering hotfixes from multiple node failover clusters ranging in OS version from Windows Server 2003 to Windows Server 2012. Recently, I reviewed a number of failover clusters for my customer and it was identified that they were struggling with keep the hotfixes...

Tom Moser here with a post on one of the new ADDS features in Windows Server 2012; Virtual Domain Controller Cloning. Until now, cloning, snapshotting, copying, or pretty much doing anything but rebuilding from scratch to a virtual domain controller wasn't just unsupported; it had the potential to...

  Hello, Rick here to talk about how you can use the new PowerShell Web Access (PSWA) feature in Windows Server 2012 to allow remote administrative access to a set of servers in your IT infrastructure. Furthermore, you can granularly delegate access and only expose specific administrative privileges...

Welcome to part two of this blog where we discuss promoting a Domain Controller with Windows PowerShell. We also discuss how you can do the prerequisites checks before introducing the first Windows Server 2012 Domain Controller. Promoting a Domain Controller with PowerShell Just like in the GUI...

Fellow PFE and blogger Michael “Hilde” Hildebrand makes a great case for being able to inventory the IP configuration of your hosts – especially those that have static IP configurations (like most of your servers). For example, audit the DNS server search order (primary and secondary...

In my role as a transactional PFE, I have the privilege of visiting 40-50 customers per year. Often I’m called in to perform an Assessment of the Active Directory Infrastructure . Without a doubt, one of the biggest challenges most customers face is managing the membership of the privileged groups...

Three months ago I posted some information on AD Sites, Subnets and Roaming Clients . The heart of the blog was a PowerShell script that collected and collated netlogon.log files across all Domain Controllers in the forest to report a list of hostnames and IP addresses that have authenticated from IP...

Hello, Ray Zabilla and Rick Bergman again. As promised in our previous post on this topic we will go into the details of how we created the script, the challenges we had during testing and what final code looks like. We are even so generous that we are going to share the scripts with you too. :) How...

If the title of this blog hasn’t already put you off, you’re probably interested in the interaction between Microsoft DNS and DHCP services . Specifically, you should understand how Microsoft DHCP servers can be configured to dynamically register A and PTR records in DNS on behalf of their...

We’ve recently received some great feedback from several customers and other PFEs on the ADM template post that Mark and I wrote a month or two back. I thought I’d take some time to respond to some of those questions and to post an updated version of the script. Going forward, we plan to...

In my role, I often get to review failover clusters. Typically we look for configuration problems or deviations from best practices. One of the most challenging aspects of managing and maintaining a failover cluster is keeping the nodes identically configured. This means identical drivers, driver versions...

If you want detailed information on how Active Directory sites and subnets work to help clients find their closest domain controller, there is good information on TechNet . In short, you need to ensure that you’ve defined (in Active Directory Sites and Services) Active Directory sites for all of...

Pre Req: This post assumes you are not using the TS method of managing GPOs documented, at http://blogs.technet.com/b/askds/archive/2009/12/09/windows-7-windows-server-2008-r2-and-the-group-policy-central-store.aspx In the field we commonly see two scenarios around the Central Store for Group Policy...