The DFS Replication Management Pack for System Center Operations Manager 2007 is now available for download. Download the DFS Replication Management Pack File Name: DFS Replication Management Pack for Operations Manager 2007.msi Version: 6.0.6321.0 Date...

Don’t know how to get started on classification? Afraid of getting it wrong? Think classification is cost prohibitive? Don’t understand what value you can get out of classifying and applying policy? If you answered yes to one of the above...

By Judd Hardy It’s easy to see how the FCI platform helps you manage the files on your servers.  In other articles, people have talked about how you can create properties to track and set up rules to have those properties automatically set based...

Version 1.0 of the File Server Capacity Tool (FSCT) was announced yesterday during a presentation by Jian Yan and Bartosz Nyczkowski at SNIA’s Storage Developer Conference in Santa Clara, CA. The presentation covered a number of details about FSCT and...

Many customers have asked questions in our forums on how to understand and troubleshoot errors reported by Windows Server Backup. While we document the event IDs logged by Windows Server Backup (for example, see http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library...

If you've been trying out the LUN Resync APIs with the Beta or RC bits for Server 2008 R2 you may have run into a few issues. Most of these have been addressed in the RTM build. Greg from the VSS team has a post detailing the fixes on his blog -Dinesh

by Anupadmaja Raghavan In the last post, http://blogs.technet.com/filecab/archive/2009/08/14/using-windows-powershell-scripts-for-file-classification.aspx , we saw how simple PowerShell scripts could be used to do custom file classification in Windows...

Titus labs has posted some interesting blog posts that talk about FCI, SharePoint and how their product integrates with FCI Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 File Classification Infrastructure (FCI) Leveraging FCI in Windows Server 2008 R2

The DFS-N test team has completed some extensive Performance and Scalability testing and we wanted to share some of the results. To start, here is a comparison of the performance of adding links to a standalone namespace. It includes data for Windows...

Jose Barreto has a new blog post to help you understand how to design your DFS Namespaces. He covers three options to create a namespace that points a few folders in three different file servers: Simple mapping of shares Flattening out the tree...

by Anupadmaja Raghavan The File Classification Infrastructure in Windows Server 2008 R2 is great for classifying files based on file content and/or location. You can define rules that can discover sensitive files (such as those containing social security...

Jose Barreto has a new blog post to help you understand how to use the DFSDIAG.EXE tool to check your DFS-Namespaces (DFS-N) configuration. DFSDIAG, which was introduced in Windows Server 2008 and improved in Windows Server 2008 R2, has five types...

The File Server Capacity Tool (FSCT) is a capacity planning software for CIFS/SMB/SMB2 file servers. It’s also useful for identifying performance bottlenecks. FSCT results include the maximum number of users for a file server configuration, throughput...

Microsoft released the File Server Migration Toolkit version 1.2 (FSMT 1.2), which will help you migrate file shares from computers running Windows NT 4.0 Server, Windows 2000 Server, Windows 2003 Server, Windows Server 2008 and Windows Storage Server...

The previous posts in this series explained how to create a Windows Failover cluster and how to configure DFS Replication for high availability on that cluster respectively. Now, it is time to add the failover cluster as a member of a replication group...

In the previous blog post we examined how to create a Windows Failover Cluster for Contoso. Now, let’s examine the steps involved in configuring a highly available file server on this new failover cluster. It is highly recommended to read the previous...

On Windows Server 2008 R2, a Windows Failover cluster can be configured to be a member of a DFSR replication group. This feature can be used to configure highly available replication services. In this three part blog series, let us examine how to configure...

Whenever you’re deploying Windows Server DFS-Namespaces, you will need to figure out how many servers will be required. Although we never really had any problems with performance of the namespace server themselves, the question of where to place them...

This article answers following questions related to Windows Server Backup in Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2: Q1. How does Windows Server Backup store backups and maintain backup versions? Q2. How do I query backup stored versions on...

Classifying files based on their content is something we have covered before for the File Classification Infrastructure (FCI). Basically, FCI allows you to create rules that will search the contents of files (using the Content Classifier) for strings...

The Content Classifier in the File Classification Infrastructure extracts text from files using the IFilter mechanism that enables the Search Indexer. Here is a list of file types that have a corresponding IFilter installed on a Windows Server 2008 R2...

In this article, we'll take a look at a new class of VSS writers enabled in Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 that lower the cost for applications to participate in backups. Before we get there though, let’s briefly recap the role of VSS writers in backups...

In a previous article, we looked at LUN Resync a new fast recovery scenario in Windows Server 2008 R2. Himanshu from the VSS team has posted a few sample scripts to demostrate the scenario using Diskshadow and the VSS tools in the Windows 7 SDK. ...

A request we’ve received consistently from our customers is – How do I know what DFS Replication is currently doing on my server? In Windows Server 2008 R2, we have attempted to provide a way for administrators to better understand the state of replication...

Over the long weekend, one of my colleagues and I were discussing the new File Classification Infrastructure in the upcoming R2 release. My colleague asked me: “Why do you keep emphasizing the importance of separating the classification from the...