I've been meaning to try this for a while and finally got round to it at the weekend. Currently, on a monthly backup (or so - you know how things get in the way), I'll compact my Virtual Machine images running on my home domain, zip them up and burn them...

I felt very privileged to be able to attend a BCS (British Computer Society) event held last night, purely co-incidentally, at the Microsoft Campus in Reading where I happen to work. The event was presented by Tony Sale and about how he led the project...

Today, the last of the download links for the Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2008 R2 RC (Release Candidate) release, Windows 7 client and the Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT) for Windows 7 RC have gone live. Windows Server...

Following the HUGE Virtual Server announcements made by Steve Ballmer a couple of days ago at the MMS conference, if you want to here what Steve had to say first hand, click here to hear his keynote speech streamed directly over the Internet. On that...

I use Robocopy a great deal to copy stuff from corpnet in a reliable way onto my laptop. One huge advantage of robocopy is that you can set it to copy in restartable mode, and if the network connection fails, it can take off from where it got to. Therefore...

More interesting stuff I just came across - a case study which details how Data Protection Manager has been deployed internally at Microsoft to perform backups for over 130 remote sites or "Branch Offices". I just love that term being applied to the UK...

Summary from KB Article : When you open the Virtual Server Administration Website in Microsoft Virtual Server 2005, you receive the following error message: Could not connect to Virtual Server. Access was denied. You can specify an alternate virtual server...

Hyper-V uses a role based authorisation model for access checks. This series of articles takes a look at the model; defines the available primitives; and walks through a couple of examples. (I actually wrote most of this series many months ago – only...

This question was asked of me at the roadshow this week and I expect this is going to become a far more common situation with the use of tools like Virtual Server Migration Toolkit (VSMT) increasing as organisations consolidate and virtualise environments...

No, not usually a good idea, I know. However, I was asked last night a "what would happen if...." question. Using taskkill, the process is identified as a critical system process. However, if you use pskill from sysinternals to kill winlogon on a remote...

I've just got out from a meeting and after a colleague happened to display their calendar on the projector noticed something which (for me at least) is really dead useful. I never knew you could display more than one timezone on your Outlook calendar...

I was speaking to a customer yesterday who was telling me about a problem he was having with DHCP in his reasonably small office network (something like three servers). He had recently upgraded to Windows Server 2003 and implemented Active Directory....

So there's many tricks to optimising the size of a VHD. One which I always use, but appears not to be widely known about, is to turn of the system file checker. Of course, this has it's downsides and your mileage may vary. In practice you can reduce a...

Several people internally at Microsoft have commented that you should turn off Hyperthreading when you're running Microsoft Virtual Server 2005, especially under load. It appears that the overhead of scheduling between logical processors gives either...

Continuing the blogcast series on infrastructure essentials. Yesterday, we got Outlook Web Access available on the Internet (albeit still using http rather than https - later this week we'll solve that). Our users are currently accessing Outlook Web...

I had a couple of emails overnight asking whether it is possible to use Hyper-V Manager "v1" (as in KB952627 for Windows Vista SP1, or part of RSAT in Windows Server 2008) pointing to a machine running Windows Server 2008 R2 RC or Microsoft Hyper-V Server...

I was playing this weekend trying to get the VHD (Virtual Hard Disk) size down to the barest minimum. I thought I did OK - WS2003 SP1 with Support Tools, Admin Pack, Group Policy Management Console, Small Office 2003 installation running Word+Excel patched...

Hyper-V uses a role based authorisation model for access checks. This series of articles takes a look at the model; defines the available primitives; and walks through a couple of examples. (I actually wrote most of this series many months ago – only...

Windows Messenger 5.1 (English) is now available for download. I've been running the 5.1 beta for a while now internally at Microsoft. For me, it's great in that I can sign in to both a corporate service and a .NET service at the same time from the Internet...

At the IDF (Intel Developers Forum) yesterday, Microsoft made the announcement I've been waiting to go public on for a couple of months now. Virtual Server 2005 SP1 is no more. Well, that isn't exactly true, the changes which are present for those of...

Part three of my weekend project involves a little more reconfiguration of my ISA 2006 Server to allow TS Web access the Terminal Services virtual machine running under Hyper-V beta. There are two rules I need to create on the ISA server to achieve this...

As I mentioned at the Technical Roadshow yesterday in the Virtual Server session, the VSMP or Virtual Server Management Pack for Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 was released just a few days ago. This is a really great way to monitor your virtual environment...

An interesting question was posed to me a couple of days back about why when starting Hyper-V Manager, you get a UAC prompt, yet you don't with most other Microsoft Administrative MMCs. You should note that the workaround in here only applies to Windows...

So there I was, a month after joining Microsoft with a new monster laptop freshly delivered. This really is a monster – hyper-threading mobile P4, 2GB ram, built in gale-force wind generating fan. It also doubles as a portable heater now the colder time...

I was speaking to a customer this morning about Windows management generally and this happened to come up in conversation. There are many ways to manage servers remotely in Windows, but the customer was asking if there was a way to avoid his nightmare...