1 - Overview When you set up a File Server, there are advantages to configuring multiple Network Interface Cards (NICs). However, there are many options to consider depending on how your network and services are laid out. Since networking (along with...

The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) is hosting the 7th Storage Developer Conference (SDC) in the Hyatt Regency in beautiful Santa Clara, CA (Silicon Valley) on the week of September 20th. As usual, Microsoft is underwriting the CIFS/SMB...

I am often asked about File Server performance. The usual conversation evolves into a discussion on what registry settings would be recommend to make a file server work faster. We typically end up talking about specific settings for performance tuning...

Every once in a while the question comes up. How come my IT department is charging me tens of dollars per gigabyte of storage for my application per month when I can pay less than 15 cents per gigabyte at Best Buy (where a 2TB drive might cost less than...

Overview This blog post covers a few different ways to consolidate multiple SMB file servers and keep exposing the consolidated file shares under the old share paths. Scenario Let’s say you currently have 3 file servers named file1.contoso.local...

DFSUTIL.EXE is a command line tool to manage Windows Server DFS Namespaces. In Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2003 R2, DFSUTIL.EXE was included as part of the “Windows Server Support Tools” in the Windows Server CD. A common question by DFS administrators...

A user asked me recently if there is a prescribed way to rename an existing DFS-N server . More precisely, she asked if simply renaming a server hosting a DFS Namespace would lead to messed up Active Directory pointers, links, link targets, etc. I asked...

I just got an e-mail informing me that I could now upload and create documents in http:/docs.com, so I went ahead and tried it out. For starters, you don’t need to create usernames or passwords. You just use your facebook credentials. If you’re logged...

Quick blog post to let you know that information about the Best Practices Analyzer (BPA) for Windows Server 2008 R2 File Services has been published. It includes several rules for the configuration, operation, performance and security of the SMB, NFS...

Overview I recently learned how to develop, test and deploy a Windows Azure application. This post describes how created and deployed a sample application. Please note that I am not a member of the Windows Azure team and this post covers my own personal...

One of the interesting things about PowerShell is how easy it is to discover its cmdlets and parameter. In PowerShell itself or in the ISE, you can just start typing a command and then press the <TAB> key complete it. One other interesting bit is...

I was trying to figure out why people use the more complicated [System.DateTime]::Now instead of the simple Get-Date. They do the same thing and they both return an object of type "System.DateTime". PS C:\> Get-Date Thursday, April 08, 2010 10:46:48...

Overview In a previous blog post, I have examined some of PowerShell’s control structures and included an example gathered some information from web. If you haven’t seen it, you can check it at http://blogs.technet.com/josebda/archive/2010/04/04/experimenting...

Last week I was testing Visual Studio 2010 to write a C# application to export all my blog posts to a file. I described that in some detail at http://blogs.technet.com/josebda/archive/2010/03/21/experimenting-with-visual-studio-2010-and-backing-up-the...

1. Overview In a recent blog post, I was looking at PowerShell V2 r emoting in Windows Server 2008 R2. If you haven’t seen it, take a look at http://blogs.technet.com/josebda/archive/2010/03/31/experimenting-with-powershell-v2-remoting.aspx . In that...

Interesting blog post covering a tool to copy VHD files.The tool was created by a Microsoft MVP. Details at http://blogs.technet.com/wchomak/archive/2010/03/31/why-hyper-v-vhd-files-are-so-large-and-how-to-efficiently-copy-them.aspx

As I continue to experiment with PowerShell v2 in Windows Server 2008 R2, I will share some of what I learn here on the blog. This time I am focusing on PowerShell Remoting. If you never played with PowerShell before, please start by reading http://blogs...

During a recent internal conference, someone asked me about how DFS-R (DFS Replication) in Windows Server 2008 R2 secures its communication. I wasn’t sure at the time, so I talked to a few people that work with DFS-R and spent some time looking into that...

I spent some time today experimenting with the Visual Studio 2010. As I learned a long time ago, the best way to experience a development environment or programming language is to try to implement a solution with it. So I set out to create a small tool...

I was glad to see that tje TechNet public site was recently updated to include detailed documentation on Windows Storage Server 2008 and iSCSI Software Target 3.2. See below the main two top items that were posted, along with the topics covered under...

If you work with File and Storage, you probably heard of the annual FAST conference. The most recent one was FAST’10 (8th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies), which happened in San Jose, CA on February 23-26. The content from the FAST...

A few years ago, I was working with a Microsoft customer to deploy a Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS 2007) solution. SharePoint 2007 had just been released at the time. The customer needed document URLs stored in SharePoint to continued to work...

If there was ever a post true to the part of the tagline of my blog that mentions random thoughts, this is it. :-) This post is a compilation of my tweets from today, which cover several different topics related to Storage. Microsoft Research: Dryad Project...

The presentations from SNIA's SDC 2009 are now publicly available for download. This SNIA event happened in Santa Clara, CA last September and the decks are now publicly available, after being restricted to conference attendees for a few months. Out of...

I get a number of questions regarding reference information for DFS Namespaces (also known as DFS-N). I gathered here the main links that can get you started on the subject: Here are my own blog posts on DFS Namespaces (all updated for Windows Server...