This week at TechEd 2011 I will be delivering a presentation about “Windows Server 2008 R2 File Services Consolidation - Technology Update”. If you’re attending the conference in Atlanta-GA, this is session WSV317 on Wednesday at 10:15 AM, plus a repeat on Thursday also at 10:15...

If you work with storage, you probably already heard about the “4K Sector Drives”, “Advanced Format Drives” and “512e drives”. These new “4K sector drives” abandon the traditional use of 512 bytes per sector in favor of a new structure that uses 4096 bytes...

1. Introduction The File Server Capacity Tool (FSCT) is a free download from Microsoft that helps you determine the capacity of a specific file server configuration (running Windows or any operating system that implements the SMB or SMB2 protocols). It simulates a specific set of operations (the “Home...

If you’re installing a Windows Server 2008 or Windows Server 2008 R2 file server, we always recommend getting the latest hotfixes from Windows Update. That will include all security updates and updates that are considered important enough to be delivered to all Windows Server users. However, there...

SMB Signing Overview Server Message Block (SMB) is the file protocol most commonly used by Windows. SMB Signing is a feature through which communications using SMB can be digitally signed at the packet level. Digitally signing the packets enables the recipient of the packets to confirm their point...

I recently talked to a customer that was surprised to hear that their Windows 7 clients were not using the latest version of SMB2 to talk with their Windows Server 2003 file servers. I explained to him that, in order to use SMB2, both sides of the connection have to support it. If not, they will negotiate...

Ned Pyle, a Senior Escalation Support Engineer with the Directory Services team at Microsoft, has just started a new blog series focusing on DFS Replication. Here’s how he introduces it: Hello folks, Ned here again to kick off a new five-part series on DFSR. With the release of Windows...

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 storage) is one of the most common bottlenecks...

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, file2.contoso.local and file3.contoso...

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 2008 R2 and including domain V2 namespaces): ...

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 included a demo running FSCT with the HomeFolders...

The DFS-N test team has completed some extensive Performance and Scalability testing and we wanted to share some of the results. It includes results on standalone namespaces, "2000 mode" domain namespaces and "2008 mode" domain namespaces, under Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008 and Windows...

Introduction In this blog post, we’ll showcase the flexibility you have with DFS-N by showing three distinct ways that you could design a namespace. Note: If you’re not familiar with DFS-N, please read this blog post first: http://blogs.technet.com/josebda/archive/2009/03/10/the-basics-of-the...

Introduction This blog post covers the changes in the list of Roles, Role Services and Features from Windows Server 2008 (with Service Pack 2) to Windows Server 2008 R2 (used the latest RC build available to me). To create the tables and lists below, I installed both operating systems, used the...

Introduction The Distributed File System Namespaces (DFS-N) service is a role service of the File Service role for Windows Server. For a basic description of DFS-N, start with http://blogs.technet.com/josebda/archive/2009/03/10/the-basics-of-the-windows-server-2008-distributed-file-system-dfs.aspx...

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 for that configuration and performance counters for...

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 2008 to computers running Windows 2003 Server, Windows...

Introduction Whenever you’re deploying Windows Server DFS-Namespaces, you will need to figure out how many servers will be required. Since I moved to the role of DFS-N PM, I noticed that the specific information on how many namespace servers you need is something that isn’t clearly posted anywhere...

I am glad to share that Windows Storage Server 2008 (WSS 2008) and the Microsoft iSCSI Software Target 3.2 have been released to the Microsoft OEM partners. This is the successor to Windows Storage Server 2003 (WSS 2003) and Windows Unified Data Storage Server 2003 (WUDSS 2003). I have been working...

The most common administration activities related to DFS-Namespaces can be performed using the “DFS Management” MMC. This will show up under “Administrative Tools” after you add the DFS role service in Server Manager. You can also add just the MMC for remote management of a DFS namespace server. You...

1 – Overview This blog post details the behavior of Windows Server 2008 DFS-N (Distributed File System - Namespaces) clients by looking at network traces. The main goal here is to show the interaction between a DFS-N client, a domain controller, a namespace server and a file server. These traces...

A new white paper on how Microsoft IT is combining Hyper-V and SQL Server has just been published. This comes from a team that provides thousands of SQL Server instances for internal applications. It includes a lot of interesting new information, including results of specific tests they performed to...

Overview In this blog post, we’ll cover the basics of the Distributed File System (DFS) in Windows Server 2008, which offers users simplified access to a set of file shares and helps administrators easily maintain the file server infrastructure behind those file shares, including options for load...

I am installing Windows Server 2008 on a new server that has no video card and no DVD drive. It's an interesting challenge to make that one work and I'm relying on using a bootable USB disk and unattend files. In my case, it turns out the server has a USB interface and using USB to boot is not that...

There is a new book on "Understanding Microsoft Virtualization Solutions" by Mitch Tulloch with the Microsoft Virtualization Teams, available from Microsoft Press as a download. At 400 pages and 15MB, this PDF file covers Server Virtualization (Hyper-V), Virtual Machine Manager (VMM), Presentation...