Overview FSRM (File Server Resource Manager) is a service of the File Services role in Windows Server 2008. You can use FSRM to enhance your ability to manage and monitor storage activities on your file server. The main capabilities of FSRM include...

Windows Server 2008’s Hyper-V has been in public beta for a while now and lots of people have been experimenting with it. One aspect that I am focusing on is storage for those virtualized environments and more specifically the options related to SAN storage...

Windows Server 2008 is just around the corner. The Beta 3 bits are publicly available, “release to manufacturing” should happen by the end of the year and the launch event date has been announced: February 27th, 2008. There are plenty of new things...

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...

Introduction For the last few years, I’ve been blogging about the Microsoft iSCSI Software Target and its many uses related to Windows Server Failover Clustering, Hyper-V and other server scenarios. Today, Microsoft has made this software publicly...

This post is obsolete. Please check the SP1 version of it at: http://blogs.technet.com/josebda/archive/2008/03/15/complete-reference-of-all-stsadm-operations-with-parameters-in-moss-2007-sp1.aspx I was looking for a specific action under "STSADM...

This blog post is obsolete, since new versions of Windows Storage Server and the Microsoft iSCSI Software Target are now available on MSDN and Technet. For details on new releases, check http://blogs.technet.com/b/josebda/archive/2010/09/27/windows-storage...

A while back, Microsoft announced the release of PowerShell v2 for Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, and Windows Server 2008 (see http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=151321 ). However, it is not clear to everyone that Powershell v2...

Overview In this post, I will show all the steps required to run Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V with the Microsoft iSCSI Software Target. We will cover the specific scenario of a standalone Windows Server 2008 server (as opposed to a clustered one...

There are many ways to implement Windows Server Failover Clustering with Hyper-V. I could actually find five unique methods to do it. Some of them will actually not give you a fully fault-tolerant solution, but most of them actually make sense in specific...

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...

This is an update to my complete reference of all STSADM operations in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, now including the changes in Service Pack 1. I repeated what I did for MOSS 2007 in MOSS 2007 SP1, using a little scripting to get the list...

In this post, I'm providing a reference to the most relevant content related to Windows Server 2012 that is related to the File Server, the SMB 3.0 features and its associated scenarios like Hyper-V over SMB and SQL Server over SMB. It's obviously not...

Introduction This post describes how to configure the Microsoft iSCSI Software Target offered with Windows Storage Server. One of the goals here is to describe the terminology used like iSCSI Target, iSCSI Initiator, iSCSI Virtual Disk, etc. It...

Some time ago, I was automating a few tasks with PowerShell and needed to set NTFS permissions on a folder. I was tempted to use the good old ICACLS.EXE command line, but I wanted to keep it all within PowerShell...

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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...

P.P.S.: This previously unsupported scenario is now fine with Windows Server "8" Beta and SMB 2.2. See http://blogs.technet.com/b/josebda/archive/2012/03/06/windows-server-quot-8-quot-beta-test-cases-for-hyper-v-over-smb.aspx P.S.: After writing...

Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 is also now available to MSDN and TechNet subscribers for evaluation. This means subscribers can now use the Microsoft iSCSI Target 3.3 for Development, Test and all other non-production purposes. Find below the information from the MSDN/TechNet site where you download the bits.

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1. Introduction I have been presenting our solution in Windows Server 2012 for File Storage for Virtualization (Hyper-V over SMB) and Databases (SQL Server over SMB) for a while now. I always start the conversation talking about how simple and easy...

Introduction Maybe you’re lucky enough to work for a company that has standardized on SharePoint portals and ASP.NET applications across the board. In that case, you do not need to integrate different types of portals and web applications. For most...

I was looking for a list for all ActiveX controls used by Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007, but it seems like this list is not available at this time. The best references I could find was the SharePoint team blog post on web browser compatibility...

SMB Signing is a feature through which communications using SMB can be digitally signed at the packet level. This post covers signing configuration, defaults and effective behavior for both SMB1 and SMB2.

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P.P.S.: This previously unsupported scenario is now fine with Windows Server "8" Beta and SMB 2.2. See http://blogs.technet.com/b/josebda/archive/2012/03/06/windows-server-quot-8-quot-beta-test-cases-for-hyper-v-over-smb.aspx P.S.: After writing...

Back in 2001, I worked for a 300-employee company in Palo Alto as their Systems Engineer and one of the things that gave me the most headaches was backups. We had Windows Server across the board, but the backup application was from a third party, which...

Here are some notes on “SQL Server 2008 Database Mirroring” I took while attending an advanced class on SQL Server taught by Greg Low (from http://sqlblog.com/blogs/greg_low/ and http://www.sqldownunder.com/ ). Please note that, although these notes...