As the Group Manager for the database engineers that run Microsoft.com I’ve been repeatedly asked about Microsoft Clustering Services (MSCS) and where we’re using it. After all, Microsoft.com is one of the most visited web sites on the internet, and with...

This is the first in an ongoing series of blog posts from Todd Weeks, Sr. Director of Operations for the Microsoft.com Operations Team. One of perhaps the easier things to do in order to manage a highly efficient operations team is to set very clear...

We are goaled on our availability and we track this on a daily basis. That being said, our Director of Engineering Operations made a bet with our Sr. Director of Operations (his boss) that www.microsoft.com would have the highest availability at the end...

The webcast series ended with a tag team presentation by Jeff Stucky , Jim Dobbin, Khalil Nassar and Jeffery Johnson; all members of Jeff Stucky ’s MSCOM Ops Debug team. This web cast was kicked of by Jeff Stucky who re-introduced the MSCOM enterprise...

The webcast series started with High Availability Architecture, Configuration Management of Web Farms and Change and Release Management of Web Farms. We told you about our architecture how we script and manage configurations, and how we partner with various...

Part 3 of the MSCOM’s WebCast Week dealt with Change and Release Management Strategies with Microsoft.com Operations . Wayne King went into an Introduction of MSCOM that included the enterprise scale and high availability architecture that MSCOM OPS is...

OK, here is Part 2 of the Q & A from MSCOM’s WebCast Week. These are from Tuesday’s session on Configuration and Management of Web Farms . The topics that Jeff Toews covered in this web cast included Configuration Management where he descried how...

First of all thanks so much to everyone that was able to tune into the Webcasts series that we finished up on Friday. We had a blast doing these and we hope that you got some good information out of them. We certainly got some good questions from you...

No, not because it stinks; not because it brings tears to your eyes; but because performance has layers. This is the first of a series of articles dealing with the layers of the performance onion. Hopefully they will be valuable to System Admins and also...

That’s what this is about. There is great code that has traversed the SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle). Someone’s great idea was turned into a project that was assigned human resources with the ultimate marching orders of simply “Get’er Done”. Spec...

One of the most useful tools that we use in MSCOM Ops has to be LogParser . I can’t say enough about this tool. We use it to parse IIS Logs, NetMon logs, NT Event logs, HTTP… in fact I can’t think of log that I ever met that LogParser could not parse...

Well we were rummaging around in our collective tool box and we came up with the following: FILEMON – Used for tracking down which processes are accessing particular files or particular drives on your system. http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/Filemon...

Here are the links to sign up for the upcoming webcast series. Go to http://www.microsoft.com/events/default.mspx , then click on the More live webcasts… link at the bottom of the page scroll to the date of the event. We hope hope you can join us!...

More goodness from the MSCOM Ops tool belt…(with lots more to come!). My stars! We are just scratching the surface. WCAT ( W eb C apacity A nalysis T ool – Very useful web application stress tool for generating stress against a particular URL or...

It is amazing to see what one little innocent question and two topic suggestions can generate. Your question was: Do you have any good LogParser tricks? and your topic suggestions: Scripting, Tools and Utilities This will most definitely...

This came in as the second most popular topic that you are interested in. Huh, imagine that. You actually have to report out to somebody on what the heck the environment that you manage is doing. So do we. Daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly. Oh...

More answers for you... Question: What representation does Operations have within the MS management structure? MSCOM Operations is part of the Windows Division within Microsoft. It is a team of roughly 75 Full Time Employees (FTE) and 20 Contingent...

We are pleased and very excited to be able to announce this upcoming week long series of webcast this November. Here are the links to sign up for the upcoming webcast series. Go to http://www.microsoft.com/events/default.mspx , then click on the More...

We're just gonna keep feeding this stuff to you as we get replies... Question: What's your one 'must-have' software product that isn't produced by MS? Good question. I would have to say Keynote. We use this 3 rd party, (O/S and platform agnostic...

You told us what you’re interested in by questions or topics of interest. Thanks! We want to be as responsive as we can. We got a great list of questions/topics that we have divided them up among our team. As the answers get back to us we will post them...

We were sitting around a the hulk of a cold, dead server one night; one of those old quad 700’s; trying to determine if we should turn it in a planter or use it as a projectile to launch from a Trebuchet <a real Venus or Mars moment> when the discussion...

As part of our charter to be a very early adopter of emerging technologies, Microsoft.com is always pushing the envelope…we seem to live on the cutting edge and we venture out into the bleeding edge on a semi-regular basis. While the bleeding edge can...

Your boss walks in and fixes you with that icy stare and demands to know, “Why are the ASP.Net request/sec spiking? What the [expletive deleted] is going on around here? Are we getting attacked?” What is your response going to be…stutter, stammer start...

One of the first comments we received after we kicked off this blog was: What are the top 10 scripts we use What problems do they solve What technology did we use to create them Could we show you some examples. Wow…what a timely...

Welcome to the Microsoft.com Operations Blog! We are the operations team that runs all of the Microsoft.com sites.. WE WANT TO HELP YOU! Ask us your operational questions. Tell us what causes you to lose sleep at night. What causes you the most operational...