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...

Dogfood….yummmm! Yes it is true, Microsoft.com has been running Beta 3 of Windows Server 2008 in production since June 12, 2007. What does that mean? 78 of 80 servers that host the www.microsoft.com website are running W2K8 Beta 3 and IIS7.0. Why only...

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...

Now that Windows Server 2008 has been released earlier this year many enterprises are assessing the value proposition of moving to the Windows Server 2008 and IIS 7.0. As an IT Pro or decision maker in this process you want real world working proof to...

What is Dogfooding? Dogfooding is a Microsoft term for adopting a Microsoft product (or in a generic sense any new technology) typically while the product is still in a state of development. Microsoft Product Teams provide release builds for consumption...

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...

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...

Then and now…. Back in the pioneer days of the internet when everything and everyone were all about agility and innovation, we threw new websites on servers without rules or review and without any customer evaluation and education. Those were exciting...

We are super excited to announce that we will again be partnering with TechNet on a week long series of Webcasts. Our webcast week that we held in November 2005 really fired up the debug team so they came up with the idea of digging in even deeper into...

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...

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!...

(Note: If you have been keeping up with this blog it is probably apparent that the subject matter on this blog ranges widely. We have posts on topics as diverse as debugging .Net applications, web farm administration, Log Parser tips and tricks, upper...

Our Ops team has been testing and sampling the goods that are Longhorn Server for a while now and one of the areas we're very interested in is networking. Specifically, we're jazzed about the changes happening in the TCP/IP stack for both Vista and Longhorn...

(This is the initial blog post from the MSCOM Service Management Team. This team is an essential resource for our group. They are responsible for on-boarding new customers to MSCOM, working with existing customers to provide guidance and smooth the way...

(As promised this is Part 2 of the GUI CLI blog. Part 1 is here .) Intro In Part one of this blog, we saw that we could carry out an OS task and produce the same results whether we were using a CLI or a GUI. This was at least the case when it came...

Obviously the title can mean a bunch of different things, in this case we are merging two fun technologies: Microsoft PowerShell and Microsoft Log Parser . Here in MSCOM Operations, we are in the process of introducing Microsoft PowerShell into our environment...

One of the great new features of SQL 2005 is database snapshots. With one simple transact SQL statement, you can provide your users with a read-only, static copy of their data. For example, you can take a snapshot on the last day of the month and users...

MSCOM has been running IIS7.0 in production since June 12, 2007. On November 27 we did a webcast entitled: How Microsoft IT Is Providing an Improved Web and Applications Platform with Internet Information Services 7.0 in Windows Server 2008 In case...

MSCOM Operations get lots of requests from both internal and external customers on how we operate www.microsoft.com , Microsoft Update, and the Microsoft Download Center (just to name a few). Those customers are asking about a wide variety of topics that...

While some people are born with a green thumb, others of us have the brown thumb that comes from working to get a garden to grow. While we dream of sweet fruits and crisp, fresh vegetables, sometimes all we get for our troubles is dirt under our fingernails...

Introduction – Modern .NET Development It took me a while to realize it, but Microsoft .NET application development has significantly evolved in the past year and a half. This is not your dad’s .NET . The following releases have added many considerable...

A couple of years ago, on January 28th, 2004 to be exact, I was working another late night at the office when I got a visit from the General Manager of Microsoft.com . He was walking the halls desperately seeking someone to quickly develop a tool/utility...

One of the most common questions I am asked when meeting with customers is, How does MSCOM patch their Enterprise Web servers? I will cover exactly what our approach is, and give you a little background into some of the challenges we are faced with when...

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...

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...