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Hmm… let’s see… I can remember the old Program Status Register from the Intel x86 days. Or maybe PSR stands for Physicians for Social Responsibility? No? Then what is it? Our colleague, Mike O'Neill from the PFE – US West team explains what PSR is all about in his recent blog post . PSR is Problem Steps...

Summary : This article is contributed by Ryan Doon , a Premier Field Engineer based in Canada. In this post (the second of a two part series), he walks us through a video demonstration of the new Cluster Aware Updating feature of Windows Server 2012, and how it can be used to easily update clustered...

Tobias Hertkorn , one of our Microsoft Premier Field Engineers from Germany would like to share with you his tips on installing Windows 2012 Essentials, using a neat little trick and help from Hyper-V.   The trick Headless installation can be cumbersome and nerve-wrecking. “Did it boot from my USB...

Summary: Gregg O’Brien , a Microsoft Premier Field Engineer from Canada, walks us through some lessons he learned when testing Storage Spaces, a new feature in Windows Server 2012 that’s meant to provide enterprise-level storage performance, flexibility, and scale. The moral of his story...

Bruce Adamczak continues to dig into the Server Core installation mode of Windows Server 2012, with some bite-sized nuggets of goodness in his Core Survival Guide. The list of Core topics he’s planning to cover is extensive, but he’s blazing through them! I like many of you keep notes to remember all...

(Huh!?) My old PFE flame* Chad Duffey has a short and sweet post on an interesting new feature in Windows Server 2012: Powershell Web Access . There is a nifty feature that comes with Windows Server 2012 which allows you to use PowerShell in a web browser. There are a million use cases for that! Maybe...

Summary : This article has been contributed by Ryan Doon , a PFE working with Microsoft Canada. In this post (the first of a two part series), he talks about the new Cluster Aware Updating feature of Windows Server 2012, and how it can be used to easily update clustered servers while maintaining availability...

More than once, I have made the mistake of installing Windows 2008 R2 with a full GUI, when I really just needed the Windows Core flavor. Now the only supported way to fix that was a complete rebuild. Argh Worry not anymore! With Windows Server 2012 there is an option to seamlessly switch back and forth...

My sometime partner in crime Chad Duffey posted a tip he came across from a couple of DirectAccess deployments where Win7 clients mysteriously stopped workin g: I'm seeing lots of cases were a Direct Access proof of concept has been set up and it works really well for a while with both Windows 8 and...

Dave Guenthner , a Premier Field Engineer working in the United States, discusses an exciting new feature in Windows Server 2012, Continuous Availability File Server . He shows how the combination of the transparent failover in Windows 2012 for these file share resources, combined with new client features...

There’s no better way to learn something than to teach someone else! (With some possible exceptions ). Bruce Adamczak has been going hammer and tongs at the Windows Server 2012 feature set, and has been publishing links and summaries at a rapid pace. Here’s a no-particular-order selection! Follow me...

This article was contributed by Ryan Doon , a PFE working at Microsoft Canada. Clustering in Windows 2008 R2 has been greatly simplified, and one of those areas of simplification includes choosing which quorum model to use. Based on the cluster configuration, the best quorum model will be chosen...

Lots of security-related news to catch up on. (Ed note: I’m one of the developers/maintainers of the Security Health Check 4.5 offering, so I try to keep abreast of developments at home and elsewhere in the industry.) Alexandre Marins introduces the new Attack Surface Analyzer . Attack Surface Analyzer...

Sometimes, you’d do anything to keep your connection icons tidy! Chad (from the Canberra PFE team ) and I gave a talk on the new simplified DirectAccess at TechEd 2012 Australia , and we really wanted our demos to look good. Part of that was trying to convince the audience that network connectivity was...

Tom at AskPfePlat has put some time in to looking at virtualized Domain Controller support in Windows Server 2012. Until now, cloning, snapshotting, copying, or pretty much doing anything but rebuilding from scratch to a virtual domain controller wasn't just unsupported; it had the potential to be really...

Monsieur Holman brings word of a Base OS MP Update . Lets talk for a minute about Windows Server 2012.  This new server OS has hit RTM already.  However – initially this OS version was only going to be supported as an agent monitored system for SCOM 2012.  There was to be no support for...

Article written by Aydin Aslaner, a Premier Field Engineer based in Dubai (UAE). He is a Networking/Security PFE who focuses on Remote Access technologies and IPv6. With this series of blog posts I will try to provide you an overview of some key highlights in Windows Server 2012, from an administrator...

Article written by Bhumit Shah, Premier Field Engineer at Microsoft India, who specializes in tuning Windows Server performance. Common questions I hear from my customers are: “ My desktops and laptops are taking long time to boot, can we find out why? ” and “ What can I do to...

David Hail over at the PFE Virtualization Blog notes a correlation between BIOS power state settings (c-states) and Hyper-V performance during live migrations: How long does it take for you to do a live migration between hosts? I ask that of all the customers I talk to that are using Hyper-V...

It’s a time of great change! Michael Hildebrand posted a quick overview of server management in past Windows versions, and a “walk around” the new Server Manager interface in Windows Server 2012 over on the Ask PFE Platforms blog. I say as someone that’s only been using it for a little while: It’s a...