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Summary: Milad Aslaner , a Microsoft Premier Field Engineer based in Germany, gives us a quick peek at System Center Advisor (SCA), a freely available cloud-based service from Microsoft that enables you to assess your server configurations and proactively avoid problems. As you probably know by...

Summary: Still running Windows Server 2003? Besides making the well-advised recommendation of moving to Windows Server 2012, Frank Plawetzki , a Senior Microsoft Premier Field Engineer based in Germany, runs us through how to monitor servers remotely on a large scale, what to look for from a performance...

Summary : Holger Hatzfeld , a Microsoft Senior Support Escalation Engineer, provides us with a PowerShell script that deploys customizable performance logs to any or all of you domain-connected servers, effectively mimicking flight recorders for server performance capture. Powerful stuff. Hello...

Summary: Gregg O’Brien , a Microsoft Premier Field Engineer from Canada, makes a case for not throwing sand in your face and correct zipper placement when dealing with a Certificate Revocation List Distribution Point (CDP) in Microsoft Active Directory Certificate Services. The moral of his story...

Summary: Milad Aslaner , a Microsoft Premier Field Engineer based in Germany, gives Login scripts a lashing and encourages us to move on to using Group Policy Preferences. Enjoy! When I’m delivering Microsoft Premier Support Workshops like XPERF View on Windows Client Performance or Supporting...

Summary : Ambuj Nautiyal , a Microsoft Premier Field Engineer based in Canada, walks us through a solution for the circumstance where your .NET application(s) throw the error HttpException: Failed to Execute URL. I was recently working with one of my customers and when they deployed a .NET application...

Summary: Milad Aslaner , a Microsoft Premier Field Engineer based in Germany, walks us through a real-life scenario and lessons learned on how he managed to recover a hard drive that was partially decrypted. Enjoy! Recently a good friend of mine was decrypting the secondary hard drive of his...

Summary: Gregg O’Brien , Microsoft Premier Field Engineer from Canada, faces a problem with some Hyper-V guests, and troubleshoots it. Spoiler : He fixes it. Recently I was working in my lab to test a configuration I was working on with a customer. I opened the Hyper-V Management Console and started...

SBSL Hotfix Rollup Mark at AskPFEPlat announced the release of a new slow-boot-slow-login (SBSL) hotfix rollup particularly useful for corporate Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 customers: Hey y’all, Mark here with some great news. A massive Slow Boot Slow Login (SBSL) hotfix rollup for enterprises...

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...

Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Replica is a great new feature that replicates all changes on a virtual machine to a counterpart virtual machine hosted by a different server. Basically, any server workload that’s virtualized in Hyper-V can be replicated, and it works with standalone servers, failover...

Post contributed by Craig Forster , our Premier Field Engineer (PFE) in Denmark. He shares his top tips to keep your clusters healthy – this is based the collective experience of our PFEs, so treat this as the ‘inside scoop’ During the transition from Windows Server 2003 to the newer versions, something...

Gregg O’Brien is a Microsoft Premier Field Engineer from Canada, where French people are readily available. The Challenge: Capturing Traffic Across VMs There comes a point in the life of every server administrator where they must take a look at what is happening on the network. Complex...

Mike Rosado demonstrates the new Fixit Center Pro tool at AskPFEPlat , which incorporates our latest support diagnostic tools, which replace the venerable MPSReports utilities (which collected data quite efficiently, but didn’t analyze that data). For many years, Microsoft Commercial Technical Support...

He was a skeptic, but Senior Microsoft Premier Field Engineer Jeff Stokes has determined that Windows Performance Analyzer (WPA) , a component of the Windows Performance Toolkit (downloadable here ), offers a level of depth and insight not currently available with the classic Visual Trace Analysis tool...

Written by Ryan Doon , Microsoft Premier Field Engineer. Lately there is a question that I always seem to receive and it always starts with “What is the Microsoft Best Practice when it comes to ___________”. That blank represents a wide range of questions that can be asked, but for today’s discussion...

I highly recommend giving this a read so you are ready for Windows Server 2012.  The dude had a hand in proofing the book and even has a sidebar on page 25 on performance monitoring.  Give it a read, rumor has it there may be some floating around...( read more ) ...read more

The Setup My downstairs PC (on the dining room table) is an HP Touchsmart all-in-one Core 2 Duo Intel Integrated Graphics 965-based box, which makes it absolutely abominable for games. Upstairs, my internet connection plugs into my Hyper-V host ...read more

Written by Liju Varghese , Premier Field Engineer. The Issue Performing an authoritative restore on a Windows Server 2003 domain controller of a group results in the reanimation of tombstoned group membership links. The Impact If an Organizational Unit containing Users and Groups was deleted, the authoritative...

Written by Liju Varghese , Premier Field Engineer. On a domain controller running Windows Server 2008 R2, when performing a system state restore in Directory Services Restore Mode using Windows Server Backup, at the Select Location for System State Recovery step you have to decide whether or not to select...

Written by Richard Case, Premier Field Engineer. This is the first article in a series of blog posts on collecting Microsoft Windows memory dumps for specific scenarios. Each part will detail some of the tools and techniques that can be used to capture a memory dump for that scenario. These scenarios...

Written by Liju Varghese, Senior Microsoft Premier Field Engineer. This article aims at making it easier to set up a Source-Initiated Subscription with Windows Server 2003/2008 so that events of interest from the Security event log of several domain controllers can be forwarded to an administrative workstation...

Written by Mark Farrugia, Senior Microsoft Premier Field Engineer. Please note that the following post is all based on beta software, and all features are subject to possible change upon official release. I have done a number of posts around BitLocker, and today I would like to add one more.  Some...

Written by Mark Farrugia, Senior Microsoft Premier Field Engineer. In my previous posts I introduced the concept of BitLocker and talked about managing the Trusted Platform Module , now let’s talk about how we can enforce policy to ensure clients are indeed encrypting their system and data volumes. ...

Written by Mark Farrugia, Senior Microsoft Premier Field Engineer. There are many volume encryption technologies out there, and some of these are now taking advantage of technology that Microsoft BitLocker has been using from its inception.  The Trusted Platform Module (TPM) chip is a micro-computer...