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...

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...

Written by Jaroslav Zikmund, Microsoft Premier Field Engineer. This article discusses the recommendations around the placement of the Microsoft Exchange Server File Share Witness (FSW) in Database Availability Groups (DAG) where the DAG member is...

Mark at AskPFEPlat digs into an Xperf startup trace and talks through identification of normal vs abnormal: In the past , I briefly talked about using the XPERF Services pane and on which to focus, but my guidance lacked clear and concise direction...

Pedro Azevedo Lopes shares his prescription for a better-looking SQL Server in his post About Maintenance Plans – grooming SQL Server : I admit I’m not a big fan of Maintenance Plans (the feature that goes by that name) mainly because of its “do or die...

Get the impression that PFE work with performance a lot? Well, we do. We try to ensure that whatever we’re thrown at is as optimized as it can be in the time available to us. Not content to talk about current versions of Windows, Jeff takes a dive down...

You're using Forefront Threat Management Gateway 2010 (a.k.a. TMG 2010) as a proxy server and want users to be prompted for credentials in order to access the Internet, but discover the default behavior is to have the browser display a "Denied Access...

Perf PFE Jeff Stokes provides some simple steps that should produce a good boot trace for a Windows 7 machine. You have a Windows 7 host that you want to collect a trace from.  A good trace.  One that you know other people will be able to decipher...

In a follow-up to his popular post on How To Create Video Games Using PowerShell , Jeff Adkin, a Microsoft Premier Field Engineer based in Canada, gets back to business and shows us how to use PowerShell to graphically represent information gathered over...

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...

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...

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...

Article written by Santos Martinez , a US-based Microsoft Premier Field Engineer and resident ConfigNinja . Do you want to expand your stand-alone System Center Configuration Manager 2012 (a.k.a ConfigMgr) primary site into an hierarchy? So you...

Not any more, they’re not! As long as you take Ashley McGlone’s advice in Freaky neat Active Directory site links with PowerShell : Today's post will help you clean up site link descriptions and give you some nice reporting capability. For a quick overview...

While filling us in on his weekend plans, Rhoderick accidentally lets slip that System Center 2012 SP1 Beta is now available . This is an interesting release as it is adding support for Windows Server 2012.  In the case of SCVMM 2012 SP1, it means...

Just in case you thought PowerShell was just for automating administrative tasks, Jeff Adkin, a Microsoft Premier Field Engineer , shows us how to have some fun with PowerShell by providing us with a detailed walkthrough of creating a video game. Here’s...

You’re trying to recover your Exchange database from the “dirty shutdown” state to “clean shutdown.”  You use ESEUTIL /R and after several ill-fated attempts the databases remain dirty.  What’s happening?  Danijel Klaric. a Microsoft Premier...

Written by Tamer Maher El-Sharkawy , Premier Field Engineer Issue: When you launch a SharePoint 2010 Management Shell you might receive one or both of the following errors: “Microsoft SharePoint is not supported with version 4.0.30319...

Kirk “has-more-points-than-I-do” Evans shares some PowerShell to configure the SQL Server Provider for FBA , for Sharepoint 2010. A long time ago, I wrote a blog post that shows how to configure the SQL Server Provider for FBA in SharePoint 2010 . ...

Saud from the UK Manageability Guys has been helping customers migrate from WSUS to System Center Configuration Manager 2012 . For desktop migrations, customers are usually happy to take all updates or the majority of updates and just start fresh...

Awesome tip on how you can search for something (for example, searching for System Center docs within Technet ), with more precision than the usual site:technet.microsoft.com ! This feature allows to use Bing to directly search against the meta...

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...

Let’s say you want to block ActiveSync for mobile devices. Did you know that some clients will use Exchange Web Services as a fallback? If you just gasped, this post is for you! (Also: calm down) Disabling EWS isn’t really an option, as quite a lot of...

How long do your enterprise desktops take to boot up to a usable state? 2 minutes? 3? 5? 10? Does this impact business productivity? Has your organization had a WDRAP (if not, then why not)? Is it all about boot times and logon times, or does it go beyond...

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...