A recent performance issue case revolved around slow disk access times, and the impact that this had on Hyper-V and Windows in general.
The customer had identified that one of their SAN units was dramatically out performing another one, even though the slower unit should have been orders of magnitude faster – well, at least on paper!
As part of their tests IOMeter was used along with copying large files (20 – 30GB) from servers to and from the offending SAN. The customer quickly noted that the Windows file copy was performing poorly in terms of throughput and memory consumption on the server. So this had to be a Windows problem, right? Well not really
So what was going on? There was already a great reference written up on the askperf blog where the explanation of the copy buffering was discussed. Please hop on over to that site, subscribe to the RSS feed, and read the article.
How to efficiently perform the copy test then? Eseutil.exe was the weapon of choice to copy large files around, which is the reason for addition the capability to Exchange in the first place. The syntax is shown below:
Even though it is trivial to get this working on non-Exchange servers it is still work, and may require change requests to be filed out. If you don’t like completing such paper work, then you should be happy to hear that Windows 7 & 2008 R2 now have this capability built in. The XCOPY command has a new switch, the /J which will perform an un-buffered copy.
And specifically the /J
Cheers,
Rhoderick
At an engagement yesterday, I ran into an interesting issue where a custom certificate template that was created was unavailable from the Certificate Services Web Enrolment page.
One quick peek into the KB revealed a match for the issue.
You cannot have a Version 2 custom template of Type Minimum Windows 2008 Supported CA to be Available via Web Enrolment in Windows 2008
In Windows 2008, when you duplicate a template, you have an option to select the minimum supported CA. (Windows 2003 Enterprise or Windows 2008). If you want to use Web Enrolment to request the certificate based on a Custom Template created in the Certificate Authority running on Windows 2008, then you would have to create the custom template with Minimum supported CA as Windows 2003 Enterprise.
After we recreated the new template and set it for a minimum level of Windows 2003, all functioned as expected.
Exchange sustained engineering has released Exchange 2007 SP3 RU6 to the Microsoft download centre as update 2608656.
The description of the update can be located here and the update is located here.
I’ll leave you you to peruse the changes, but there are a couple in particular worth highlighting
2545080 Users in a source forest cannot view the free/busy information of mailboxes in a target forest when the cross-forest Availability service is configured between two Exchange Server 2007 forests
914533 The Microsoft Exchange Information Store service may stop responding on an Exchange Server 2007 server
2575360 A new feature is available to automatically stop the Microsoft Exchange Information Store service when a time-out is detected in an Exchange Server 2007 SP3 environment
The fix for the Availability web service is important to understand as it corrects the behaviour of the CAS when it chooses the URL to use for the target forest. This issue occurs because the Client Access server in the source forest uses internal URLs of the Availability service in the target forest.
When a user requests free/busy information, the Client Access server in the source forest uses the Autodiscover service to determine which URL of the Availability service in the target forest to query free/busy information. The Autodiscover service retrieves both the external URLs and the internal URLs that are configured for Exchange Web Services in the target forest. However, the source Client Access server only uses the internal URLs of the Availability service. Because the internal URLs of the target forest cannot be resolved by DNS, the request fails.
As always please evaluate the update in a lab prior to placing this into production!
Windows Phone has lots of features that assist with a multitude of daily tasks.
The phone site has a great selection of them, so go check them out.
My favourite are the pop-up shortcuts on the keyboard, e.g. press and hold the full stop key and a bar showing other punctuation symbols is displayed