Server and Cloud Partner and Customer Solutions Team Blog

MVP Pro Speaker Series: Operations Manager Evolution: Taking Your Environment to the Next Level with Operations Manager (Level 300)

Karrie Ondracek — Tue, 21 May 2013 16:33:19 GMT

Cameron Fuller gave a great presentation today on Operations Manager Evolution: Taking Your Environment to the Next Level with Operations Manager. If you would like to view the presentation, you may do so by clicking on the video box below.

If you would like to review the deck, you may find it located here. If you have any access issues to the deck, please contact me directly.

MVP Pro Speaker Series: Backup that really works using multiple members and functions of the System Center 2012 SP1 family (Level 300)

Karrie Ondracek — Mon, 20 May 2013 17:55:17 GMT

Robert Hedblom gave a great presentation on May 7th titled Backup that really works using multiple members and functions of the System Center 2012 SP1 family. If you would like to watch the presentation, you may do so by clicking on the video box below.

If you would like to review the deck, you may find it located here. If you have any access issues to the deck, please contact me directly.

MVP Pro Speakers Series: Building Workstation and Application Deployment Automation with Service Manager and Orchestrator (Level 300)

Karrie Ondracek — Thu, 16 May 2013 16:39:43 GMT

Nate Lasnoski gave a great presentation today titled Building Workstation and Application Deployment Automation with Service Manager and Orchestrator. If you would like to view the presentation, you may do so by clicking on the video box below.

If you would like to review the deck, you may find it located here. If you have any access issues to the deck, please contact me directly.

MVP Pro Speaker Series for 5/14/2013 has been moved to 5/16/13

Karrie Ondracek — Mon, 13 May 2013 16:03:22 GMT

Due to the mini MVP summit taking place in 5/13-5/15, we are moving the MVP pro speakers series for this week to Thursday 5/16/13.

Nate Lasnoski will be presenting the following topic: Building Workstation and Application Deployment Automation with Service Manager and Orchestrator. Please be sure to join us via Lync at 8 a.m. PST.

You can find the invite by following this link where you can add all the meeting invites to your calendar and listen in and participate.

MVP Speaker Series: Keeping Your CIO Happy: Executive Scorecarding with SQL, SharePoint and System Center 2012 Operations Manager (Level 300)

Karrie Ondracek — Tue, 07 May 2013 21:09:31 GMT

Gordon McKenna gave a great presentation on 4.25.13 titled Keeping Your CIO Happy: Executive Scorecarding with SQL, SharePoint and System Center 2012 Operations Manager. If you would like to view the presentation, you may do so by clicking on the video box below.

If you would like to review the deck, you may find it located here. If you have any access issues to the deck, please contact me directly.

MVP Pro Speaker Series: Automating the Hyper-V Administration with PowerShell (Level 200)

Karrie Ondracek — Mon, 06 May 2013 23:43:09 GMT

Leandro Carvalho gave a great presentation on 4.23.2013 titled Automating the Hyper-V Administration with PowerShell.

If you would like to review the deck, you may find it located here. If you have any access issues to the deck, please contact me directly.

Unfortunately we were not able to capture the audio from Leandro’s presentation. My apologies.

MVP Pro Speaker Series:Tips & Tricks to Using the Visual Studio Authoring Extensions (Level 300)

Karrie Ondracek — Thu, 02 May 2013 22:28:00 GMT

David Allen gave a great presentation today on Using the Visual Studio Authoring Extensions. If you would like to view the presentation, you may do so by clicking on the video box below.

If you would like to review the deck, you may find it located here. If you have any access issues to the deck, please contact me directly.

Announcement: Windows Server/System Center MVP Speaker Series presentation scheduled for 4/30/13 has been moved to 5/1/13.

Karrie Ondracek — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 18:00:18 GMT

The session originally scheduled to take place Tuesday 4/30/13, has been moved to Wednesday 5/1/13 at 8 a.m. PST.

If you are interested in attending this online meeting, please follow this link where you can add all the meeting invite to your calendar and listen in and participate.

Microsoft Lync is required in order to “attend” this on-line meeting. If you need to install Lync, you may do so from here.

NTttcp Version 5.28 Now Available

joshad — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 08:00:00 GMT

Leveraged extensively by both external customers and Microsoft Product Groups alike to profile and measure Windows networking performance, updated versions of NTttcp (a Winsock-based port of BSD’s TTCP tool) have remained 'internal-only' for the past five years (the last public version, v3.0, was released in 2008). That is, of course, until now!

Download: NTttcp v5.28

I’m excited to announce that the latest version of NTttcp is now also publicly available, posted on TechNet Gallery bundled with an updated EULA. This latest version (v5.28) brings forth both performance improvements and feature enhancements including:

Optimizations added for 10GigE interfaces
Increased platform support: x86, x64 and ARM
Simplified usage (e.g. sender and receiver functionality determined with a simple parameter switch)
Dynamic allocation of threads across all system cores (using ‘*’ for the processor ID mapping value)
Startup order dependency removed (i.e. server/receiver will wait for the other rather than time out)
Custom warm-up and cool down options available
Results can be outputted to XML
Ability to bind sender traffic to a specific IP address
Synchronization of data ports, useful when running multiple instances
An option to set the WAIT_ALL flag when using recv or WSARecv functions

Overall, the basic program workflow follows the previously released public version (v3.0), with the most notable exception related to the setup of the sender and receiver. Rather than needing to rename the program based on function, parameters enable the selected functionality: '-s' for the sender and '-r' for the receiver.

For example, to measure the network performance between two multi-core serves running Windows Server 2012, NODE1 (192.168.0.1) and NODE2 (192.168.0.2), connected via a 10GigE connection, on NODE1 (the sender), run:

ntttcp.exe -s -m 8,*,192.168.0.2 -l 128k -a 2 -t 15

(Translation: Run ntttcp.exe as a sender, with eight threads dynamically allocated across all cores targeting 192.168.0.2, allocating a 128K buffer length and operating in asynchronous mode with 2 posted send overlapped buffers per thread for 15 seconds.)

And on NODE2 (the receiver), run:

ntttcp.exe -r -m 8,*,192.168.0.2 -rb 2M -a 16 -t 15

(Translation: Run ntttcp.exe as a receiver, with eight threads dynamically allocated across all cores listening on 192.168.0.2, allocating 64KB buffers [since -l is not specified], a 2MB SO_RCVBUF Winsock buffer and operating in asynchronous mode with 16 posted receive overlapped buffers per thread for 15 seconds.)

Using the above parameters, the program returns results on both the sender and receiver nodes, correlating network communication to CPU utilization. Example sender-side output from a given run (which showcases a fully saturated 10GigE connection at 1131.4 MB/s):

D:\>NTttcp.exe -s -m 8,*,192.168.0.2 -l 128k -a 2 -t 15
Copyright Version 5.28
Network activity progressing...

Thread Time(s) Throughput(KB/s) Avg B / Compl
====== ======= ================ =============
     0   30.016        77074.627    131072.000
     1   30.016       231692.964    131072.000
     2   30.016       115782.516    131072.000
     3   30.016       231496.802    131072.000
     4   30.016       116072.495    131072.000
     5   30.016        77155.650    131072.000
     6   30.016       231611.940    131072.000
     7   30.016        77633.262    131072.000

##### Totals: #####

Bytes(MEG) realtime(s) Avg Frame Size Throughput(MB/s)
================ =========== ============== ================
33959.125000 30.016 1456.355 1131.367

Throughput(Buffers/s) Cycles/Byte Buffers
===================== =========== =============
9050.939 2.453 271673.000

DPCs(count/s) Pkts(num/DPC) Intr(count/s) Pkts(num/intr)
============= ============= =============== ==============
40284.215 1.228 51434.235 0.962

Packets Sent Packets Received Retransmits Errors Avg. CPU %
============ ================ =========== ====== ==========
24450576 1485400 0 0 4.559

And here is a Task Manager screenshot profiling the run:

Note that in keeping to the theme of making this latest version’s operation more robust, dynamic and streamlined, the following options are no longer available and/or replaced with new functionality:

-x   [PacketArray size]
-i   Infinite Loop
-f   <File Name>
-fr Full buffers posted on reads
-mb Multiple buffer post mode

For more information about specific parameters and options, please reference the documentation included with the previous version and/or run the tool without arguments to display all supported options. And stay tuned for future blog posts detailing the expanded functionality and additional use cases available with this latest version.

Download NTttcp v5.28 today!

Josh Adams
Senior Program Manager
Windows Server & System Center

Announcement: Special Windows Server/System Center MVP Speaker Series presentation taking place on Thursday 4/25/13

Karrie Ondracek — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 23:22:00 GMT

We will be having a special additional MVP speaker series session on 4/25/13 titled: Keeping Your CIO Happy: Executive Scorecarding with SQL, SharePoint and System Center 2012 Operations Manager.

If you are interested in attending this online meeting, please follow this link where you can add the meeting invite to your calendar and listen in and participate.

Microsoft Lync is required in order to “attend” this on-line meeting. If you need to install Lync, you may do so from here.