eXtreme. tech. : Windows Server 2008

XP-Mode vs App-V vs Med-V vs VDI

David Tesar — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 02:32:00 GMT

There are so many virtualization options available from Microsoft, which one do you use when? We cleared this up in a short interview and addressed how these options might help you remediate your legacy applications over to Windows 7. Also, we just launched the XP to Windows 7 Migration process guide with the announcement of Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 RTM yesterday which will further clarify these options and give you links to deeper resources on each subject.

Visit the original post on TechNet Edge which has links to the other 4 videos in the series

Server 2008 / Vista SP2 CPP released

David Tesar — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 03:39:00 GMT

Today Windows Server 2008 and Vista released Service Pack 2 (pre-RTM) through the Customer Preview Program (CPP). MSDN and TechNet subscribers can download the SP2 CPP now, everyone else will have access this Thursday 12/14.

What’s pretty interesting is for the first time the same single service pack files can be deployed across the server (Server 2008) and the client (Vista SP1). Will this capability add any value in your organization or is it only a “that’s neat” type of response?

My colleague, Joey Snow, wrote up a good summary of what’s included with it and links to resources – which you can view his blog post on Edge.

OR go straight to download and evaluate the Vista SP2 / Server 2008 CPP beta bits

Windows Server 2008 R2 features

David Tesar — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 03:24:00 GMT

Microsoft disclosed Windows Server 2008 R2 today at PDC for the 1st time today. Here is a short summary of some of the new cool features in 2008 R2:

Virtualization

R2 Hyper-V - client virtualization when used with Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), improved management via PowerShell 2.0 cmdlets, enhanced admin console, and integration with SCVMM
Live Migration – No downtime to migrate VHDs between Hyper-V servers
Presentation virtualization - remote apps look exactly the same as running locally, web page login for RAD (RemoteApp and Desktop), RAD control panel to connect to multiple machines

Windows 7 & Windows Server 2008 R2 better together

Direct Access – no longer will you have to use VPNs, a seamless experience when transitioning between intranet and internet
Improved RAD (RemoteApp and Desktop) experience – original high-quality audio redirection, multi-mon, video synced, and audio input recording
Branch Office - BranchCache™ server significantly reduces bandwidth by caching frequently used content
Bitlocker on removable drives – keep the data on your USB flash or eSata drives secure

Management

PowerShell 2.0 – easily remotely run scripts on multiple machines
More options for power management – Automatically and dynamically reduce the number of processor cores used (Core Parking) and/or their processor speed / power consumption
AD updates – easily recover deleted objects, easier to perform common tasks
Best Practices Analyzer (BPA) - built-in for each server role to help ensure proper & optimal configuration

Web

Full .NET support on Server Core
Easier administration – manage your SQL databases within IIS, integrated powershell task automation, built-in configuration editor
FTP enhancements – FTP over SSL support, IPv6, virtual FTP sites

Scalability & Reliability

64 physical Core Support – and 256 logical cores support for a single OS instance
DNSSEC – verify authenticity of a response from DNS

View the Windows Server 2008 R2 homepage at: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008r2
Download Windows Server 2008 R2 reviewers guide (Beta) for granular details on the changes.

DFSR and Bitlocker work together + performance tests

David Tesar — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 22:42:34 GMT

As far as I can tell, there isn't anywhere on Microsoft's sites or documentation which state DFS + Bitlocker is supported or works in Windows Server 2008. The DFSR FAQ mentions DFSR does not work with EFS, but does not mention Bitlocker. This is the case more than likely due to Bitlocker being so far below any user-mode application that the applications (such as DFSR) simply do not know that it exists. Consequentially, testing is not needed for every single scenario of Bitlocker + <app>. Microsoft does officially support the DFSR + Bitlocker combination on Server 2008.

Ned Pyle, a Microsoft enterprise support engineer, volunteered to do some performance testing of Bitlocker + DFSR. The net result was Bitlocker+DFSR worked great. However, there was a ~%25 degraded performance in replication time with Bitlocker turned on. This is to be somewhat expected due to the overhead of encryption, however, having a faster disk subsystem than what was tested with will more than likely significantly improve performance with Bitlocker enabled and reduce this gap. Again - please keep in mind this is a worst-case scenario considering the given hardware and configuration.

Here are the detailed results from the testing:

Environment used:

Win2008 Enterprise
Hardware - 2.4Ghz Quad Core, 4GB RAM, single 250GB non-SATA IDE drive
Default DFSR config, no antivirus realtime scanning running
Effectively worst case from disk perspective (very slow IDE disks shared with OS (%systemdrive% only))
Replication time based on delta between event 4102 and 4104 on downstream.
Between each pass the RG's are deleted as is the replicated folder data
1GBit NIC’s (Intel 82566DM-2 WHQL inbox driver 9.12.17.0)
Switched 1GB network, probably under fairly high load as it’s the NC test lab and is usually moving a lot of multi-cast imaging data all the time.
No hops, same Ipv4 subnet.

Sample data:
5.05 GB (5,432,323,831 bytes)
Data set made up of: 2008 platform sdk, office 2007, visual studio 2008, r2 sdk, vista sdk directories 51,614 files, 5,680 folders

Bitlocker off:
baseline1 - 0h:50m:29s
baseline2 - 0h:49m:51s
baseline3 - 0h:50m:44s
avg - ~50m

Bitlocker on:
bitlocker4 - 1h:05m:14s
bitlocker5 - 1h:07m:25s
bitlocker6 - 1h:06m:10s
avg - ~66m (~25% slower)

Windows Server 2008 - DNS enhancement nuggets

David Tesar — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 20:00:00 GMT

There are a number of enhancements to DNS in Windows Server 2008. There are already some lengthy articles on the features, so in this post I hope to give a quick “why you care” on each of the features and some nuggets of wisdom / insight. Here we go…

DNS on Server Core: I see this as a very useful scenario for most people who use DNS in conjunction with RODC in branch offices using the new primary read-only zone. You get all of the server core benefits such as improvements in performance, less patching, security, etc, and it can have all of the same core functionality as a regular DNS server. The easiest way to manage is remotely using the DNS MMC.

Background Zone Loading: Companies who have a large number of records in AD-integrated zones might have to wait 1+ hours to have DNS respond to queries after restarting. Now, DNS spawns off multiple threads to be able to respond to client queries right away. If the record in the zone hasn’t been loaded into memory yet and it is still in the process of loading the entire zone, it will query the node in AD, cache it in the zone, and return a response to the client.

IPv6 Support: Microsoft supports IPv6 in Server 2003, but it was a bit of a management pain and there were some other limitations. See Joseph Landies Cable guy article for the management/integration improvements made in WS08. Also, some other improvements:

· DNS servers can now send recursive queries to IPv6-only servers
· The server forwarder list can contain both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses
· DHCP clients can also register IPv6 addresses in addition to (or instead of) IPv4 addresses.
· DNS servers now support the ip6.arpa domain namespace for reverse mapping.

Make sure your critical apps are cool with receiving a response for an IPv4 address and an IPv6 address. I haven’t personally seen any app problems, but nonetheless, worth mentioning.

Primary read-only zone: This new zone type is also referred to as a “branch office zone” which is available on RODCs running DNS. The zone will make a read-only copy of all of the AD-integrated zones locally from a full DC. The easiest way to think about it is as a read-only secondary zone, but better due to the benefits of AD-integration (i.e. security, management, and you can easily replicate multiple zones).

Global Names Zone: This allows you to resolve single-label names in DNS as an aid to get rid of WINS. If you still need computer browsing, you have apps hard-coded to only use NetBIOS name resolution, or have really old clients & NT4 – sorry, you probably still need WINS. However, if you just need the single-label name support for things like custom-named internal websites or servers throughout your entire environment – this is the solution. There are quite a few things to consider with this, so I recommend reading the whitepaper listed below. A couple quick key limitations are a) this functionality only works with WS08 DNS servers and b) it also doesn’t support dynamic updates.

DNS Client changes: For Vista clients or WS08 servers, the DNS client has a few good changes:
· Periodic check to make sure the client is authenticating with a local DC (configurable via group policy). Previously, a client would only fail back to the closer DC when forced.
· Locate the nearest domain controller using the defined Active Directory sitelink costs instead of searching randomly. This is disabled by default, but good to enable when you have clients across slow site-links.
· Use link-local multicast name resolution (LLMNR), also known as multicast DNS or mDNS, to resolve names on a local network segment when a DNS server is not available.

Get Started
Windows Server 2008 & Domain Name Service: What's New (WS08 Blog by Kurt Roggen)
Changes in Functionality from Windows Server 2003 with SP1 to Windows Server 2008 (http) (doc version)
The Cable Guy DNS Enhancements in Windows Server 2008 (by Joseph Davies)
What's New in DNS in Windows Server 2008 (very short blurb on TechNet)
DNS Server GlobalNames Zone Deployment Whitepaper

Note: this can also be found on TechNet Edge here.