In this episode of “Let’s Tech” I take a couple of Hyper-V Virtual Machines and enable them for Replica, but this time to the Cloud using Microsoft Azure. I cover the setup, planned and unplanned failovers, DR testing, and a host of other options. This is an incredibly easy BC DR solution that can help you get your feet wet with IaaS. Admittedly... it is a pretty long video but this is a huge topic. Worth the time if you're wanting to extend your VM's beyond your on-premises (on-prem) datacenter. We frequently call this "extending your private cloud".

http://youtu.be/URY8CA2QOVQ

So a quick little bit of background on this one. If you’re already using RDCMan (a.k.a. Remote Desktop Connection Manager) you’ve probably noticed it hasn’t been updated in a while. It isn’t an “official” Microsoft project, it isn’t open source, and the last version of it was released quite a while ago.

I won’t go into why, let’s just say that it wasn’t *ever* an official product and they guy who wrote it didn’t really ever expect it to get as large as it got.

There is a similar product that is still being actively updated. It is called Terminals, it lives at codeplex, and it is open source. Which means that if there are problems with it in the future, anybody can help resolve them.

One major issue I ran into was organization. You can import computers from AD or you can import computers from an existing RDG file (RDCMan’s database) but you cannot get the groups to import this way. I manage thousands of servers so just having a big flat file wasn’t going to work.

I wrote a PowerShell script to help you to populate a Terminals XML Favorites file using your Active Directory OU structure. You can download it here (right-click and then save as). Hope it helps!

Video Link:

http://youtu.be/yZqad04CQxQ

In this episode of Let's Tech, will it be called Windows Server 10? Who knows, but I downloaded a copy and fired it up. The commentary is about the new features and in the video we take a look at the new Desktop and the new Start Menu (not a start screen in this version). This is a pretty quick video and it is at a technical level of less than 100, just a quick look at the new interface.

I’m starting a new grouping of videos called the “Performance Series” which will be a break-out of the “Let’s Tech” videos. I’m releasing the first two videos in this series today, and I’m really excited about them. Hope you enjoy!

In this two part Performance Series on slow Domain Controllers I cover how to identify causes of slow DC's, how to spot and fix bad LDAP queries and searches against the directory, run diagnostics on Active Directory, what tools to use and when. Then I cover how to fix various problems by optimizing queries, indexing attributes, and when different solutions are more appropriate.

Part 1:
http://youtu.be/28pWAxR1zv0
Part 2:
http://youtu.be/s1aHH2E733I

V-Log Post Available Here:

http://youtu.be/cj1OsUqJaTM

Welcome to another Let's Tech... I don't particularly like having user1, user2, user3, user4 as a bed of test users. So in this episode I'll show you a more interesting way to populate your pre-prod environment. This I am doing ahead of another Let's Tech episode that I am working on about AD Performance, LDAP query troubleshooting, and how to brow beat lazy programmers. Enjoy!