It seems that the day of entering everything via DOS commands have come full circle as larger enterprise environments take advantage of high availability technologies like Windows Failover Clustering. I was setting up a test environment today which consisted of eight nodes in a Windows 2008 Server Environment. The days of using the GUI and your mouse to click around get pretty annoying when you have to repetitively follow these processes across a number of servers. Here are a couple of quick commands that can be used in setting up your clusters on Windows Server 2008. Install the Failover Clustering role using the Server Manager Command Line: C:\> servermanagercmd -install Failover-Clustering Once you have installed the Failover Clustering role on all of your nodes, you can also automate the creation of the cluster itself from the command line. Specify a few parameters and you are set to go! C:\> cluster.exe…

Interesting quote from Steve Ballmer on virtualization that he gave during his September 25 Churchill Club speech: “If you want virtualization on 80 percent of servers instead of 5 percent of servers, you better not charge three times as much as the price of the server for the virtualization,” Ballmer said. “For certain high-end applications, the approach that VMware has used is a perfectly good approach, but it’s not an approach that is going to lead to virtualization of a high percentage of servers.” See the whole speech and more details here.

There are situations where you may want to generate a number of test mailboxes whether it be for a demo or another scenario.  With Exchange 2007, you can leverage Powershell cmdlets to complete this process for you in just seconds. First, I start out with the a CSV file that contains a limited number of columns, basically the minimum needed to create an Active Directory user account and mailbox-enable it.  Since I have a passion for baseball, my test CSV file is a tribute to some of my favorite players in history.  This is what the sample users.csv file looks like: UPN,FirstName,LastName,Password bruth,Babe,Ruth,TestP@ssword1! mmantle,Mickey,Mantle,TestP@ssword1! hwagner,Honus,Wagner,TestP@ssword1! brobinson,Brooks,Robinson,TestP@ssword1! yberra,Yogi,Berra,TestP@ssword1! kpuckett,Kirby,Puckett,TestP@ssword1! rcarew,Rod,Carew,TestP@ssword1! hkillebrew,Harmon,Killebrew,TestP@ssword1! twilliams,Ted,Williams,TestP@ssword1! jdimaggio,Joe,DiMaggio,TestP@ssword1! Next, it only takes a couple lines of code for us to generate the accounts and mailboxes.  You can take this code and save it into a file named something like createmailboxes.ps1.  This is what the script should…

Every once in a while I run into a case where my Windows performance counters go a little whacky.  That is, when I am in Performance Monitor, my objects and their respective counters display text are replaced with a 3-4 integer description instead.  I have no idea how this happens, but this tends to break other things, particularly the Jetstress application which relies on performance counters for it’s data. Counter corruption can be seen typically when adding a counter to monitor where the performance object and counters actual names are replaced by a numeric description. To restore the performance counters, start a Command Prompt and run: c:\>LODCTR /R C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\PerfStringBackup.ini The result will be that when you restart Performance Monitor, your counters again will be readable.  If you are running the x64 version of Windows Server, make sure that you replace SYSTEM32 with SYSWOW64 as this is where the INI file…

I spent the last week in Las Vegas at Microsoft Management Summit 2008.  MMS is a conference that focuses on the technologies that Microsoft offers to manage infrastructure like desktops, servers and beyond. I hadn’t realized how much the technologies had changed in the last several years.  When I was still working for Microsoft I spent a lot of time with my customers working on solutions around Systems Management Server (SMS), Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM), and even had some early adopters of Data Protection Manager (DPM).  SMS is now known as Configuration Manager and DPM is stronger than ever with its new version which protects advanced application data (SQL and Exchange) as well as your existing files and folders.Those technologies have all changed and evolved all underneath one umbrella.  Enter Microsoft System Center. System Center ties all of these components together.  From deployment of desktops and servers, to asset management,…