As soon as your Active-Directory gets bigger and bigger, as more and more you need to be ready to partially or entirely recover it. As a good domain admin, you should always have a reliable backup/restore strategy in place to safeguard your domain data and, in worse case scenarios, restore your entire directory on a disaster recovery scenario. The most common and basic strategy is backing up the system state of your PDC emulator, which grants you a consistent backup of your entire directory that can be used if all needs to be restored.

It is in here, it has arrived. The new generation of Windows server family is quickly being introduced everywhere. All social networks, blogs, forums and publications are speaking about it; and that is because Microsoft is offering a lot of resources to get up to speed with it. Windows Server 2012 Release Candidate (RC) is available for free download and evaluation, as well as the eBook Introducing Windows Server 2012.

Everybody knows that Windows caches Usernames and Passwords, include domain credentials and credentials that we type in when we try to access shared resources, when we click the Save Password feature. How to clear this cache in case you have to do so? Do the following: on a command prompt type rundll32.exe keymgr.dll, KRShowKeyMgr, select the conflictive entry and delete or modify it as needed.

Windows Server 8 “Beta ” is out there. It comes with important list of cool stuff like PowerShell v3, Metro UI, Resilient File System (ReFS), DHCP failover, etc. However, one of the most important parts Microsoft has enhanced that time, has been Hyper-V. Microsoft has introduced with Windows Server 8 an important number of new Hyper-V features that should consolidate it as an enterprise virtualization platform. Today, I would like to show you the ones that exited me most:

Windows Server 8 “Beta” (ISO or VHD) can be downloaded after registering for its evaluation. Also, Microsoft SQL Server 2012 RTM trial has been released for evaluation purposes to general public, and can be download here. Windows Server 8 is the next generation of Windows Server products that incorporates cloud-based services and the new Resilient File System (ReFS), an evolution of the actual NTFS. Microsoft SQL Server 2012 incorporates all cloud-ready services for integration and new high availability features like AlwaysOn.

On How to Cluster DFS Replicated Resources on Windows Server 2008 R2 (Part I) we installed the file server role, the failover clustering feature and we brought online our quorum disk. On How to Cluster DFS Replicated Resources on Windows Server 2008 R2 (Part II) we saw how to create our cluster, assign resources and cluster the file server role; to prepare everything to properly cluster DFS-R shares. So, now lets see how add shared folders and make them part of our DFS-R group.

I’m preparing a Hyper-V two-nodes cluster where to create a test environment of our current Active-Directory domain for DC upgrades to Windows Server 2008 R2 simulation scenarios. To keep resources for child partitions I have installed Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Core edition as base OS on the nodes. One of the common tasks I use to run after the base installation is tuning the virtual memory and moving the page file to a dedicated partition to avoid fragmentation.

Another great tool from Microsoft, has been revealed to me by my colleague Brandon Carder (thanks Brandon!). If you are managing multiple screens and your desk has been conquered by mice and keyboards, this is the definitive tool that will give you more space and freedom. Check what I’m talking about on the following TechNet blog. Microsoft download from The Garage: Mouse without Borders

Yesterday, Microsoft revealed the specifics of its next-generation file system in full. Some of the new features are the ability to handle large volumes, resiliency to corruption and shared storage pools across machines while maintaining backwards compatibility with NTFS features. Details have been published on Building Windows 8 blog by MSDN. Building the next generation file system for Windows: ReFS

Microsoft has released the Remote Desktop Load Simulation toolset for server capacity planning and performance/scalability analysis. When planning and designing environments Remote Desktop, is useful to estimate the number of users that can be supported, thus defining the scalability and performance by providing an advance estimate in that environment. The toolset can be downloaded from the following link: Remote Desktop Load Simulation Tools Microsoft already released Terminal Server Capacity and Scaling guide which is intended for Windows 2003 based Terminal Services environments.