4 novembre 2012

Citrix yesterday announced the availability of the tech preview of Excalibur . Excalibur is part of project Avalon and provides one install, one architecture and one console for both Citrix’s Desktop and Application virtualization platform XenApp and Citrix’s Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solution XenDesktop. Avalon covers the integration of several products which were developed and acquired by Citrix in the last couple of years and its intention is to create a platform to deliver desktops and applications as cloud services as... [Lire la suite]

Besides releasing version 5 of Microsoft Application Virtualization (App-V) yesterday, Microsoft also released Service Pack 2 for App-V version 4.6. Service Pack 2 provides support for Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012, but more important allows for coexistence of the 4.6 client together with the App-V 5 client so that the 4.6 App-V packages can work side-by-side with the new 5 APPV packages. Besides that SP2 also contains a rollup of all hotfixes released after Service Pack 1, which was released in March this year. --> please... [Lire la suite]

Hyper-V Performance Metrics that you might want to know more about. So you want to take Hyper-V for a spin? Good idea, but wait, there is quite a lot of metrics that lays around. If you have mostly managed vSphere clusters in the past, you might be tempted to test the new Hyper-V v3 and see how is the performance there. The Hyper-V environments, the capacity monitoring and performance analysis remains complex. In fact there is over 100+ performance monitor objects in the Windows Performance monitor application, the principal tool... [Lire la suite]

It’s been exactly a week since Windows 8 has been released, and Microsoft is doing its best to convince IT professionals and system administrators to adopt their latest client OS. As I pointed out in my article from last week that presented six reasons why you should deploy Windows 8, there are a fair number of impressive new features and improvements that make test-driving Windows 8 a requirement for anyone in IT. All that said, Windows 8 isn’t a sure thing for IT shops. While Windows 7 has been almost universally praised by... [Lire la suite]

I have been working with Bob Hunt at the TechNet Radio team to provide a series of webcasts with information about SMB 3.0 and the File Server role in Windows Server 2012. These are fairly informal conversations, but Bob is really good at posing interesting questions, clarifying the different scenarios and teasing out relevant details on SMB 3.0. By the way, don’t be fooled by the “Radio” in the name. These are available as both video and audio, typically including at least one demo for each episode. Here is a list of the TechNet... [Lire la suite]

A much needed feature was added in Service Pack 2 for Forefront TMG 2010. This great new feature gives you the ability to lock accounts on TMG at the local level before accounts are actually locked out in the domain. The account lockout feature, when used properly, will prevent TMG from trying to authenticate a user to a Domain Controller after the defined number of bad passwords has been attempted. In one of my previous blogs I talked about scenarios where TMG is being used as a reverse proxy and the Account Lockout Threshold has... [Lire la suite]

As an admin, how do we find out when a user’s password expires?   It is easy to find, once you know the command The one we need to run is Net User username /domain from the command prompt. It gives you more info than what you are looking for, but it has all the info about the password – when the password was changed, when will it expire etc. --> Please see the rest on the blog : http://www.howexchangeworks.com/2012/11/how-to-find-when-a-user-password-expires.html

Microsoft has released a standalone client for Lync 2013, similar to Lync 2010. But the client is basic in the feature set as the name suggests.   The full Lync 2013 client comes bundled with the Office 2013 suite. The standalone Lync 2013 Basic client gives IM, audio & video calls, online meetings, availability (presence) information and sharing capabilities. It’s a slimmer version of the full Lync 2013 client and provides the same core functionality. --> Please see the rest on the blog... [Lire la suite]

Many admin tools that we know & love in Exchange 2010 has been retired in 2013, including the “famous” Exchange Best Practice Analyzer.   You should be familiar by now that Exchange Administration Centre is the new EMC & ECP combined. Exchange 2013 only has the toolbox as part of the management console. What is wrong with this picture? Some of our admin tools didn’t make it to Exchange 2013 including BPA and Routing Log Viewer. --> Please see the rest on the blog... [Lire la suite]

I have been getting so many hits on my blog for VXLAN I figured it was time to expand a bit on what I have written about so far. My first blog post was about Configuring VXLAN, the steps required to set it up in your vSphere environment. As I had many questions about the physical requirements I followed up with an article about exactly that, VXLAN Requirements. Now I am seeing more and more questions around where and when VXLAN would be a great fit, so lets start with some VXLAN basics. The first question that I would like to answer... [Lire la suite]