Now that Microsoft intends to expand their virtualisation strategy with the purchase of Softricity, I expect that we will see a few things with SoftGrid:

Always an interesting discussion around the traps is that of how much memory to install in Terminal Servers. Due to the nature of Terminal Server and limitations of the 32bit architecture, kernel address space will be exhausted before a Terminal Server will run out of RAM (depending on the number of users, of course). Brian Madden has an excellent article discussing this limitation.

I’ve recently had conversations about running anti-virus software on some specialised servers. Specifically Windows Servers running ISA Server 2004 or VMware Server (or Virtual Server). The argument for installing anti-virus software on these servers is to ensure they are protected against viruses and worms. I’ve been arguing against installing anti-virus software to ensure maximum performance. The reasons I have argued against are the following:

The User Profile Hive Cleanup Service is a tool that I’ve even been installing on desktops. A beta for version 2.x is underway and Thomas Koetzing has an impressive writeup of the tool on his site here, where you can also sign-up for the beta. Version 2.x sounds great and I hope that all of the features in this new version make it into Vista which a a similar service built in.

Check out this great Firefox extension that allows you to view pages with the Internet Explorer engine inside Firefox: ietab

Here’s an excellent document I’ve added to my list of articles to give to clients:

Over the past week, I’ve been creating an internal Exchange best practice/check list document so that we can standardise on how we configure Exchange servers for our clients. This document includes a number of items including information on configuring AV scanners to exclude certain Exchange folders. I thought it best to provide the reader of this document direct links to knowledgebase articles on various AV products. I attempted to cover the following vendors:

Has Microsoft realised the power of EventID.Net? They’ve added an ‘Events and Errors Message Center’ page @ TechNet.

I spend a lot of time troubleshooting applications on Windows XP and Windows Terminal Server. The challenge, especially in Terminal Server environments is to get applications running and still keep the environment secure. This means spending time with the Sysinternals tools and various others. Brian Madden has started posting videos and presentations from this years BriForum. The first video and slide deck are a great resource for those of us who deploy and manage applications. Definitely worth a watch:

Backup the system state on your domain controllers. “Like duh!” you say, well that’s what I said too. I spent Friday a client’s site where a domain controller had gone down and they were experiencing issues with logons and Exchange. The client has/has four domain controllers, one at each of their four sites and all were marked as Global Catalog(ue)s. However once this single DC went down, due to hardware failure, AD essentially went bye-bye. Backups were no good and all the usual diagnostic tools would only show the downed DC as the lone GC. We could not seize the Schema Master and after spending about 6 hours on the phone with PSS, the decision was made to start again with a new domain, DC and Exchange server. Lots of fun that could have been avoided with products like Microsoft Operations Manager or NetIQ AppManager. I still don’t understand why these types of products are generally a hard sell.