OneClick version of Network Monitor is a quick solution that allows you to capture network traffic from a Windows computer without the need of installing the complete Network Monitor package. Still, you need Network Monitor installed on a separate computer in order to able to analyze the saved data. This tool is useful for customer support scenarios. The two One Click Packages available are the Autorun package and the ExtractOnly package. Autorun: Running this utility will install Network Monitor 3.1 (NM3.1) on your machine (if you do not already have a previous version of NM3) and begin capturing. The capture will terminate after 2 hours, or if you press the 'x' key on your keyboard. If you did not have NM3 on your machine previously, NM3.1 will subsequently be uninstalled. - Save the Autorun.exe file to your machine, right click on the exe and select "Run as administrator". ExtractOnly: Use the ExtractOnly package if you want to save the OneClick utility to a portable device, e.g., a USB key and later run the tool on a different machine. The extract only package will extract all the necessary files needed to run One Click to a user-specified destination folder. If you place the files on the root of a flash drive, One Click will run automatically when you insert the drive. You can also run One Click by double clicking the file "OneClick.cmd" in the destination folder. - For ExtractOnly.exe, right click on the file OneClick.cmd which is extracted to your destination folder, and select "Run as administrator". Note, if you get an "Access Denied" error when running the utility then you need to run One Click as an administrator. In addition, you can run OneClick if NM3 is already installed or you are a member of the Netmon Uses group.
LAS VEGAS — March 22, 2011 — Today at the Microsoft Management Summit, Microsoft Corporate Vice President Brad Anderson demonstrated how private clouds built with Microsoft technologies can help IT organizations meet their companies' demands for more agile services. Anderson introduced the new System Center 2012, which will enable IT managers to deliver private cloud services that empower business teams, provide greater insights into application performance, and allow IT to carry forward current investments as they adopt public cloud computing. "Our IT customers have told us that their focus is helping their businesses deliver the critical applications that will strengthen their bottom line, while maintaining necessary control and compliance," Anderson said. "Virtualization and server consolidation are important steps toward cloud computing, but it's essential to have management tools that provide intelligence about how the apps themselves are doing, not just management of virtual machine black boxes. Microsoft's management solutions provide that insight, along with the needed oversight." System Center 2012: Managing More Than Virtual Machines System Center 2012, slated for release later this year, enables IT managers to build private clouds with the infrastructure they know and own today — including other vendors' platforms and virtualization technologies. In his keynote, Anderson demonstrated the Virtual Machine Manager capability in System Center 2012, available today as a beta release athttp://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/en/us/try-it.aspx. Using this core component of Microsoft private cloud solutions, IT managers can efficiently standardize infrastructure and application services and delegate them to business partners for fast deployment of applications. Anderson also showed code name "Concero," the new System Center 2012 capability that empowers department-level application managers to deploy and manage their applications on private and public cloud infra
SANTA CLARA, Calif. - 3/22/2011 - Citrix Systems, Inc. today announced that IBM has certified Citrix XenServer® on System x and BladeCenter Servers to make deployment faster and easier for customers. The rigorously pre-tested configurations enable customers to more easily leverage Citrix XenServer and IBM servers to automate datacenter management processes and increase efficiency of datacenter infrastructures. Today's announcement expands the growing market momentum for XenServer in both cloud and enterprise datacenters. More than 50,000 enterprises worldwide now deploy XenServer for server virtualization, including 50 percent of the Fortune 500. XenServer also continues to gain share among cloud providers, building on the presence of the open source Xen hypervisor, the most widely deployed virtualization platform in the cloud. It is also the most widely used hypervisor for virtual desktops, hosting an estimated 2.5 million VDI-based desktops. IBM has a proven track record of customer success with Citrix-based solutions running on IBM System x and BladeCenter servers. For customers deploying the pre-qualified configurations, IBM provides server hardware warranty support, while Citrix offers procurement and software support. To access the pre-qualified configurations, and find more details on the tests conducted, please visit the IBM and XenServer page. In addition, the IBM System x and BladeCenter servers are featured on the Citrix Hardware Compatibility List.
The Network Monitor tool is not included with Windows default installations hence, you need to download it from Microsoft Download Center and run the installer on a target machine. The tool installs a network driver with each network adapter in order to be able to collect data. Using the equivalent command line tool NMCap requires you change directory to c:\Program Files\Microsoft Network Monitor 3\ which is the default installation folder. Then from the command prompt type: Nmcap /? – to get a full list of options, for example: Nmcap /network * /capture /file filename.cap – captures all traffic on all network interfaces and saves it to a file named filename.cap Press Ctrl+C to stop the capturing process. You can then analyze the data captured using the Network Monitor tool by clicking the Open Capture button form the tool's main page. Analyzing network data is best done expanding the frame details pane of the captured data as shown below: Both the GUI Network Monitor and the command line NMCap require the Network Monitor driver to be installed hence, I suggest installing the complete tool prior to its usage. If your environment does not allow you to install the complete package, then another version exists which allows you to quickly capture traffic on a computer. Network Monitor OneClick which available from here, removes itself automatically once the capture is complete! Use the ExtractOnly package if you want to save the OneClick utility to a portable device, e.g., a USB key and later run the tool on a different machine.
Performance Monitor is a great tool for identifying performance bottlenecks! You can identify the source of performance problems that make your system performs slow or sometimes completely unusable. Performance Monitor is best suited when you are collecting performance statistics over a period of time such as, when users on regular basis report system degradation at specific times. You can set a number of performance counters (system components to monitor) related to your specific problem as to allow Performance Monitor to collect and save these data. To use Performance Monitor go to Server manager, expand Diagnostics\Performance\Monitoring Tools and click Performance Monitor. By default the graph is empty that is, no counters are selected to run. You can add counters to the real-time graph by clicking the green plus button on the toolbar. In addition, you can display data from other computers on the network. When monitoring a large number of resources, the real-time graph may become cluttered even though each counter appears in different color, however, selecting on counter from the list below the chart and pressing Ctrl+H would show the selected counter in bold and black. Other options are available from the top menu such as, change graph type and freeze display. Although, I recommend that you play around with Performance Monitor to get acquainted with the tool, I would like to mention a couple of useful features. For instance, to save performance data you need to right click the node Performance Monitor on the left hand side and select New\Data Collector Set and follow the Create new data Collector Set wizard. Right clicking the graph and selecting Properties will load the properties page where you can set most of the appearance options. However, an important option is found in the Source tab. When you have set Performance Monitor to save data to a file then the Source tab is the place to go to open that file as your data source. One last note which I find very