Are you an MSDN subscriber? I can imagine that most of you somehow are connected to MSDN and enjoy the benefits it offers, however, Microsoft are now offering free compute hours on their Windows Azure infrastructure if you are an MSDN Premium or Ultimate subscriber. Check with your manager or superiors your subscription level and take advantage of this offer as to dirty yours hands with this Cloud technology! "Windows Azure is an internet-scale cloud computing and services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers, which provides an operating system and a set of developer services which can be used individually or together. It gives developers the choice to build web applications; applications running on connected devices, PCs, or servers; or hybrid solutions offering the best of both worlds. New or enhanced applications can be built using existing skills with the Visual Studio development environment and the .NET Framework. With its standards-based and interoperable approach, the services platform supports multiple internet protocols, including HTTP, REST, SOAP, and plain XML." The special offer consists of approximately $1800 worth of services annually. You will benefit from a 750 hours per month of free compute hours running an extra small scale instance, 10GB of free storage space and 1 million free transactions per month. This offer is adequate to run a small web application for free! In fact, this offer is very similar to Amazon's AWS Free Usage Tier. Competition is good, isn't? Existing MSDN users can activate the trial run from their MSDN account while non-MSDN users can try a limited amount of the infrastructure through an introductory promotional offer. For more info about MSDN Windows Azure benefits go here.
Today is the day. Watch the Live EI9 Launch at 5:30 p.m PDT/7:30 p.m. CDT by following this link: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/default.mspx
I rarely come across systems administrators that use Windows reliability monitor when troubleshooting server or client platforms! I guess we either completely forget about this tool or the issue at hand is so critical that the tool is unavailable or even inadequate. However, I do recommend administrators to become acquainted with Reliability Monitor and leverage the power of its graphical reporting mechanism. It is ideal when diagnosing intermittent and long-term problems. In a nut shell, the tool tracks the computer stability by keeping track of installations and failures that occur on the machine and rate this activity with a stability index. A stable system is rated with an index towards the value of 10 (optimal stability) while a system with more installations and failures may have its stability index dropping towards a minimum value of 0. For example, supposedly your system is encountering an intermittent problem and you have no any clue if one of the couple of utilities installed recently is causing the intermittent fault. With Reliability Monitor you can quickly browse both failures and application installations over time and correlate the failures with an application installation! To open Reliability Monitor in Windows 2008 servers, open Server Manager, expand Diagnostics\Performance nodes and click on Monitoring Tools. From the right hand side click More Actions and select View system reliability… The top portion of the chart of Reliability Monitor shows data for each day or week as set in the View by: option. The rows below the chart show icons for successful and unsuccessful software installations, application failures, hardware failures, windows failures and other problems. To view more details you can select one day from the chart and view the report below the chart. Reliability Monitor data is collected by the Reliability Analysis Component (RAC) which runs once an hour as a hidden scheduled task. You can view this task by browsing to Configuration
There are a number of tools which give you details about resource utilization on Windows based machines. Detailed reports are best used when digging further down into an existing problem or analyzing a complex problem that requires a lot of details but an ad hoc quick performance check would suffice with few details. Actually, routine quick checks would benefit most when the results are presented visually and contain explicit values that indicate clearly the state of the resource under test. The inbuilt Data Collector Set allows you to execute a quick performance resource test with a clear and indicative overview of results. The following steps show the simple procedure to run System Performance standard test and find if your server status is optimal or not: From Server Manager, click and expand Diagnostics\Performance\Data Collector Sets and click System Performance – In Windows 7 computers start Performance Monitor. Right click System Performance and select Start or click the menu green arrow image – by default, the system will gather information for 1 minute where the green arrow appears and disappears after the 1 minute time-frame. After the minute passes, right click the System Performance node and select Latest Report – the menu green writing pad image has the same functionality. Examine the report in particular the Resource Overview for any warnings, such as, high utilization of any component. Additionally, by right clicking the report node, and selecting View\Performance Monitor you can load the traditional performance monitor graph and add/remove counters. From the Resource Overview report above, you can easily notice the Memory utilization percentage which according to your specific environment may indicate an increase in resource utilization. A quick look at these high level counters can s
Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 Service Pack 1 provides further improvements and hardens these Operating Systems. Although, SP1 includes previous updates which many organizations and users have deployed through Windows Update, Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) or third-party patch management systems, it is quite often the practice to use a Service Pack as a baseline. That is, having successfully deployed a service pack throughout the organization creates a reference point or standard which puts your mind at rest. Some machines or even servers might have missed some updates or an administrator might have skipped some problematic updates intentionally. By time, patch management standards are likely to end up in a mess! However, before going for a full deployment of SP1 I suggest that you test your environment. If patch management inventory is available, look for machines that lack updates with respect to others and find out why. Test the most critical machines in a test or staging environment before updating production ones. Where possible, follow Microsoft recommendations before applying SP1 and run the System Update Readiness Tool to resolve update inconsistencies. There have been issues with some devise drives, hence it is recommended to update these with the latest versions and some users are reporting SP1 installation failures with an unknown error. As most organizations run their servers in virtualized environments, you might encounter similar problems while SP1 tries to access some virtual devices. In fact, I had to disable guest add-ons on my virtualized setup in order to be able install SP1 successfully. For more details about this error and the troubleshooting steps I performed to find the problem go here.