Authors

Concurrency Authors
Mitchell Grande

Mitchell Grande

Systems Engineer
Contributions by Mitchell Grande

Patching Windows Server 2016

The patching strategy for Windows Server 2016 has changed fairly significantly since 2012 R2, and understanding these changes is crucial to managing this operating system effectively.  Here, we'll review the new cycle of patch releases and how to make sure your servers stay up to date.

Mitchell Grande by Mitchell Grande

Creating a Suspect SQL Database

Recently, a customer contacted us asking for the steps to force a SQL Server database into a Suspect state.  Although there are other blog posts about doing exactly that, they didn’t quite work for us.  Let’s take a look at how we got this working for them.

Mitchell Grande by Mitchell Grande

Active Directory during DR Tests

Due to their central role in a Windows environment, including Active Directory domain controllers in a disaster recovery test will nearly always be required.  However, how do you ensure that the DCs function correctly, and safely, in a DR environment without having any impact on production?  Let's look at the best practices around Active Directory in a DR test.  These ideas apply to both on-premise replication to a secondary site and replication to Azure using Azure Site Recovery.

Mitchell Grande by Mitchell Grande

Procmon Basics

Process Monitor, or Procmon is one of the tools in the Sysinternals suite and is invaluable in troubleshooting certain types of Windows and application issues.  Procmon is a real-time monitoring tool that logs all filesystem and registry activity.  It has a robust filtering system that makes it easy to drill down into the data needed to resolve a variety of issues.

Mitchell Grande by Mitchell Grande

Windows Time Settings in a Domain

Time synchronization is an important part of any Active Directory domain.  In this post, we'll look at the impact of time being out of sync, how to configure time sync correctly, and how to troubleshoot when things go wrong.

Mitchell Grande by Mitchell Grande

Active Directory Replication Troubleshooting

With Active Directory having a decentralized database, healthy replication is extremely important to ensuring it functions correctly.  Replication problems can lead to all sorts of issues, including authentication failures, machines falling off the domain, or worse.  Let's take a look at some ways to diagnose and troubleshoot basic replication problems.

Mitchell Grande by Mitchell Grande

Upcoming Windows Features

With the release of Windows Server 2019 getting closer, let's take a look at some of the upcoming features in the latest version of Windows Server: Storage Migration Service, System Insights, and Remote Desktop Modern Infrastructure.

Mitchell Grande by Mitchell Grande

PowerShell Basics - Loops

The final article in the PowerShell basics series will look at PowerShell loops and how to use them to interact with multiple objects.  We'll specifically use the Foreach-Object command to iterate through a group of results.  Finally, we’ll review command aliases to help you read and write PowerShell more efficiently.

Mitchell Grande by Mitchell Grande

Testing File Server Performance

Measuring file server performance can be a little tricky.  In this post, we are going to look at each of the components that affect the speed clients can read/write to a file server.  After gathering baseline stats, we'll look at 2 different ways to test the performance of a file server: using the Windows Explorer file copy UI and using the diskspd command line tool.  We'll find that the speed shown in the Windows Explorer file copy interface isn't a reliable measurement of the disk throughput on the backend.

Mitchell Grande by Mitchell Grande

Introduction to WMI

The average Windows administrator has come across WMI at least a few times, maybe while troubleshooting an issue or building out a monitoring solution.  WMI is a centralized repository of information within the Windows server, and understanding how to effectively use it can simplify some administrative tasks.

Mitchell Grande by Mitchell Grande

Concurrency Authors