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Cloud Datacenter & DevOps

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

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

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

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

Domain Controller Selection

The process of a Windows client selecting an Active Directory domain controller isn't too complex but is often not fully understood.  Let's look at the way a member server chooses a DC and how this affects applications.

Mitchell Grande by Mitchell Grande

Tech Talks - Azure Iaas, Paas, Containers

In this episode of #techtalks, Nathan Lasnoski walks through how a business can use Iaas, Paas, and Containers to quickly scale up and down with demand, and deliver everything from simple cloud-based apps to sophisticated, cloud-enabled enterprise applications.

Nathan Lasnoski by Nathan Lasnoski

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