Month: May 2009

Operations Manager 2007 R2 RTMs

Good news! Systems Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 RTM'd, and you can download an evaluation copy right now! Get the download here. Microsoft says you can upgrade the evaluation version to a fully licensed version, once they release that around July 1.For a good run down on what's new in...

New VMware benchmark results

Last month Intel released their new Nehalem processors, which knock the socks off their previous generation processors and now beat AMD for dual socket servers. For years VMware has published benchmarks for various servers so you can judge their virtualization performance.The sweet spot for virtualization is a dual processor server....

Vista and Server 2008 SP2 is out

For the very few of you running Windows Vista (please, run Windows 7 RC1, its way better), or the larger crowd of server 2008 users, Microsoft has released service pack 2. What happened to server 2008 SP1? Well it was built into the RTM release, so it was never a...

VMware vSphere 4.0 is almost here!

If you are looking into virtualization or already using it, you will have likely heard that VMware is releasing their next major version of ESX server tomorrow. vSphere 4.0, the new name for Virtual Infrastructure, is a significant upgrade and has dozens of new features. Although it was formally announced...

Rollup 8 for Exchange Server 2007

In case you don't subscribe to the Exchange team's blog, today they announced rollup 8 for Exchange server 2007 SP1. You can read their announcement here. If you are running Windows Server 2008, you will now be glad to know rollup 8 automates the kernel mode authentication configuration required for...

Buckle your seatbelt for major Microsoft releases

During TechEd 2009 in LA this year it was amazing the amount of new products that will come to market in the next six to twelve months. Here's a short summary of some of the new releases you should expect and plan for: Windows 7 - Q4 2009 Windows Server...

WHQL ATI Windows 7 Drivers

Think you have to wait until the RTM of Windows 7 to get WHQL certified drivers, think again! ATI has released their WDDM 1.1 compliant and WHQL certified drivers for Windows 7. You can download the 64-bit drivers here. For some reason the 32-bit drivers seem to be older and...

Major Adobe PDF security patch

In case you missed it, Adobe has released a patch for a critical Acrobat security vulnerability. InfoWorld has a good write up on the flaw. Adobe released an official bulletin on the patch. If you have any version of Adobe Acrobat (including the free reader), I urge you to install...

How many NICs are enough for ESX?

Short answer: You can never have too many! Longer answer: It depends. As many people know, VMware ESX is NIC hungry. Between the kernel console, Vmotion, and various production networks, it can take six or more phyiscal NICs to provide full redundancy. If you want to do Microsoft clustering, throw...

Microsoft ISA vs TMG vs IAG vs UAG – Are you confused?

Sometimes Microsoft branding and renaming of products really confuses people. For example, ISA vs TMG? The whole ISA/TMG/IAG/UAG re-branding debacle really threw me for a loop. At first the renaming seemed pretty simple, but Microsoft is also re-positioning the products and I don't think MS has done a good job...

Exchange 2010 and RMS Protection

One of the greatly enhanced features in Exchange 2010 is the ability to automatically RMS protect messages via transport rules. For example, you could automatically encrypt all messages between HR and Legal. Or you could write a rule that searches message content and prevents forwarding if the string "company confidential"...

Copy files faster with Server 2008 R2 and W7!

During one of the sessions this week on DirectAccess, the speaker mentioned a tidbit of information which I found useful. For those of you running Windows XP and Server 2003, you know the pain of accessing file shares across the WAN. The higher the latency, the dramatically worse the performance....