As part of our process to disable user accounts, we take ownership of the user’s server-stored documents such as roaming profiles and redirected My Documents directories. We then either keep access restricted to the domain admins group or grant access to a replacement user who should receive access to the departed user’s files. With an upgrade to Exchange 2007, we have taken advantage of the Powershell access to Exchange objects, and have scripted the mailbox provisioning and account disable processes. ... Read more

Dell, Broadcom, and Microsoft have decided to partner up with the release of a technology called TCP/IP Offloading, or TOE for TCP/IP Offload Engine. It was bundled together in the Scalable Network Pack (SNP), included and enabled by default with Service Pack 2 (SP2) for Windows Server 2003. The gist of this technology is to enable high-load enterprise applications to be easily scalable. For those of you familiar with the OSI model, TOE moves layer 3 and 4 processing out of the OS and CPU into the NIC. ... Read more

This topic has been covered a bit (here, here, and here, for instance) but I have been working on a project that utilizes Virtual Server for testing, and it came up again. A consultant that was working on the VM’s in question apparently struggled for quite some time before he asked for help on it. So, I thought I would see if another post on this might help someone out. ... Read more

If you have ever had to take on a Physical-to-Virtual (P2V) migration of a server or other machine, you know that you generally have a fine balance of the following triangle of factors: cost, complexity, and reliability. It seems like the only way to get an easy and reliable solution is to throw gobs of money at either a VMWare infrastructure or something like Platespin. Don’t get me wrong: from what I’ve heard they both offer excellent solutions in that field, but it simply isn’t cheap. ... Read more