I am anxious to get my hands on this file system and play with the features that it will bring to the table.  I do have the Windows 8 preview and will get into it further soon, but from what I have read and previous discussions with Microsoft this seems very very interesting.

Things I like so far:

Live.  Microsoft is working to engineer ReFS to handle corruption and corrections live, without the need to offline the file system.  This will reduce the time needed to maintain the filesystem.

Better data integrity as a whole.  Because the file system can manage and mitigate corrupt files and handle much of the repair process online, there will be less need to reboot to take care of maintenance tasks, like following check disk runs.

Checksums on metadata.  Being able to ensure a file integrity has not been compromised at will without a process run by the user is great.

Shared Storage Pooling.  This will allow storage across servers to be pooled and shared amongst them creating a load balanced configuration to allow for better resource an file availability.

I cannot say that I am surprised these changes are coming and this makes up for the Metro UI a bit for me, but I do want to see more of that is planned for ReFS and get my hands on it a bit more.  One of these days I will get another Windows laptop and get Windows 8 running on it to get a closer look at the file system and its tools.

For more information on ReFS check out these links:

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/microsofts-killer-windows-server-8-feature-refs/17757

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/microsoft-goes-public-with-plans-for-its-new-windows-8-file-system/11666

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/01/16/building-the-next-generation-file-system-for-windows-refs.aspx

An administrator for the organization purchases some volume license agreements and receives both the KMS key and it’s old school counterpart the Multiple Activation Key (MAK). Instead of using several different MAK keys to activate all of these client licenses, the KMS server gets configured on one or two servers in the environment. This way the clients can validate against the KMS servers and not decrement any sort of activation count.

The way this works is really not too difficult. The clients that are using KMS keys (the default method in Windows 7 and Office 2010) check in continuously with the KMS Server(s) on the network. Licensing is validated approximately every 30 days to ensure the client can find the license server. If the client leaves the environment and cannot connect, the missing or failed activation notifications start appearing. Once the license has been revalidated against a KMS server, the balloons go away again for at least 30 days.

At first the constant check in method of licensing seemed very confusing, since I am used to the previous method of volume licensing, one key for all (or a good number of) your clients. When using Key Management Servers, the host machine gets the key installed for KMS, which is included with volume licenses. Once this key is installed for each product, the server can begin pushing out licensing to those clients. There is one caveat to this idea, each product that is going to use KMS requires different client counts to be discovered before it will issue a key.

For example, for Office 2010 Professional Plus the minimum count for KMS is 5 clients. When configuring it, you must install 5 clients before keys will be issued. Until this happens, the banner in each application will alert the user that it is not activated. Once five or more clients check in with the KMS server, Office on these clients will receive keys and the alerts will go away.

For Windows Server 2008 R2, the number of clients is also five. Windows 7 Enterprise clients however, require 25 clients to check in with KMS for keys to be issued. This is done to prevent people from installing extra clients to allow KMS licensing to work with fewer actual users.

Because the KMS server communicates with Microsoft licensing via the Internet, it determines if the host key licensing is active. Then your local server handles licensing and key distribution for clients. Each client will check in with a KMS server every 30 days to request a key. The keys are valid for 90 days, which will allow for the occasional traveller to continue using the products if they are out of the office when normal re-activation would occur. If you are in an environment with a great deal of road warriors who do not check in at the home office (physically or via VPN) regularly, using a key provided by KMS doesn’t make too much sense. There are keys included with Volume Licensing agreements for these users, they are called MAK keys and are covered next.

Multiple Activation Keys – MAK

These keys more closely resemble the old method of volume licensing, the one key for many clients scenario. You will not receive one key for all of your clients if the number of licenses you purchase is large and you still need to purchase a license for every instance of an application. The MAK key only provides you additional activations for the key, not additional licenses.

In large licensing runs, MAK keys might be split into thirds to prevent one key from being used for all of the clients. This is done to cut down on piracy of license keys. When licensing for most clients can be done by KMS this idea makes a lot of sense, especially when fewer MAK keys will be used in that scenario

Additional KMS benefits
Once you have gotten the Key Management Server setup in your environment, licensing is handled locally. This server will check in with Microsoft initially, but once that is completed, the clients obtain licensing from the server on your network. KMS servers will provide keys to any clients who request them in an environment which is also a plus.

Suppose I am traveling to a client office and my laptop, which is usually on my desk, uses KMS. If the client runs into its 30 day window while I am onsite at a client, it will look for a KMS server. If the office I am working in has a KMS server, it will issue the key and no functionality will be lost (or lovely warning messages presented).

Any KMS server found can accommodate a request from any client it can communicate with. Since there is no limit on the number of keys provided by KMS this is a great plus, less activation worries and work for administrators. The key provided by the other KMS server will keep my laptop happy for up to 90 days, even though it will start requesting a key after 30 days.

The benefit here is less management of licensing and activation. Sure you still have to purchase, record, and understand where licenses get used, but with KMS licensing servers, for most of your clients (at least where Microsoft licenses are concerned) the work is done through software with a little work on the front end, but not too much at all after that.

Hopefully this brief look at Microsoft’s Key Management Server licensing configuration will provide enough information for you to consider configuring a KMS server or two in your environment. At the time of this writing, KMS only works with products acquired through volume licensing.

Sure they seem like small things, but over time, these small things like change in the couch cushions can add up to a big ticket problem.  For me, the issue wasn’t all that bad, but it did take some head scratching (outside the scope of the actual issue) and a brief conversation with someone wiser than I about the symptoms of my issue.

We don’t trust you anymore, go away

Windows 7 is a rather finicky OS (moreso that Windows XP, and probably a bit less so than the OS between XP and 7).  Because computers are still objects within Active Directory that access other secured resources within the directory, they too authenticate.  In reality, this means that computers have accounts equivalent to User objects within the AD environment. These accounts allow computers to tell Active Directory that they belong within the environment and should be allowed to access resources.  Just like when I logon to the domain and request access to resources by providing credentials, computers in the environment do the same.

If for some reason, the Domain Controller cannot match the credentials presented by the computer to what is stored in its database, the Domain Controller refuses authentication and presents a message about trust relationships.

I didn’t create credentials for the computer, what the heck do I do now?

When a computer is added to an Active Directory domain its account is established and the password set.  Then the password is managed by the computer and AD and changed automatically about every 30 days or so.  If the computer is no longer trusted by the domain, it is likely that the password is incorrect or has gotten lost in translation causing authentication to fail.

My issue was a replication issue which caused the computer accounts of a few workstations to fail authentication.  Because it is not the best idea to maintain only one domain controller in any Active Directory environment, and because of the way that AD manages information about objects, replication happens.

Perhaps an example will work here.  Suppose I create a user object for John Smith using Active Directory Users and Computers (ADUC) on a Domain Controller named creatively DC1 at my office.  John will be starting his new career as a data entry specialist in my company’s Houston office in a week or so.  Adding the user account for John to a DC in my office works just as well as if I had flown to Houston (or remoted into the DC there) and added the account.  Because replication sends all objects created, maintained, or deleted to all other replication partners within the domain, a user account created in my office on DC1 can be replicated to Houston on DC2 and when John gets to work, he can logon and all is well.

Replication happens in the background and is pretty much out of site when things are going smoothly, but from experience I can tell you that you should check in on your friend replication regularly.  Maybe not daily, but weekly for sure.  Just to make sure that objects in the directory are being moved around without errors.

What might cause replication problems?

There are any number of settings and configurations that can cause problems with replication.  Surely more than I have seen or have time to list here, but some of the basic things are:

• Improperly configured links
• Unmanaged Replication configurations
• Misconfigured Firewalls
• Equipment failure

Improperly configured links

When you establish replication between two (or more) Active Directory domain controllers, you create links between them that allow these DCs to exchange information.  The links are one way which means that each domain controller has two links to each replication partner.  The links can be configured to handle high speed links (fast connections, like you might see between domain controllers in the same site) and slow links (which may be used to link two remote locations).  When the links are configured correctly things work really well, but if you neglect to consider the speed of your Internet connection (on both ends) replication may suffer as a result.

Replicating information across a slow link that is configured to behave like a fast one might be a little less dire to watch than downloading a blu-ray quality video over a dial up connection, but missing information can have rather large repercussions in your environment which may be seen as inability to login, latent access or no access to resources and other things.

Unmanaged replication configurations

By this I am not suggesting that you check on replication statuses every day (depending of course on the size of your environment) but you should be looking at it regularly enough to know what is going on and that replications in all directions are happening as you need them to.

Because Active Directory is a multi-master beast, meaning that any machine configured as a domain controller carries just as much weight as any other machine configured as a domain controller, information for an object that has not yet replicated throughout the environment could be a problem.  As in my earlier example, if I created the user object for John Smith, and it failed to replicate to the domain controller in Houston by the time he needed to log in, we might have a problem.

The login would likely happen, but would take a significant amount of time because the most local domain controller didn’t have the information needed to handle the request.

Misconfigured Firewalls (and other Network issues)

Windows includes a firewall to help keep things out of your environment that shouldnt be there.  I would recommend disabling the firewall on all your Windows computers and servers because it will likely be a bigger headache than you are ready for.  Also because all organizations should use dedicated firewalls to protect their corporate assets from the outside world.

My issue with replication came at the hands of a misconfigured firewall.  The firewall was enabled for a good period of time which caused hiccups in the replication of information throughout my Active Directory environment. The symptoms displayed were the previously mentioned domain trust errors that popped up when logging on or trying to unlock a PC.

In my research and previous experience the best fix for the trust problem is to disjoin the affected system from the domain and delete the computer account from Active Directory.  Then rejoin the system to AD.  Normally this will take care of the symptom.  Not necessarily the problem.

Outages and Equipment Failures

There is the obvious replication issue with failures and downed equipment.  If the replication is scheduled to occur between two systems and one of those systems is down, obviously replication cannot happen.

Working on these issues is an interesting scenario as well.  For the sake of troubleshooting, the usual steps must be followed and checked out even if the steps do not solve the problem, they will likely help you down the path to correcting the problem.

The moral?

Do not be afraid to check out the functionality of your Active Directory environment, being proactive and working to pay attention to things like replication and group policy settings.  Keeping up with those tasks before the problem strikes and requires many late nights to correct.  You will still have some long nights working with Active Directory, but they can be worth it, without all the fires.

The area where I am not sure I want to go (at least outside of the realm of certification testing) is to configure Active Directory. While Id like to leverage TMG to act as a firewall for my home environment, surely other users in my house will not want to login to a domain for access to the Internet… and I cant say that I blame them, but part of me wants to control my home network and use the tools I am learning about.

Might anyone have suggestions here? I am just trying to get a feel for what others are doing in this space. Please let me know in the comments. Thanks

Working with enterprise class storage, using SANs or direct attached storage in file servers, is an interesting role.  My organization uses a network attached storage box running Windows Storage Server 2003 with a very small amount of disk space.  Certainly not the piles of disks used by large companies, but still a good amount of storage to manage.

Finding out more

Last week I was in Redmond learning about storage and the ways it works within Windows Server (and client) as well as storage (or file system) related features in Windows Server 2008 and 2008 R2.  The opportunity to interact with other MVPs and the product groups based around storage was amazing and I am hoping to really begin digging into storage more.  My first goal is to rebuild my Windows Server 2008 R2 box to look more at iSCSI and Storage Server.

My goal isn’t to build Peta-bytes of storage, but to look at smaller storage possibilities for mid-sized businesses.  Companies similar in size to my employer who might not have the resources for huge amounts of storage, but might want to create a very efficient storage platform perhaps using Windows based iSCSI and a reasonable amount of physical disks.

Storage is all about disk isn’t it?

For a good portion of my career I thought that disk was the only component of storage, after all to store the data, there has to be some where to put it.  However, another factor is the method by which the data gets to the disk and its availability.  Other things that influence storage (or certainly could in the future) are items like Virtualization.  Being able to captialize on the mobility of virtualized servers and the reduced hardware overhead they provide seems to bring a better storage utilization.

Many opportunities but just getting going

With the MVP Summit 2010 behind me, I am very interested in what I learned and the relationships I have formed.  Getting the opportunity to work with those at Microsoft, like Suzanne Morgan, who works with the storage initiatives in and around Windows Server is amazing. In the next few months I am sure I will have a few questions, both of Microsoft and of other Storage MVPs as my learning about enterprise storage is just getting started.

Microsoft allows up to 25Gb of storage in its Sky Drive cloud application which to me seems the better deal.  Sure there are reasons to use both, depending on how the service is used and what applications it will be used with.  If you are a Docs user, the Google solution makes sense as long as you can keep within the 1Gb limit.

So where does this stack up for organizations?

I have accounts with both Google and Microsoft and have looked at both services briefly, each one coming in quite handy on days when for whatever reason, I forget my flash drive(s) at home.  But I am a bit curious as to the concept of organizational cloud storage and how this might start to change the game for companies.

Sure many companies still use on premise storage, either on a SAN or NAS with disk or tape backup to keep things recoverable, but would it make sense for an organization to push backups and even file storage into the cloud?  In coming years I think the answer will be a very loud yes.  Google and Microsoft can get server and disk space very cheaply per Gigabyte because they buy so much disk space all at once.  My organization can get the disk space to meet its needs in an on premise solution fairly cheap because we aren’t talking tons of storage, but for a larger organization, the need for storage space is likely to become much greater than today.  Allowing someone else to purchase, maintain, and handle the disks in your storage solutions might make the most sense.  This requires companies to have less IT staff and less server room overhead.

Pushing the stores to the cloud could cut into the overall energy utilization of a company quite quickly given the reduction in back office servers and tape drives that must be run to ensure business continuance.

What about today?

I am not sure the cloud is ready to take over entirely for on premise storage and backup but it is growing a bit more everyday.  In the future I have a feeling that storage other than an external hard disk for ITunes or other entertainment and a few files will be done in the cloud.  Maybe the disks in workstations will be large enough to foot the bill and a synchronization of the data to the organizations slice of the cloud will ensure backup all the way to the desktop.  Sure the bandwidth to the Internet would need to increase, but with fiber coming along and broadband being a mainstay already, this seems like the natural progression of things to me.

[poll id="8"]

Note: I have not been exclusive to Bing since its release as I find myself visiting Google out of habit.

Search throughout the Microsoft.com properties has been replaced by Bing. The old live search is gone and Bing is the wave of the future, and with good reason. The idea is that the queries entered by users need to bring back quality information before worrying about the quantity of links returned.

This gets done reasonably well; when I search for Ice Cream Sandwiches in Google I get a result of 17,700,000. The same search at bing.com returns 10,700,000 records, many of which are the same.

Figure A below shows the result count at Google and Bing.

Figure A

17 million and 10 million results for ice cream sandwiches

The results, while still massive are more focused when relevant queries are entered, the ice cream sandwiches search was to show the sheer number of results returned. For example, suppose I am going to visit Oshkosh Wisconsin for the EAA this summer.

When I enter Oshkosh WI into Yahoo I get a link to the city website and a few other links at the top of the results. I also get a pane of sponsored links that organizations pay to have show up first. While these might be quite helpful, I would rather see things relevant to visiting the city like the weather and things in the area than just the businesses who pay the most money,

Entering the same Oshkosh WI into Bing produces a different experience. Sure I still see search results and the city of Oshkosh website and a few sponsored links on the right (albeit far fewer links), but there are also related links in the left hand pane as well as links to list restaurants, businesses, the newspaper, maps, and other things that might make my trip to Oshkosh more pleasant. Figure B shows the Yahoo and Bing results for Oshkosh WI.

Figure B

The Yahoo and Bing search results for Oshkosh WI

Big deal so the search works, what makes Bing better or at least different from other sites

From using Bing I have come to notice the little things that just appear on their own. For example, recently I was traveling to a major city, when I connected to the Internet to look for someplace to have lunch and read the news; I noticed that the news page on Bing had the local news pulled off to the top right. The significance of that, for me, was that I did not need to tell the site any information about where I was located. Using my IP address (or the public IP address of where I happened to be connecting) it added local news. Finding a restaurant was also quite nice as Bing returned several results based on where I was located.

Using my Oshkosh WI search from above, I clicked the link for restaurants, and a list of local places with their phone numbers is displayed at the top of the screen. Figure C shows the restaurant results for Oshkosh WI.

Figure C

Places to eat in and around Oshkosh Wi

What else is there… search and?

Bing also allows a user to preview video from any sites if the video is returned as a result. The easiest way to show this would be on the news site. When a video appears in the list of results, clicking the window for the video will play the video right from the search results.

Bing also has a travel section which can help travelers find affordable fares when flying around the world. Using technology from farecast.com and MSN travel, Microsoft has created Bing Travel. This site will help users find the best prices for moving around the world that are available on the web. Figure D shows the opening screen for Bing Travel.

Figure D

Traveling with Bing

Even though the name of the site sounds like a startup created by characters in a 90’s sitcom, the search decision engine created by Microsoft really does get quality results. I encourage all of you to put Bing! Through its paces today.

Using programs like Microsoft Software Assurance and Open Value can help your organization stay up front with both applications and their licensing which is so important for IT administrators to consider.

I am not a licensing expert – yet.  Hopefully in the near future I will get started down that path, simply to help my organization and others better understand the lengthy and very snooze worthy EULA.

Licensing seems to be the glue that either holds the IT organization together or the frustration that causes early baldness in IT pros all over.  I am not sure why the documents are so hard to comprehend (and yes I know that they really aren’t that bad, but you have to read them).

It seems to me that Microsoft (and other organizations) want to get all the possible scenarios into the license so they do not miss anything or leave any loopholes, which is understandable, but the efforts to do so seem to pull all of the trustworthy out of computing.  If you cannot trust your users and have to put huge license agreements out for all products except Bob (surely all of you have seen MS Bob), most aren’t going to read the EULA anyway.  This does two things:

1. gets the user to agree blindly to the terms laid out in the EULA

2. gets the vendor nowhere in terms of its customers understanding the agreements they put out.

One thing I would like to know is where can one go to find materials to learn about how licensing works not to mention get the EULA for a product before purchasing it?  Sure there are sites and books and blogs about licensing, but what training material is out there for the beast?

I do not have a huge issue with licensing other than trying to learn it.  Really it is there to protect the manufacturer and the user and should be followed, but when I saw the Windows Server 2008 Licensing for Dummies hand out at Tech Ed, it made me wonder why would they need to even joke about a Dummies manual for licensing?

Hopefully licensing gets more user friendly in the future, after all the word user is even in the title of the document.  They aren’t called the IT Professional License Agreement.

Have any of you found a good tactic for learning more about licensing or a way to gain from reading product EULAs?  If so, post in the comments or contact me, I would be interested in finding out how others handle it.

Update: Poll added below

[poll id="6"]

The site contains webcasts of sessions to build your knowledge as well as links to valuable blogs and other sites that might be of value to you or those in your communities that are trying to grow in the Information Technology field.

Many statistics today focus on those who have been displaced from a career and are looking for work and thrive is moving this way at the present time as well, hopefully in the future some material or webcasts involving educational institutions and career offices to help those coming out of college find things in the IT field that will better their careers or skill sets.

I strongly encourage you to check out Thrive if you haven’t already. If you have been there, there are new links and resources coming every day to help broaden your skills and increase your career opportunities.

If anyone has any suggestions for things that might help improve the site or increase the resources available please post them in the comments and I will make sure to pass them along.

The overall experience of Tech Ed has been wonderful.  Lots of sessions (too many to get to everything) but a little of something for everyone.

Unable to attend Tech Ed this year?  Never fear, the majority of sessions and content are being made available as a subscription at Tech Ed Online.

There have been some great sessions about Windows 7, specifically for me App-Locker and Bit Locker to go.  New features of Windows 2008 R2 have been introduced, File Classification Infrastructure (more on that soon).

The sessions have been great.

So why attend Tech Ed or get access to Tech Ed online?

Tech Ed allows learning from SMEs and the ability to meet with both Microsoft employees and third party experts who can help you solve issues that you are having.  Because the content from sessions is downloadable making it tangible and available whenever you need it.

Sure, it is only Tuesday and there are three days left of Tech Ed, but there are lots of reasons to make the investment in Microsoft Tech Ed.  The sessions will teach you technical and functionality, but they can also help you deal with Business Decision Makers and getting them on board.

I will be looking at Virtualization in my organization using some of the things I learned and worked with TechEd.  Thanks Microsoft, the opportunity was amazing.