While upgrading your Active Directory Domain Controllers, Domain Functional Level(s) and Forest Functional Level to Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2 offer additional functionality compared to previous versions, also a couple of caveats exist, that I think you should be aware of. In this blogpost: NT 4.0 Compatible Encryption ...

You know, in terms of deploying servers in a smart way, so you can actually utilize them for as long as their economical lifecycle in a supported fashion without a need to reinstall them, I’ve made a stupid decision in advising IT Pros to deploy Server Core Domain Controllers in the last two years. The problem, you see, is the product team ...

Server Core installations of Windows Server 2008 can be utilized in a variety of ways. I’ve written about using them as Web 2.0 Servers with IIS 7, PHP and MySQL, as Streaming media (reverse) proxies, as branch office servers, loaded with DFS, DNS, DHCP and secured with BitLocker Drive Encryption and of course using them as highly-optimized ...

Microsoft has published a document titled “SYSVOL Replication Migration Guide: FRS to DFS Replication” to the Download server today. The 52-page 416KB weighing document outlines how to get from using File Replication Service (FRS) replication to Distributed File System Replication(DFS-R) for the SYSVOL folder. Since DFS-R offers more performance, ...

On Patch Tuesday for June 2009 (yesterday, June 9, 2009) Microsoft released security bulletin MS09-18 yesterday to address a vulnerability in Active Directory and Active Directory Application Mode (ADAM) that could allow remote code execution. It’s should not come as a shock Microsofts Active Directory and Active Directory Application Mode ...

Microsoft products cover a multitude of technologies, and thus are managed by a multitude of management attitudes, vision and scenarios. In the past Microsoft products lacked a common vision on management, but Microsoft is slowly changing this. All Windows Server products will be manageable through: Server Manager (locally on Full ...

Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 Enterprise and Datacenter Edition offers the ability to make virtual machines highly available by leveraging failover clustering. This however is not a good idea in the case of Active Directory Domain Controllers. In this post I’ll explain why Hyper-V High Availability for Domain Controllers is not a good idea and ...

The Read-only Domain Controller is one of the new and most existing features of Windows Server 2008. So is Server Core. Combining these two features opens up a whole new world of possibilities for your Active Directory environment. Server Core Domain Controllers are the high-performance low-maintenance brothers of Domain Controllers running on ...

Domain Controller Stickiness is a problem which prevents Active Directory clients to be connected to the best Domain Controller they can be. The root cause of this problem is once an Active Directory client found a Domain Controller (using DNS) it would store the name of that Domain Controller in its DC Locator cache and keep using that Domain ...

One of the fun things I get to do is co-organizing the Flaming Dog Lanfestival, where my main responsibility is to design, build and manage the networking infrastructure. About the Flaming Dog Lanfestival Last year Michiel de Jongh and I organized the Flaming Dog Lanfestival for the first time. This event is sponsored by OGD, our employer. In ...