For 84% of all organizations, Active Directory is the cornerstone of their networking infrastructure. Heavy investments in Active Directory technologies have enabled them to achieve authentication, authorization, auditing and centralized management goals, by leveraging Domain Controllers, PKI, Rights Management Services, Federation and Group ...

I’ve seen a couple of vendors release backup products, specifically targeted at Hyper-V. Some solutions utilize the Hyper-V Volume Shadow Service (VSS) writer to make backups. The big question, however, is whether this type of backup is of any use to backup Domain Controllers for disaster recovery. Over the years, we’ve seen a lot of issues ...

This page contains the following whitepaper: Host-Based Backups and Restores of Domain Controllers How to be effective in backing up and restoring virtual Domain Controller with host-based backup solutions Title:Host-Based Backups and Restores of domain Controllers How to be effective in backing up and restoring virtual Domain ...

Microsoft has included numerous features in Active Directory the last couple of years. Also, more and more technologies in products like Exchange Server, SharePoint Server and the Windows client (Windows Vista, Windows 7) have an Active Directory opt-in to store information in Active Directory. All this bountiful integration, however, comes with ...

Active Directory relies on accurate time for a number of reasons. One of this reasons is Kerberos authentication, which by nature can only cope with a difference in time (time skew) of five minutes between the Kerberos server and client. Now, don’t get me wrong. I think the time skew limitation and the overall Kerberos implementation as we know ...

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, ...

A while ago Microsoft announced to make the release of Windows Server 2008 R2 and further Windows Server releases 64bit-only. (both x86-64 and IA64) Windows Server 2008 R2 Server Core is even the first Microsoft Windows Server to optionally include 32bit support… Most systems administrators have no problem with Microsoft going 64bit-only. These ...

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 ...

In the recent days I've been enjoying seeing Mark Wilson slinging good information on Active Directory design online on his (we)blog, based on the MCS Talks: Active Directory design considerations, part 1: Introduction Active Directory design considerations, part 2: Forest and domain design  Active Directory design considerations, part 3: ...

You might be running Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2003 R2 Domain Controllers at the moment and you're looking to replace these servers with Windows Server 2008 Domain Controllers to utilize the new features of Windows Server 2008. You might also be looking to replace your aging Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2003 R2 Domain ...