I just received confirmation on speaking at the UK Virtual Machine User Group (VMUG) Meeting in the Hilton Doubletree hotel in London on Tuesday May 21, 2013. I will be delivering my session on virtualization-safe(r) Active Directory and Domain Controller Cloning. The same session I have been delivering for the past year at numerous events, ...

Microsoft introduced the VM-GenerationID in Windows Server 2012, to enable Virtual Machines (VMs) to notice when they’re snapshotted, restored and/or cloned. Active Directory is the first technology to put the VM-GenerationID to good use. The following Hypervisors support VM-GenerationID: Windows Server 2012 Standard Edition (Hyper-V) ...

Windows 8 offers many new  features, compared to Windows XP, Windows Vista and even Windows 7. Some of these features are fantastic, but come with a top of the bill hardware price tag. In this blogpost I’ll explain why you’ll need to scour the specifications of your hardware components for these five acronyms: Note: Of course, ...

Designing and implementing an Hyper-V environment can be challenging. Placement of Active Directory Domain Controllers requires additional consideration, especially in Hyper-V Failover Cluster scenarios where Active Directory membership for the cluster nodes is strictly needed. Windows Server 2012, in Active Directory terms, is a big step ...

For a while, Microsoft’s KnowledgeBase article 976424, titled Error code when the kpasswd protocol fails after you perform an authoritative restore: "KDC_ERROR_S_PRINCIPAL_UNKNOWN", has been available to solve issues with unexpected behavior after authoritatively restoring  the krbtg account on Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server ...

In the previous blogpost in this series I discussed virtualization-aware Active Directory. With the use of the newly introduced VM-GenerationID, virtual Domain Controllers can now detect when they are reverted back to an earlier state or when their virtual hard disk is reused. Let’s look into the latter scenario a bit. In Windows Server 2008 R2 ...

In organizations with different teams being responsible for Active Directory management and management of the virtualization/hypervisor layer, it is not uncommon to seriously damage contents in Active Directory with snapshots. Virtualization Admins can easily cripple Active Directory by reverting a snapshot of a virtual Active Directory Domain ...

Windows Server 2012 can be seen as a major release for Windows Server. Not just in terms of virtualization (Hyper-V 3.0), storage (SMB 3.0 and Storage Spaces) or manageability, but also in terms of Active Directory. There’s a load of new features, improving the lives of many Active Directory admins! Active Directory Domain Services sees a lot of ...

This week I got the chance to work with some x86 High Performance Computing hardware at the Donald Smits Center for Information Technology (CIT) at the University of Groningen. Their hardware typically contains more than 64 logical processors and TBs of RAM. 10Gb/s interconnects and loads of Solid State Disks (SSDs) are also not very uncommon in ...

Today, Daniel van Soest and Rik van Berendonk visited the University of Groningen to play with Windows Server 2012 on some serious systems. Serious systems When I talk ‘serious systems’ I’m talking about a fully-fledged HP ProLiant DL980G7 and a Dell PowerEdge R910. The first system was equipped with 8 10-core processors (160 logical ...