George Chetcuti Blog

With Windows Explorer you can manage disk quotas in Windows Servers 2008 without the need of invoking the Quota management console, although the console remains the recommended tool.
To configure disk quotas on a computer using Windows Explorer follow these steps:
Open Windows Explorer and right click the disk you want to configure quotas for and select Properties.
From the disk properties window, select the Quota tab.
Check the Enable quota management box as show below:

Select the Limit disk space to option and specify the limit and warning thresholds. Users are not notified when they exceed the limit.
Select the Log event when a user exceeds their quota limit and/or warning level check box/s to add an event in the System event log when this occurs. An event ID of 36 from source NTFS indicates that a user has reached the warning level and an ID of 37 indicates that a user has reached the quota limit. If you want to get notified when these events occur you need to use event triggers to send an email to your inbox or run a specific program.
When you select the option Deny disk space to users exceeding quota limit, users will be unable to save or update files when they exceed their quota limit. This may harm users' productivity and should be used with caution. I suggest that you set up appropriate warning thresholds and event triggers so that you can follow up before the user is blocked.
The Quota Entries… button allows you to view the current disk usage. In this window you can double click a user to configure a user specific quota that differs from the default settings for the disk.

When a volume on Windows Servers is found to be corrupted, NTFS schedules a Chkdsk operation for the next reboot. This is done by invoking Autochk.exe during startup. From personal experience you can tell that reboots occur for many reasons such as, in the event of Windows updates and an inadvertent delay is caused if an Autochk is scheduled. Although, it is highly recommended not to delay fixing dirty volumes but you may need to perform a quick server reboot and fix the volume manually after the system is up and running. Server administrators can choose to not delay the boot up process by turning off checking the data volumes at reboot time. This is performed by using the chkntfs command and will allow you to include specific volumes. In addition, the setting is persistent across all reboots hence, you need to invoke the command again to restore the default behavior.
For the full list of options type chkntfs /? as shown below:

To improve Chkdsk performance Microsoft updated this tool with a better caching mechanism where larger blocks are now handled. By caching larger blocks of the disk in RAM, Chkdsk execution time is reduced. In addition, this feature also reduces the need to re-access data from the disk thus impacting positively on I/O time. As you can appreciate, the benefits gained by the new caching mechanism will cause an increase in memory consumption. Therefore, a server that is tight on memory space may see no performance improvement as regards to Chkdsk execution times.
You may be under the impression that the bigger the volume size is, the longer the execution time is, but reviewing Microsoft's benchmarks shows that the size of the volume is the lowest factor. The number of files in the volume has the highest burden on the Chkdsk execution time while available memory is second. Actually, the results show that the volume size has no effect on the execution time of Chkdsk.
The same results show that Windows Servers 2008 R2 Chkdsk is faster than the Ch

The new look and feel experience of IE 9 and other benefits I was enjoying were cut short as I started to encounter various problems during my day-to-day work. There are many web applications that are not fully compatible with the latest html standards and hence, I had to switch IE 9 to compatibility mode many times and in some case even to Software Rendering mode. The major setback is with web publication software such as, wordpress where some controls in the admin console do not function and prevent you from performing the most basic things. For example with wordpress the control to insert, edit or remove a hyperlink is completely dead while writing content and doing basic formatting in text boxes turned out to be an impossible task.
Switching IE 9 to compatibility mode may help you avoid some issues with content publishing systems and you can find Compatibility View in the Tools menu but you need to display the Tools menu first as this is hidden by default. To show the command bar you need to right click the topmost row next to the websites' tabs and select Command bar. Then from the Tools menu, select Compatibility View.
To enable Software Rendering Mode go to Internet Options in the Tools menu, and on the Advanced tab check the Use software rendering instead of GPU rendering box under the Accelerated graphics section. This option may show some graphics that were previously failing to load or causing rendering problems. Running IE 9 in Software rendering mode may result in performance degradation and Microsoft recommends users to install the latest video driver that supports GPU hardware acceleration, and switch to IE 9 native GPU hardware acceleration.

Network Monitor is a free tool available from Microsoft. You can capture data using either the graphical Network Monitor or the command-line NMCap tool. Analysis of the captured data must be done through the graphical interface. As network traffic is in abundance especially on busy servers, you would need to use filters to reduce the number of packets collected and remove the packets not related to the application you are examining. This blog post is about a typical troubleshooting scenario using NMCap where we use a DNS capture filter as to find out what is breaking our DNS test environment.
We will capture DNS traffic from a client workstation in a domain while pinging valid and inexistent external web servers, and also when our DNS services are down! The Network Monitor tool is installed on a domain controller which happens to be the DNS server as well. For these tests we will use the following syntax:
NMCap /network * /capture "DNS" /StopWhen /TimeAfter 2 min /file DNS.cap
Where we are saving our captured data in a file called DNS.cap located in c:\Prorgam Files\Microsoft Network Monitor\ and only DNS related traffic will be collected for a period of 2 minutes.
Now, from the client workstation we ping a valid URL such as, windowsecurity.com for several times or using the ping –t option. You can also use the command nslookup www.windowsecurity.com. After the 2 minute period, go to Network Monitor and open dns.cap. You should be able to verify the complete path of the DNS requests from the client to the DNS server to the gateway and vice-versa as shown below:

The request completed successfully and this means that the client can resolve domain names without any problems. There is no need to go into much detail, it is sufficient to select each frame and verify its DNS query flag! As shown above, the first frame represents the DNS request from the client (192.168.100.2) to the DNS server (192.168.100.2) ending with a success query flag. The s

The answer to this question is not easy and I reckon that no one should try to answer it for you without having full knowhow and understanding of your present IT infrastructure! Your organization needs to research the Cloud Infrastructure and related costs and finally compare the results against the on-premise setup. The research should include hands-on experience and test runs of some of the organizations’ critical services with adequate sample data. To help you with the feasibility study Microsoft has made available an online Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) calculator:
“Use the Windows Azure platform TCO calculator, and in 10 minutes or less, you’ll see how Windows Azure compares to on-premises solutions, quantify migration costs, and get a pricing overview.”
This is a recommended starting point, why? Since, getting migration and operational costs at an early stage can help senior management to decide whether moving or not to the Cloud (in this specific case to Azure). This would save the IT team from conducting further research and training on the specific solution if the decision by senior management is a no-go! They can skip to next solution or provider. So, I suggest do the costs homework first!
The costs calculator will help you determine the right Windows Azure Platform and provide a pricing overview, help you quantify the migration costs to the Cloud infrastructure and application delivery costs.
The cost analysis are based on the company’s industry, location, services/applications required and specs, user requirements, user and application growth and foreseeable intermittent spikes, etc. As you can see, the tool gathers quite a number of elements in order to compute an accurate estimate. The Windows Azure platform TCO calculator can be found here.

OneClick version of Network Monitor is a quick solution that allows you to capture network traffic from a Windows computer without the need of installing the complete Network Monitor package. Still, you need Network Monitor installed on a separate computer in order to able to analyze the saved data. This tool is useful for customer support scenarios.
The two One Click Packages available are the Autorun package and the ExtractOnly package. Autorun: Running this utility will install Network Monitor 3.1 (NM3.1) on your machine (if you do not already have a previous version of NM3) and begin capturing. The capture will terminate after 2 hours, or if you press the 'x' key on your keyboard. If you did not have NM3 on your machine previously, NM3.1 will subsequently be uninstalled.
– Save the Autorun.exe file to your machine, right click on the exe and select "Run as administrator".
ExtractOnly: Use the ExtractOnly package if you want to save the OneClick utility to a portable device, e.g., a USB key and later run the tool on a different machine. The extract only package will extract all the necessary files needed to run One Click to a user-specified destination folder. If you place the files on the root of a flash drive, One Click will run automatically when you insert the drive. You can also run One Click by double clicking the file "OneClick.cmd" in the destination folder.
– For ExtractOnly.exe, right click on the file OneClick.cmd which is extracted to your destination folder, and select "Run as administrator".

Note, if you get an "Access Denied" error when running the utility then you need to run One Click as an administrator. In addition, you can run OneClick if NM3 is already installed or you are a member of the Netmon Uses group.

The Network Monitor tool is not included with Windows default installations hence, you need to download it from Microsoft Download Center and run the installer on a target machine. The tool installs a network driver with each network adapter in order to be able to collect data. Using the equivalent command line tool NMCap requires you change directory to c:\Program Files\Microsoft Network Monitor 3\ which is the default installation folder. Then from the command prompt type:
Nmcap /? – to get a full list of options, for example:
Nmcap /network * /capture /file filename.cap – captures all traffic on all network interfaces and saves it to a file named filename.cap
Press Ctrl+C to stop the capturing process. You can then analyze the data captured using the Network Monitor tool by clicking the Open Capture button form the tool's main page.
Analyzing network data is best done expanding the frame details pane of the captured data as shown below:

Both the GUI Network Monitor and the command line NMCap require the Network Monitor driver to be installed hence, I suggest installing the complete tool prior to its usage. If your environment does not allow you to install the complete package, then another version exists which allows you to quickly capture traffic on a computer. Network Monitor OneClick which available from here, removes itself automatically once the capture is complete! Use the ExtractOnly package if you want to save the OneClick utility to a portable device, e.g., a USB key and later run the tool on a different machine.

Performance Monitor is a great tool for identifying performance bottlenecks! You can identify the source of performance problems that make your system performs slow or sometimes completely unusable. Performance Monitor is best suited when you are collecting performance statistics over a period of time such as, when users on regular basis report system degradation at specific times. You can set a number of performance counters (system components to monitor) related to your specific problem as to allow Performance Monitor to collect and save these data. To use Performance Monitor go to Server manager, expand Diagnostics\Performance\Monitoring Tools and click Performance Monitor. By default the graph is empty that is, no counters are selected to run. You can add counters to the real-time graph by clicking the green plus button on the toolbar. In addition, you can display data from other computers on the network. When monitoring a large number of resources, the real-time graph may become cluttered even though each counter appears in different color, however, selecting on counter from the list below the chart and pressing Ctrl+H would show the selected counter in bold and black. Other options are available from the top menu such as, change graph type and freeze display.

Although, I recommend that you play around with Performance Monitor to get acquainted with the tool, I would like to mention a couple of useful features. For instance, to save performance data you need to right click the node Performance Monitor on the left hand side and select New\Data Collector Set and follow the Create new data Collector Set wizard. Right clicking the graph and selecting Properties will load the properties page where you can set most of the appearance options. However, an important option is found in the Source tab. When you have set Performance Monitor to save data to a file then the Source tab is the place to go to open that file as your data source. One last note which I find very

I rarely come across systems administrators that use Windows reliability monitor when troubleshooting server or client platforms! I guess we either completely forget about this tool or the issue at hand is so critical that the tool is unavailable or even inadequate. However, I do recommend administrators to become acquainted with Reliability Monitor and leverage the power of its graphical reporting mechanism. It is ideal when diagnosing intermittent and long-term problems. In a nut shell, the tool tracks the computer stability by keeping track of installations and failures that occur on the machine and rate this activity with a stability index. A stable system is rated with an index towards the value of 10 (optimal stability) while a system with more installations and failures may have its stability index dropping towards a minimum value of 0.
For example, supposedly your system is encountering an intermittent problem and you have no any clue if one of the couple of utilities installed recently is causing the intermittent fault. With Reliability Monitor you can quickly browse both failures and application installations over time and correlate the failures with an application installation! To open Reliability Monitor in Windows 2008 servers, open Server Manager, expand Diagnostics\Performance nodes and click on Monitoring Tools. From the right hand side click More Actions and select View system reliability…

The top portion of the chart of Reliability Monitor shows data for each day or week as set in the View by: option. The rows below the chart show icons for successful and unsuccessful software installations, application failures, hardware failures, windows failures and other problems. To view more details you can select one day from the chart and view the report below the chart.
Reliability Monitor data is collected by the Reliability Analysis Component (RAC) which runs once an hour as a hidden scheduled task. You can view this task by browsing to Configuration

There are a number of tools which give you details about resource utilization on Windows based machines. Detailed reports are best used when digging further down into an existing problem or analyzing a complex problem that requires a lot of details but an ad hoc quick performance check would suffice with few details. Actually, routine quick checks would benefit most when the results are presented visually and contain explicit values that indicate clearly the state of the resource under test. The inbuilt Data Collector Set allows you to execute a quick performance resource test with a clear and indicative overview of results.
The following steps show the simple procedure to run System Performance standard test and find if your server status is optimal or not:

From Server Manager, click and expand Diagnostics\Performance\Data Collector Sets and click System Performance – In Windows 7 computers start Performance Monitor.
Right click System Performance and select Start or click the menu green arrow image – by default, the system will gather information for 1 minute where the green arrow appears and disappears after the 1 minute time-frame.
After the minute passes, right click the System Performance node and select Latest Report – the menu green writing pad image has the same functionality.

Examine the report in particular the Resource Overview for any warnings, such as, high utilization of any component.
     

     

Additionally, by right clicking the report node, and selecting View\Performance Monitor you can load the traditional performance monitor graph and add/remove counters.
     

From the Resource Overview report above, you can easily notice the Memory utilization percentage which according to your specific environment may indicate an increase in resource utilization. A quick look at these high level counters can s