To get the best performance out of VMware’s iSCSI initiator it’s a good idea to enable jumbo frames on the ESX hosts.  First configure a new vSwitch dedicated to the iSCSI network and if you’re doing this in the GUI delete the default port group that is created.

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  With Windows 7 public availability around the corner, ADNS will be making the move this Friday.  We will report our experiences on this blog with all aspects from upgrades (Vista only) and new installations.

Majority of our workstations are Dell Vostro 400s, so we should not have any issues meeting the recommended system requirements.

Here are some specs to help get you ready:

Minimum requirements-

• 1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
• 1 gigabyte (GB) RAM (32-bit) or 2 GB RAM (64-bit)
• 16 gigabyte available hard disk space (32-bit) or 20 GB (64-bit)
• DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver

Check back Friday 8/7 for part 1: Installation.

It never hurts to have a quick reference for Linux administration commands, so I wanted to put out some helpful items for user, file, directory, and group management.

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As Windows Server 2008 takes it’s place in more data centers, serving as a domain controller, design changes are starting to impact end users.

One of these notable changes effects a workflow most users have picked up: browsing the network to find file servers and shares.

We have seen more and more customers call in with an error similar to below (wording may differ from client to client):

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After installing WSS3 SP2 on a clean install of Server 2008 x86 SP2 STD, and using SQL 2008 SP1 as the backend, I could not get any search results.  The setup is about as simple of a farm installation you can get, it is for a small number of users, and demonstration purposes, so everything is installed on a single machine virtualized on an HP server running VMware ESXi 3.5.  There are two site collections using different application pools, one enabled for anonymous access, and the other not.

The search service is common to both, but the crawl account (data access) is unique.

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!IMPORTANT!

All installations of Microsoft Office Server 2007 that have installed SP2 for SharePoint Services are affected by the following bulletin.  In short, it has reset your license key putting the product in trial mode, and it will expire in 180 days without notice.  See the below article for the resolution, and more details.

http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/05/21/attention-important-information-on-service-pack-2.aspx

The setup: Server 2003 R2 SP2, DC & DNS Roles, WSUS SP1 Fresh install, default website (80).

The issue: No status  reported by clients (Servers and workstations), Event ID 13042 in the Application logs on the WSUS server Self-update is not working.

After researching, I came across these 2 forums:

http://www.microsoft.com/communities/newsgroups/en-us/default.aspx?pg=2&p=1&tid=853e8bb5-71c7-4bee-9392-d75dbbf21c6b&dg=microsoft.public.windowsupdate

http://blogs.msdn.com/jjameson/archive/2008/04/08/wsus-clients-failing-with-error-0×80244019-after-installing-wsus-sp1.aspx

The articles were close, but both addressed installing SP1 POST a typical WSUS 3 install, mine was a fresh install at the customer’s site.  (more…)