A new white paper on how Microsoft IT is combining Hyper-V and SQL Server has just been published. This comes from a team that provides thousands of SQL Server instances for internal applications. It includes a lot of interesting new information, including results of specific tests they performed to...

  The 2009 Worldwide Partner Conference is coming later in the year (July 13–16 in New Orleans), but the WPC Awards program is already opened for nomination. If you are a Microsoft Partner with an awesome solution built on Microsoft technologies, it's time to start writing something up. ...

I will be attending an advanced SQL Server training in a couple of weeks and the instructors recommended some pre-reading. I'm sharing here a subset of those recommendations that point to articles and white papers published by Microsoft, grouped by category: Database Storage TechNet Library Whitepap...

Microsoft keeps a number of scripting examples at the Technet Scripting Center. These are mostly focused at administrators that need to write code every once in a while, as opposed to the MSDN references, focused mostly at full-time developers. If you are an IT Administrator and you have exhausted y...

There is a new book on "Understanding Microsoft Virtualization Solutions" by Mitch Tulloch with the Microsoft Virtualization Teams,available from Microsoft Press as a download.  At 400 pages and 15MB, this PDF file covers Server Virtualization (Hyper-V), Virtual Machine Manager (VMM),...

I got a question today: Can you convert an existing MBR disk to GPT? This is about the partitioning style of a disk, with MBR being the older one (limited to 2TB) and GPT being the newer one (going up to 18EB). Keep in mind that the GPT partitioning style is not recognized by all previous versi...

Data Protection Manager 2007 is a Microsoft solution that can protect the data in your servers. Combining VSS technologies with DPM-specific code, it provides an easy way to create consistent snapshots of your server’s data at regular intervals. You can later easily restore that data to any of tho...

The Tolly Group, Inc. has just released a new 39-page report on the SMB2 performance improvements in Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. Title: Enhanced Network Performance with Microsoft Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 - Update Abstract: With the release of the Windows Vista client operati...

The presentations from the SDC 2008 are now publicly available for download. This SNIA event happened in Santa Clara, CA on September 22-25 and the decks are now available to everyone, after being restricted to conference attendees for a few months.  Out of the dozens of presentations...

I had the pleasure to deliver yesterday a TechNet Webcast on "Windows Server 2008 File and Storage Solutions", which also included details on the upcoming Windows Server 2008 R2. That webcast is now available on-demand (for streaming or download), via http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.as...