Posts Tagged ‘Windows 8 Server’

Want some free Windows 8 training?

Thursday, May 24th, 2012

Earlier this year I attended MVPNation in Seattle in March.  During this conference, a number of MVPs across various disciplines, presented sessions around Windows 8 and Windows 8 server that gave a deeper insight to anything that Microsoft had previously done.  This content is now being made available for free by SMBNation (the conference organisers).  So if you want to check out a heap of deep content on Windows 8 and Windows 8 server, take a look here

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My Windows 8 Server keeps crashing…

Monday, April 9th, 2012

Sounds pretty horrific doesn’t it.  One of my servers I’ve got here is running the Windows 8 Server Developer Preview version and this morning, it started to spontaneously reboot every 2 hours.  This worried me initially as it has been 1000% rock solid since it’s installation.  I dug into the event logs and the first thing I noticed was that it happened every 2 hours without fail.  That told me it was something scheduled.  I did some more digging and found that in fact it was a scheduled expiration of Windows 8 Server Developer Preview that was due to expire on April 8th (ok it’s April 9th here in Australia, but you get my point).

This Microsoft KB here also shows how to get a hotfix via Windows Update that will extend the expiration date through to Jan 15, 2013 – far longer than I need.  In fact, next week I’m reinstalling this system with the latest Windows Server 8 beta, so it won’t be an issue.  Installing this hotfix however got around the issue for me for the moment.

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I wonder how much of this will be in the next version of SBS?

Tuesday, January 10th, 2012

Microsoft are doing their bit at CES this week to show the world how great Windows 8 will be and how much we all will need it.  Windows 8 from a client desktop perspective certainly has some great new features that will be of great use to single person computer environments – what I mean here is the scenarios where we have one user to one desktop computer. 

I’m wondering how much of it however is relevant to the next version of Small Business Server?  Look at the Windows 8 Start screen shown in this video below.  How much of that would be relevant when shown on an SBS Server screen?  Would it be relevant at all?  What would you show in the active tiles?  What would be a risk to security to show there?

Or how about the Windows Phone stuff shown here – some of you will know that Microsoft have already produced a cool plugin for Windows Phone 7 to allow it to connect to your SBS 2011 essentials server and that’s great – but what about the resellers/vars – how much can they use this technology?

 

What about the apparent success of the IOS – iPhones/iPads – will the next version of SBS work with them?

I don’t have the answers to this – not right now, but it’s all got me wondering.  With so much being controlled by touch screens and active tiles and the like, how much of that is really relevant to our current SBS servers?  Will we have to rethink how we do things to accommodate these technology advances or will we simply let them slide by?  Time will tell and when I do have answers and I can talk about it, you can bet I’ll be posting it here.

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SBSfaq.com runs the office on Windows Server 8 with Hyper-V

Monday, December 19th, 2011

That’s it – it’s done.  All virtualised servers for SBSfaq.com (aside from our public website) are now running on Windows 8 Hyper-V.

Yes – I know that Microsoft have said do not run this in production, but I am taking steps to minimise the risk so that I can learn the technology that will be the basis for whatever Microsoft does in the SMB market over the next few years.  SBSfaq.com has a couple of servers – there’s our main SBS server, a W2008R2 Terminal Server, a W2008R2/SQL Server, and then a couple of additional servers for monitoring the network and things like that.  A few weeks back, I moved over all of the servers with the exception of the SBS server to the Windows 8 with Hyper-V.  Yesterday I moved over the SBS server to it and it’s running faster than ever and has been stable for the past 24 hours.  I actually didn’t want to move it just yet, but a sudden bout of hardware instability in the old server forced my hand sooner than I had planned.

Now – I get to play with more cool stuff.  I’m going to dig into Hyper-V Replica as a means for helping our clients at Correct Solutions to have a very cool way to have redundancy in their network at an affordable price.  I’ll share some of my experiences here as they happen and as I’m permitted by the NDA I’ve signed with Microsoft.

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Windows 8 – File Transfer

Wednesday, December 14th, 2011

One of the things I love about the new Windows 8 server that is available for testing from Microsoft is the file copy dialog box and the graphing it shows you.

Below I’m copying a 500GB file from a W2008R2 server over to my Windows 8 test system.  It gives me not only the time remaining, but also an indication of the speed of the transfer.

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If you run Task Manager, you can dig into things more still with deal data on the NIC and it’s performance.

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My 1GB NIC is getting a bit of a workout Smile

And you know what is really cool about this…. the 1 hour estimate actually was about 1 hour!!!

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Windows 8 Preview Build out now

Wednesday, September 14th, 2011

Yes – after all the hype and fanfare, Microsoft are releasing the preview build of Windows 8 today via MSDN.  You can find out more here.

I’ve had a chance to play with it over the last few months as I’m on the TAP program with my other business Correct Solutions.  I can only say that I’m blown away with not only what the desktop version offers, but also the things they’ve been working on for the Windows 8 Server systems too.  Long story short – if you are an IT Professional, then you will want to get your hands on this goodness ASAP and start to become familiar with it.  It’s not going to be released as a final product tomorrow or anything, but you DO NEED TO GET ACROSS THIS.

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