Microsoft Windows Server Hybrid Architectures and Solutions
This article discusses all available Windows licensing options. It includes description of the features of open licensing, SPLA, CSP, VDA and RDS licensing. Open licensing The Open licensing scheme provides an one-off purchase of Windows Server licenses and the customer must buy the Software Assurance (SA) maintenance contract separately on additional cost. The SA is ... Read more
Introduction When designing a new file server in a Windows Server environment, you need to take into account a series of design factors in order to properly finalize your implementation. This article provides Windows file server design considerations. Design factors There are a lot of Windows file server design considerations. The following general design factors ... Read more
This post is also available in my podcast. This blog post discusses Windows User Profiles and Folder Redirection options. It is recommended to also review my separate article on Windows File server design considerations. Introduction There are various technologies available in Windows client and server operating systems for managing user profiles and folder redirection in ... Read more
This post discusses recommended services for on-prem virtualization infrastructures. The post is also available in my podcast. When deploying an on-premises virtualization infrastructure (which could also be thought of as a private cloud with the sole customer being the enterprise/organization itself) there are services and server roles which should be considered in order to achieve ... Read more
Windows Controlled Folder Access policy overview The Windows Controlled Folder Access policy can be set in an RDS-based or other enterprise environment via GPO. The policy requires at least Windows Server 2019 or Windows 10 1709 version. The policy enables various filesystem level security countermeasure against common malware attacks. The policy can be found in ... Read more
This article provides Dell server and storage capacity planning resources. When designing server and storage solutions from Dell, the following Web resources are highly useful:
This post is also available in audible format on my podcast. The post discusses the most common and widely used data exchange formats. There are various scenarios in which both software and systems engineers need a way to exchange data between users, systems, scripts and applications using mutually understandable protocols and formats. The most widely ... Read more
A Citrix health checklist can assist when reviewing an environment for configurations that might cause future problems, not necessarily existing problems. Health Checks tend to focus on non-functional qualities like the following: Carl Stalhood has put together a very useful health checklist article for Citrix environments. The health check list covers the following Citrix components ... Read more
Introduction to troubleshooting DNS and network issues This article discusses troubleshooting DNS and network issues. The article describes how to use the dig and nslookup tools to test DNS settings and troubleshoot name resolution issues. Microsoft Windows uses nslookup, while Mac OS X and Linux use dig. You can use these tools to determine the IP address associated with ... Read more
