Management Technologies in Windows Server 2008 – by Ranjana Jain (IT Pro Evangelist, MS India)
- Session talked briefly on Power-Shell, Server Manager, Windows Server 2008 Core, Windows Remote Management (WinRMI)
- Server Manager allows you to manage everything in one Window:
- Event Viewer has a collector service to get events from other servers and bring them in one place. Also tasks can be activated when an event happens.
- Task manager with more features is integrated with server manager
- Reliability Manager is integrated with service manager, which tells what happened / how reliable was the server on a time scale.
- Windows Server core – only a Command Prompt (The WOW stops here). Four core services – DNS/DHCP/Active Directory/File Services and I suppose she missed to mention the recently added IIS.
- Just Starts the Command Line
- To Set an IP adddress
- See the Interfaces: NetSh Interface ipv4 show interfaces
- netsh interfaces ipv4 set address name=4 address …
- To add to a domain: NetDom Join /domain:contoso /user:Administrator *
- WinRMI – how to do things remotely including remote machines’ IP address.
- Power Shell
- Create and access process like Notepad as a .NET Variable
- Access Registry store as a drive like HKLM:
- Winrm command to execute remote commands
- WinRS command to create a remote shell
- Instead of asking all the questions before installing, it takes a different approach, it takes default and then after reboot presents with a list of activities where it asks questions
- Once setup, then the only window opens up – Server Manager. it presents everything including PerfMon.
- Now Active Directory service can be stopped and started
What’s new in Windows Mobile 6.0 by Loke Uei
- .NET Compact Framework 2.0 SP2 installed in ROM
- 20% Performance improvement
- Easy to send and receive SMS
- SQL Compact Edition installed in ROM
- Support for AJAX in Pocket IE
- New native APIs – allow you to play WMA/MP3, Ink Platform
- WISP Lite ported from Tablet PC
- New Windows Mobile 6 SDK, One tool for developing native and managed code – VS 2008
- A good session to check from MEDC DVD – ILL303: Data Replication Session on how to repliace between thousands of clients with SQL CE with SQL Server
- Windows Mobile 6.0 has 3 editions – Standard (Smartphone with no touch screen), Professional (Pocket PC with touch Screen) & Classic. Also in Pro, all applications run in priveleged mode (One-tier), Standard has multiple tiers
- You can use Security Configuration Manager to setup security and install parameters
- You have a FakeGPS, Cellular Emulator (Fake Voice Calls), FakeServer (If you need to call a Web Service but right now not connected to the server), Hopper in the SDK Tools
- Cellular Emulator allows you to do calls to the emulator, fake reject calls, send SMS etc from PC to emulator
- An interesting point was of his boss doing Elbow testing, where by he asks you to be away and pushes his elbow on the keyboards. Similarly Hopper is a great random testing tool
- He demoed an application where by his device will send the current GPS coordinates by SMS to his wife. His wife can see where in the world he is, in a map
- You can get GPS Position, Check whether device is currently in Roaming (or not, then decide to make a call/data connection)
- You can monitor SMS and take actions based on the SMS contents
Windows Cardspace by Vineet Gupta (Microosft India)
- Talked about the basics of cryptography, WS Trust (Implemented by WCF), WS-MetadataExchange, WS Security Policy (Implemented by WCF), Security Token Service (AD and ADFS) and Consistent user experience (Implemented by Windows CardSpace)
IIS 7.0 Overview by Vinod Kumar (Microsoft India)
- Vinod started as usual brilliantly but the title came up as an Overview session – he too emphasized on that, so I got out. Sorry Vinod :-)
High Availability in MS Exchange Server 2007 & SP1 by Rajat Choudhary (Microsoft India)
- Server roles other than Mailbox:
- Deploy multiple Hub Transport Server in each site
- Deploy multiple Edge Transport Server and use round robin DNS to load balancing
- Client Access Server – NLB or 3rd Party Load balancing
- Unified Messaging Server
- High Availability for Mailbox Server
- Local Continous Replication – Secondary copy of the mailbox on the same device. Works on Log Shipping Mechanism, async with a bit of time lag
- Cluster Continuous Replication: Stretch your subnet over VLAN. Doesn’t require Shared Storage (Reduced Cost), Automatic Recovery, Witness on Hub Transport. Can be replicated between two storage on the same machine or between two different machines
- Single copy Cluster – Shared Storage Model. Up to 8-node Active/Passive, Active/Active Cut. Only Mailbox role can be clustered, other roles can be clustered using previously technologies
- Something on Transport Dumpster being 1.5 times the size of maximum mail store, I didn’t understand it
Strategies for Disaster recovery for Exchange Server 2007 by my good friend Venkatesh Ramakrishnan (Microsoft India)
- Strategy should be Effective, Efficient, Granular
- A well defined step by step procedure for backup and restore of Exchange Server 2007 when server damaged by a disaster
- Dependent Tasks: Which data is backed up depends on which Exchange Server 2007 role you have installed; The data you decide to backup as a part of the disaster recovery strategy determines the recovery process
- Cricitical Inputs: Knowing what you may have to recover from, Consider your SLA, Understanding the way Exchange Database works and the dependency on Active Directory. For example: Exchange Server 2007 is purely a 64bit subsystem
- Backup of Exchange in your organization is a necessary operational tasks. Verify the backup and restore process in a test environment. Once in production, you should periodically check restoring the backups to the test environment
- Depending on the resources, your test environment can be a Virtual Hardware
- When do you “Repair” and when do you “Restore”. Simple rule of thumb – any component which you will like to bring it to previous state without brining back the offline copy, use “Repair”. Else “Restore”
- Planning the scenario’s : Recover a permanently deleted mail item, recover a mailbox, recover an information store, receover a server with a specific role, recover a mailbox server & finally recover from total site failure
- For brick level backup (each item level) – leverage Recovery Storage Groups, allows you to keep a second copy of the mounted exchange store
- Go for a Streaming Backup or VSS (Shadow) backup so that you have backups at a point in time
- Even if you are doing Online backup, do an Offline backup as well
Finally, the whole day kept going, even at 7PM they had last but one session in Track 1 going on and on. I decided to call it a day. Then I got stuck in Mumbai traffic for 90 minutes for the 10 mins journey from Renaissance Powai to Hotal Rodas in Powai, with rains pouring.