News, Views, and Skews of The Full Circle » Tech

A new (media center) PC test – the Tranquil ixL i5 Power PC…

reubenjcook — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 14:58:56 +0000

Something we rarely talk about on the blog but enthuse and evangilise to many is Windows Media Center. I’ve been building and using Media Center for our primary entertainment system since the days of Window XP Media Center Edition beta’s c.2002-03.

I’ve built several systems for various friends and family over the years, but when our main home media center based on a Shuttle SG36M died due to a PSU failure (also took out the motherboard – a bummer!), it was time to be looking for a new machine (the brightside to the failure I guess! )

As a long time listener of Ian Dixon’s podcast at http://thedigitallifestyle.com I’d heard of Tranquil (http://www.tranquilpc.co.uk) who are based in Manchester. Tranquil produce fanless pieces of highend exotica covering Media Centers, Home Servers, and powerful new Intel i5 based PC’s…

Now Tranquil don’t produce ‘cheap’ kit and fortunately I’m a believer in ‘buy cheap, buy twice’ so £459 + VAT later I’d ordered the ixL i5 Power PC with an Intel i5-650 (and a CD/DVD optical drive).

I got my order in late on Tuesday, and this morning a very nice looking box arrived..

..with a complimentary Boost bar! – how they knew my hangover needed a sugar fix I don’t know, but the experience certainly started great!

Over the weekend I’m looking forward to getting a couple of gigs of 1066Mhz RAM, a Corsair 128GB SSD, and my Hauppauge dual DVB-T in there and seeing how she flys with some test builds.. likely Win7 32-bit and Windows Server 2008 R2 (for testing as a Hyper-V platform plus 64-bit driver support), but first work and clients to see…

Returning at the weekend for my first test built I grabbed a copy of Windows 7 Ultimate (32-bit) which installed painlessly enough, but did list the following as needy of drivers:

Display adapter driver – http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&ProdId=3144&DwnldID=19099&lang=eng
Ethernet (network) driver – http://downloadcenter.intel.com/download.aspx?url=/19059/a08/PROWin32.exe&DwnldId=19059&lang=eng
PCI Serial Port -
PCI Simple Communications Controller (read IR RX) -

With no documentation or driver media in the box, if you’ve ordered anything but a pre-built system you will need to go and find driver support from the web, however as the sytem is based on a current Intel desktop motherboard, the Intel® Desktop Board DH57JG, this is a fairly trivial task.

A visit to http://www.intel.com/products/desktop/motherboards/dh57jg/dh57jg-overview.htm will get you covered with 32 & 64-bit drivers for Windows 7, Vista, XP Pro, plus 32-bit for XP Home, and even Windows XP Media Center Edition (one day I might restore an image of XPMCE as I still have the Compaq D510 SSF PC I used in the first builds back in 2002-3!).

Going for the lazy option I grabbed the network driver first so I could let Windows Update do its worst on the rest – 35 updates later, inc. Intel HD Graphics (Intel listed 15.17.4.2119 as , Microsoft Update provided 8.15.10.2119 – the last digits being significant, the same) and a restart resulted in still needing the PCI Serial Port & Communications Controller (likely the same driver)

At the same time, I’d recommend:

http://www.intel.com/p/en_US/support/highlights/dsktpboards/dh57jg - which includes a link to Automatically detect and update drivers and software
http://www.intel.com/support/detect.htm (the really lazy option – but it works really well, after I’d been struggling getting the audio outputs to work, bar SPDIF)

http://www.intel.com/design/motherbd/software/dolby/index.htm

Chipset: Intel® Chipset Device Software for Intel® Desktop Boards – http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&DwnldID=10884&lang=eng
(this one may also address the PCI Simple Communications Controller / IR reciever, but I’m having no luck just yet…)

Intel® Desktop Utilities for 4 & 5 Series Desktop Boards – http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&DwnldID=18934&lang=eng

Intel® HD Graphics Driver for Windows* Vista and Windows* 7 15.17.7.2141 – http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&ProdId=3144&DwnldID=19099&lang=eng

Audio: Realtek* ALC Audio Driver - http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?DwnldID=19018

I mentioned performance updates coming soon, on Windows 7 32-bit with the above drivers the Performance Information and Tools (Windows Experience Index) gave a rating of 4.8, comprised of:

Processor: 6.9
Memory: 5.5
Graphics: 4.8
Gaming graphics: 5.3
Primary hard disk: 5.9

Hyper-V R2 SP1 Beta testing & Dynamic Memory

reubenjcook — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 06:51:05 +0000

So this week Microsoft released the beta code of SP1, this was one of the many anticipated announcements at the Worldwide Partner Conference this week.

As our business (The Full Circle – www.thefullcircle.com) is a Microsoft Gold Partner that has been involved in Microsoft virtualization since the beginning I thought it was time we were testing Hyper-V with Dynamic Memory! Microsoft’s answer to VMware’s memory over commit allows Hyper-V to dynamically allocated memory to a guest machine from a pool of available memory. This doesn’t allow you to over specify what physically isn’t available (a safer option than over-commit), but it does allow a group of VM’s to more efficiently use memory resource where it is needed – just what is needed for Microsoft to get serious in the VDI space.

So a quick 1.2GB download later (to support Win7 x86 & WS2008R2 IA64 & x64) and you’ve got an ISO to unpack or burn.

1st hurdle on my test install of Hyper-V Server R2 is.. a language blocking issue with the installer reporting ‘Hyper-V Service Pack 1 install has detected unsupported language files’ reporting that Chinese (Traditional) is not supported..

Did I install Chinese? I don’t think so.. well, not intentionally anyway! but checking both our test and live Hyper-V cluster systems revealed that the ‘Chinese (Traditional)’ display language was installed (by default) per:

Fortunately this is a simple fix, as shown in the picture - at a command line (or Task Manager Run) you can access the Region and Language settings control panel by executing ’intl.cpl’, goto Keyboards and Languages, hit the Install/uninstall languages button, and finally select Chinese (Traditional), Next. After a few moments the progress should report ‘Uninstall complete’ and you can close and OK out of the Control Panel app.

Once the language support (or lack of if you wanted Chinese!), re-running setup should run through as below:

And eventually, after the mandatory reboot checking out the Windows version (Task Manager, About, no more winver from the command line in Hyper-V Server or Server Core) should report – Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 Build 7601: Service Pack 1, v.178 – yikes that’s a lowish version, and the Build number is significant up from 7600 (more accurately version 6.1.7600), anyway we are only on test system at the minute! (and without EAP support I think that’s about as far as it should go! )
(more on EAP’s and The Full Circle’s involvment in the development of Hyper-V 2008 R2 at http://blog.thefullcircle.com/2009/11/05/the-full-circle-secures-ascom-network-testing-for-windows-server-2008-r2-early-adopter-program/)

next on to the changes within Hyper-V and hopefully dynamic memory!

Training: 44CO175 – SharePoint 2010 Administrator Bootcamp

ashleylawrence42 — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 08:39:45 +0000

44CO175 – SharePoint 2010 Administrator Bootcamp (BPIO)

Summary
Step-by-step understanding is key to successfully implementing and deploying SharePoint 2010. This 15-module course will guide you through each critical stage, giving you exactly the skills you need to leverage full value from the latest SharePoint technology.

Agenda
Module 0 – Getting Ready for a SharePoint 2010 Implementation: Why Governance and Business Requirements are Essential for a Successful Implementation.
Module 1 – Understanding the Architecture of SharePoint Server 2010
Module 2 – Installing SharePoint Server 2010.
Module 3 – Administrating and Configuring Farm Settings in SharePoint Server 2010
Module 4 – Understanding and Administrating Web applications
Module 5 – Managing Web Applications
Module 6 – Introduction to Site Collections
Module 7 – Creating Site Collections
Module 8 – Managing Site Collections
Module 9 – Working with SharePoint Server 2010 Portals
Module 10 – Governance and Information Assurance
Module 11 – Enterprise Content Types & Managed Metadata
Module 12 – Managing Documents and Records
Module 13 – Workflow
Module 14 – Implementing and Managing Search
Module 15 – People & Social Networking
Module 16 – Disaster Recovery

A handful of notes from the week..

Installation Preparation for Service & Install Accounts

The SharePoint Installation Account

While I’ve become used to installing applications on servers with either the local or domain admin account, SharePoint 2010 really really really needs to have its own account created for the installation process. If you don’t you’ll have to correct the various service and app pool accounts later and that’s a pain.

Key points about the account used to install with -

It will become the application pool account used in IIS for the Central Admin
If you do plan to let SharePoint create your databases (content DBs’ etc…) this account needs rights to the SQL database to create DB’s (DBCreator and DBAdmin)
If DB’s are already created then it only needs DBAdmin
It only needs Local Admin permissions on the installation machine
Not to be used in day-to-day admin
Imagine this account to be “enterprise admin” of SharePoint.
It should never be used again after the initial install, obviously that doesn’t mean disable or delete it.

Example User Account – spinstall

The Farm Admin Account

The farm admin account is an account that should be used by as few people as possible.

It either needs to be a local admin on the SharePoint front end or create a new supper user or login as spinstall(logging in as spinstall is not recommended)
The farm admin account change services running on the machine hence the need for local admin rights, farm admin right in SharePoint central admin isn’t enough

Example User Account - spfarmadmin

During the SharePoint 2010 install

Make sure you move index location during install off from the C:\…\14\data location

This index file is a flat file used in search and can grow very large in next to no time.

After the install – the Configuration Wizard

Do not use it, it doesn’t follow best practice.

Performance Tip for SharePoint databases

Turn off Auto Growth

While it’s been mentioned a thousand times and shouldn’t need to be mentioned…

To prevent it happening in existing installations for any new databases:

SQL Management Studio > Database > Model. Under the file groups section change the properties for .mdf to grow by 50MB at a time

Fixing it for existing databases:

Open the properties of each database and under the file groups section, change the properties for .mdf to grow by 50MB at a time

Note: Why 50MB? Because it’s just right for SharePoint since it aligns with the default maximum upload file size.

Registering Managed Service Accounts for SharePoint 2010

Best practice is to add them here first then start to use them to run services
All are generally fine as just domain user accounts without elevated privileges

Application Pool Accounts in IIS for SharePoint 2010

Never change the app pool account from inside IIS as the config DB will not know about the change, web apps will not know about the change and new servers added to the farm will not know which account to use.

One of the few things you can and do need to configure in IIS is SSL certificates and also needs to be done on each and every web front end.

SharePoint 2007 / WSS3.0 broken by AllItems.aspx overwrite

reubenjcook — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 08:19:57 +0000

Yesterday I managed to seriously break our production SharePoint 2007 site (WSS3.0 on SBS2008) site by inadvertently saving a word document over the AllItems.aspx file.
This is an incredibly easy thing to do by pasting the URL of a SharePoint folder location from the browser, there is the is the mistake (if taken from a Windows Explorer would be okay) into the Save As control e.g.

Copying https://sharepoint.fqdn.com:PortNNN/General%20Documents/Forms/AllItems.aspx?RootFolder=%2fGeneral%20Documents%2fFoldrer1%2fFolde2%2fFolder3 out of the IE address bar to paste into the Save As File name entry in hope that it would then enumerate the target folder..

Anyway, clearly its the wrong thing to do and in this case replaced the Allitems.aspx with a word document, this broke the browser view of all SharePoint pages on the site collection although using Windows Explorer to access SharePoint folders continued to work okay.

Our resident SharePoint expert and Development Director (Chris Hermon) used SPD 2007 to try and replace/restore the Allitems.apsx but whilst this initially appeared to resolve the issue, the basic SharePoint object controls were still broken such as not having the drop down available e.g.

We took a view on this and decided to perform an stsadm restore from the last content dB backup. This was a relatively straightforward decision for us as we knew and had made copies of documents changed since the last backup (daily), however in a busier enviornment this would not be so easy.

Restoring the stsadm backup resolved the issue it’s a rather drastic resolution for a incredibly easy issue to create (and no, I was not using an Admin account or the collection administrator, just a normal author).

I’ll try the same on SP2010 and see if Microsoft have fixed this rather obvious gap in system integrity protection!

Best of Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) UK 2010: Manage the Future – Desktop to Cloud

reubenjcook — Tue, 18 May 2010 07:38:19 +0000

Location:	100 Victoria Street London SW1 5JL United Kingdom

Start Time:	18 May 2010 09:30 GMT, London
End Time:	18 May 2010 17:30 GMT, London

Language(s):

English.

Product(s):

Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager,Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager,Microsoft System Center Essentials,Microsoft System Center Operations Manager,Other.

Audience(s):

Infrastructure Specialist,IT Decision Maker,IT Implementer,IT Manager.

Event Overview

Best of MMS UK 2010 will provide the best possible opportunity to learn about the latest IT Management products, solutions and technologies from Microsoft and how to apply them in your organisation. With a number of significant management product releases and announcements planned from Microsoft in the coming year, including some early Beta releases, this is an opportunity you won’t want to miss!

This 1-day event will provide you with an understanding of the latest technical updates on Desktop, Datacenter and Cloud management features and solutions from Microsoft. The event will share more expert knowledge and information than ever, covering current System Center products as well as Windows platform management solutions for virtualization of servers, desktops and applications.

Please mark your calendar for Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) UK 2010 on Tuesday 18 May 2010 in London.

Join us and interact live with Microsoft, key partnerships and early adopter customers in this informative event near you. (Twitter – #mmsuk2010)

*TIME*	*AGENDA*
08.30	Registration
09.30	Session 1 (Keynote): Virtualization 360: Microsoft Virtualization Strategy, Products, and Management Solutions for the New Economy
10.30	Session 2: Configuration Manager v.Next: Overview
11.30	Break
12.00	Session 3: What’s New Since the Release of Operations Manager 2007 R2
13.00	Lunch
14.00	Session 4(A): Opalis IT Process Automation: Introduction & Technical Overview	Session 4(B): Introduction to Systems Management in Midsized Organizations with System Center Essentials 2010
15.00	Break
15.30	Session 5: Technical Introduction to Data Protection Manager 2010
16:30	Session 6: Service Manager Integration with System Center
17.30	Networking & Close

Abstracts:

Session 1:

Learn about the Microsoft virtualization strategy from the datacenter, to the desktop, to the cloud, and how it will help you cut costs and build value. In this session we review and demonstrate Microsoft virtualization products and discuss how you can use them to solve today’s IT issues (cost cutting, consolidation, business continuity, green IT), develop new computing solutions (VDI) and build a foundation for a more dynamic IT environment, including cloud computing. The session reviews all of the latest Microsoft virtualization products, including Application Virtualization (App-V), Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (MED-V), Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V, and Microsoft Hyper-V Server, as well as the System Center management platform (including Virtual Machine Manager 2008). Learn about the innovative pricing and licensing structure that allows further savings to lower both acquisition and on-going ownership costs. Learn how you can enable IT to become a cost cutting mechanism with Microsoft virtualization and management technologies.

Session 2:

The next release of Configuration Manager is coming! For over a decade, Systems Management Server and Configuration Manager have been used by thousands of customers and partners to deliver classic management capabilities to clients and servers. As we enter a new era for IT Administration, the System Center flagship product is evolving. In this session we present our vision for user-centric client management, and demonstrate improvements from Configuration Manager 2007. This session promises to be very interesting. We demonstrate a functioning product to showcase some of these major improvements, so you know you can’t miss it!

Session 3:

Join us to learn about developments which have taken place since the R2 release of Operations Manager 2007, including cumulative updates for SP1 and R2, new tools for diagnosis and troubleshooting, and new support for monitoring in the cloud.

Session 4A:

This session will walk you through the Opalis workflow designer demonstrating along the way how to integrate System Center products with other IT tools to create automated processes. You will also see how Opalis customers have automated best practices for incident management, provisioning and change management.

Session 4B:

For organisations up to 500 PCs and 50 servers, Microsoft is releasing System Center Essentials 2010 (SCE) to provide service monitoring, software deployments and updates, and management of physical and virtual machines. This single product is designed for midsized organizations, so this session will be full of demonstrations as we look at each of the major aspects of SCE 2010, including server and client monitoring, software deployment and patching, virtualization management and migration, and how to get started with easy setup and configuration. Come see it here first.

Session 5:

Data is core to a Service Management solution. Learn how to architect and extend the CMDB schema, how to set up and extend connectors, create new connectors, and lastly how the data moves to the Data Warehouse to deliver IT business intelligence.

Session 6:

The release of DPM 2010 is just a few weeks after MMS 2010 in Las Vegas, so this session will cover installing a new DPM 2010 server, and then provide an overview of the core capabilities and enhanced protection/recovery scenarios.

notes from the day..

OpsMgr 2007 R3 – a first R3 release for Microsoft

ConfigMgr 2007 -> ConfigMgr v.Next – embracing user centric targeting

SCE 2010 notes to follow..

DPM 2010, Anthony Tyler, Storage Strategy Architect (aka Foggy, and an old team mate of mine from PSS some 12 years ago!)

Backup to pretty much anything inc. “SAN in a can” but nothing seen as a removable device (so no USB unless you use iSCSI or a.n.other mapping technology)

tactical deployment in line with MS application deployment

i365 EDPM appliance – supports hetrogenius environments via eVault

SCE 2010 RTM install with SQL 2008 R2 on Hyper-V

reubenjcook — Thu, 13 May 2010 13:01:24 +0000

First things first.. the pre-reqs:

A database! – SQL 2008 R2, but which version..? – this should help, SQL 2008 R2 Features and Comparisons http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc645993(SQL.105).aspx

Arrrggggghhhhh!

Infrastructure Optimisation… where to start!?!?

reubenjcook — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 16:46:26 +0000

This week I’m in the US working with a customers data center platform systems and doing some IO (Infrastructure Optimisation) activities.

IO has been around for a while as a Microsoft branded activity – see www.microsoft.com/io for a wealth of information on the IO optimization model and how to move up the stack.

However, before can start an IO improvements program you sometimes have to go right back to basics!

New Microsoft management software on-route, clear-out the old beta’s

reubenjcook — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 07:05:57 +0000

With the release of SCE2010 Release Candidate this last week, and coupled with a rebuild of our primary infrastructure & management server it’s been time to do a bit of overdue housekeeping in light of the new software available or about to be released..

This morning (whilst finishing our new Windows 7 with Office 2010 Beta build for the ThinkPad X series – yes I’m a sad git at 07:00!) I’ve deleted space consuming binaries and install media for older beta products that have been superceeded or are about to be.

For the cull are SCE2010 Beta, DPM 2010 Beta v3 (RC is due in early feb), and a really old SCVMM 2008 R2 RC…. saved a mere 26GB of disk space there! (yes this is sarcasm!)

Now I’m not intending to write possibly the most pointless and dull blog post in the history of the blaahhhg, but more as a reference to myself of our involvement in these stages of product testing and development.

If for some reason you’re not aware of how you get hold of Microsoft early release beta’s and release candidates then take a trip to http://connect.microsoft.com. Be warned this may start a long and time consuming passtime of exploring new software, but the rewards are there for your efforts.

Anyway, its time to start reusing some of that reclaimed disk space and start extracting the 4.10GB of SCE2010 RC I downloaded the other day… who’s going to bet its even bigger than the beta?

Training – Implementing and Administering Windows Small Business Server 2008

reubenjcook — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 08:09:36 +0000

This week is another out of the office on Microsoft partner training – 4 days of SBS 2008…

Course code: 44CO120 – M6445 – Implementing and Administering Windows Small Business Server 2008

Where: QA Tabernacle Street, London, EC2A 4DT

Who: Mark Cresswell (mark.cresswell@qa.com)

44CO120 – M6445 – Implementing and Administering Windows Small Business Server 2008

Summary:
This four-day instructor-led course provides students with the knowledge and skills to plan, implement, and manage Windows Small Business Server 2008
This course is intended for technology consultants, system integrators, and in-house technology staff that serve small and medium- sized businesses

Prerequisites:
In addition to their professional experience, students who attend this training should have technical knowledge and skills equivalent to the following courses:
Course 6420: Fundamentals of a Windows Sever 2008 Network and Applications Infrastructure
Course 6424: Fundamentals of Windows Server 2008 Active Directory
Course 5115: Installing and Configuring the Windows Vista Operating
System
Course 5116: Configuring Windows Vista Mobile Computing and Applications

Objectives:
Delegates will learn how to Install Microsoft Windows Small Business Server 2008.
Migrate to Microsoft Windows Small Business Server 2008.
Configure Windows Small Business Server 2008 using the Windows Small Business Server 2008 Console.
Manage users and groups in Windows Small Business Server 2008.
Manage messaging and collaboration in Windows Small Business Server 2008.
Manage and monitor Windows Small Business Server 2008.
Secure a Windows Small Business Server 2008 network.
Expand a Windows Small Business Server 2008 network

Top tips & links picked up during the course…

Microsoft SBS docs – http://tinyurl.com/sbs-docs

Known Post Installation Event Errors from SBS 2008 - http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/957713

Microsoft blog guide to WSS3/MOSS alternate access mappings – http://tinyurl.com/wss-aam

more tiny urls.. /sbs-rsg, /sbs-docs, /sbs-grp

Microsoft OEM site – http://oem.microsoft.com

Top 100 public SharePoint sites – http://www.wssdemo.com/Pages/topwebsites.aspx

Free Block List provider – http://www.spamhaus.org/zen
This is gold! add zen.spamhaus.org to your Block List Providers and switch on connection filtering.
One caveat to note, every time an email is processed by your server it performs a lookup to zen.spamhaus.org – if they receive too many lookups they will suggest that you take up their paid service. The threshold for this is huge (100,000 SMTP connections per day or 300,000 lookups), and you must not be using it commercially i.e. providing a managed service incorporating their service.

Why disable or rename the Administrator account… because it has a well-known SID! (… -500).

Use child domains for all external domain records just like the default remote.yourdomain.com so to get round duplicate maintainence of internal and external resources (and prevent confusion when vpn’d in!)

SBS default groups have an attribute that mark them as created by the SBS setup process or management console.. so be mindful if creating outside of the console!
Fool it by opening AD Users & Computers, open the attribute editor for the group and edit the msSBSCreatedState to ‘Created’

Roaming profiles – SBS has not been designed to support roaming profiles and Microsoft will not support issues with them (in this context), e.g. production of a SBS specific hotfix to address an issue.
Advised not to use roaming profiles bar controlled environments such as standard build, lack of local admins, quotas, group policy lockdown, etc.

Client migration – above half a dozen client machines consider using the User State Migration Toolkit (USMT) to script the process, ROI should be worthwhile in configuration time vs time saved at the desktop.

Segway! – the BBC iPlayer program is a P2P service that shares out content, based on Ch4 4oD package – remove it!

Need to inject drivers into WinRE or WinPE boot environments..? don’t be scared! use drvload and PEImage, more on TechNet Edge – http://edge.technet.com/Media/WinRE-and-free-stuff-with-Sean-Kearney/

SSL certs for SBS – don’t buy single certs unless you have to. Host headers and ssl is tricky, has to be a ucc cert or wildcard cert to support.
Default cert purchase from now on will be a wildcard cert, unless a bloody good reason (or lots of small ones… read $’s) not to!

Security cost triangle – you can have any two but not all 3!
low cost, usability, security

Relability and Performance monitor – what a gem!

migration to SBS2008..

My recommendation is to start with Philip Elder’s great posts at http://blog.mpecsinc.ca/
SBS 2008 deployment checklist – http://blog.mpecsinc.ca/2009/05/sbs-2008-setup-checklist-v111.html
SBS2003 to 2008 migration guide – http://blog.mpecsinc.ca/2009/06/sbs-2003-to-sbs-2008-migration-guide.html

Exchange & Circular Logging…
A potential for lots of debate, but I’d agree with Mark that whilst migrating mailboxes, if circluar logging is not enabled, enable it otherwise run the risk of filling up disks with log files!

Disable circular logging post event and let the Exchange aware backups submit the log clear down. However, if the store data and logs are on the same spindle you may as well leave circular logging on as you get little or no recovery benefits.

How to remove the last legacy Exchange server from an organisation – http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb288905.aspx (http://tinyurl.com/sbs-exmig)

Common mistakes when upgrading Exchange 2000/2003 to 2007 – http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555854/en-us

ipconfig /displaydns

Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/bb899442.aspx
Advanced Group Policy Management – http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc749396(WS.10).aspx
Asset Inventory Service – http://www.microsoft.com/windows/enterprise/products/mdop/ais.aspx
Microsoft Diagnostics and Recovery Toolset (DaRT)
System Center Desktop Error Monitoring (DEM)
Microsoft Asset Inventory Service (AIS)

SCE 2010 installation… cleaning up afterwards (deleting wasted space, moving dBs)

reubenjcook — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 22:47:03 +0000

We installed the current beta of System Center Essentials 2010 on our production infrastructure server, an HP DL380-G4 running Windows Server 2008 R2 to find that we consumed a huge amount of disk space – so much so the server ran out of space on its C:System partition… oh and SCE didn’t report on this in its daily summary!

So a clean-up is required…

1st thing to delete was several hundred megabytes of files taken up with various language versions of MS Virtual Server 2005 binaries in:
C:\Program Files\System Center Essentials\SCVMM 2008\vs\ i386 & amd64
the ’1033′ folders contain the english versions, the rest deleted

Next on the list is the SQL database files used by SCE, by default (no installation choices given, hopefully better by RTM!), these are installed into:
C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL10.ESSENTIALS\MSSQL
C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSRS10.ESSENTIALS
each currently taking after about a week of SCE2010 running, some 748 & 580MB respectively!

in our case we also found another 417MB in C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\100\Setup Bootstrap\Update Cache\KB968369\ServicePack – will come back on this one, but have moved in the meantime…

and another 641MB in C:\Program Files\System Center Essentials\Health Service State\Health Service Store (one in particular, the HealthServiceStore.edb at 598MB!)