Microsoft

Windows Server 2012 Features: Remote Access, Core Server, and New Roles

February 25, 2013 Randy Muller Cisco, Cloudera, Featured, Professional Development, Project Management, Routing & Switching, Technology, Training in Business

New in Windows Server 2012 is the Unified Remote Access (URA) role. In Windows Server 2008 R2, DirectAccess and Routing and Remote Access Service (RRAS) were two separate roles. In fact, they could not be co-located on the same server. In Windows Server 2012, DirectAccess and RRAS can be co-located, allowing for what is now legacy remote access VPN client connectivity (L2TP/IPsec, PPTP, and SSTP). This means that the Unified Remote Access provides DirectAccess, Remote Access VPN, and site-to-site VPN and can now serve as your complete remote access solution.

What to Expect in 2013

February 19, 2013 Danielle Beavers Cisco, Cloudera, Featured, Professional Development, Project Management, Routing & Switching, Technology, Training in Business

2013 has kicked off, and there are so many new technologies we will cover this year. From trade shows to growing trends, we are watching out for anything that’s up-and-coming in the tech world. Here’s a just a little bit of what our team is looking forward to in 2013.

Windows Server 2012 Features: SMB and DAC

February 18, 2013 Randy Muller Cisco, Cloudera, Featured, Professional Development, Project Management, Routing & Switching, Technology, Training in Business

New to Server 2012 is the Server Message Block (SMB) 3.0 protocol. The SMB 3.0 protocol provides access to files, printers, and serial ports, as well as handling the transfer of files between different systems. SMB is not backwards-compatible – the best performance obtained is between Windows Server 2012 servers or with Windows 8. One great feature of SMB is when using it with clustering and replication. Clustering in Widows Server 2012 can now be done with SMB which means you no longer have to use a Storage-area Network (SAN).

4 More Windows Group Policy Tips and Tricks

February 14, 2013 Mark Mizrahi Cisco, Cloudera, Featured, Professional Development, Project Management, Routing & Switching, Technology, Training in Business

Group Policy Objects and their templates are store in SYSVOL, a storage area under the Windows directory. This has been the storage area as far back as I can remember. The old replication engine that handles (among other things) the replication of SYSVOL is File Replication Service (FRS). This engine has been problematic. Microsoft admits that a SYSVOL that has a lot of GPOs is overweighed and becoming a possible problem for Replication.

Windows Server 2012 Features: Hyper-V Replicas and Live Migration

February 11, 2013 Randy Muller Cisco, Cloudera, Featured, Professional Development, Project Management, Routing & Switching, Technology, Training in Business

Hyper-V Replica provides asynchronous replication of virtual machines (VMs) from a Hyper-V host or cluster to a remote Hyper-V host or cluster to provide business continuity and fail-over recovery. This new, built-in feature tracks write operations on the source Host or cluster and replicates them to the destination host or cluster so that both VMs are in constant lockstep. If the local VM fails (or if an administrator manually fails-over) the remote replica assumes its place. All of this happens without having any specialized storage or networking hardware requirements.