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Where am I? HELP!
My colleague created a virtual machine for me in our datacentre a few weeks ago. (Thanks Michael!) Earlier this week I needed to create a second virtual machine to cluster with it, and I felt that the best way to maximize my resources completely would be to create another virtual machine identical to the first. …
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Step by Step: Building a Scale-Out File Server (SoFS) on Windows Server 2012 R2

In several presentations since Windows Server 2012 was released I have heard Microsofties claim that SAN devices are a thing of the past. I have a hard time getting on board with that, but have nonetheless told many an audience that if they are planning on throwing their SANs out because Microsoft said so then…
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Help! Where is my Client Access Point?
So you are building a Scale Out File Server (SoFS). You are all happy because you read one of my articles (or POSSIBLY someone else’s… but really, why would you hurt me like that?) and you know you are good to go. You have your cluster, you have your drives, and you have created your…
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Stream-lining: A review of my new companion device.
I have always had a deal with the companies that have supported me over the years: If you give me a product to test and I like it, I will write about it. If I don’t like it, I will not write about it. That is why there are so few negative reviews on my…
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My New Word…?
I was driving with a friend over the week-end, and describing the behaviour of someone with whom I recently cut all ties. Part of the reason I did is because she is a master manipulator. “She is a Manipulatrix.” Brad said he loved that word, even though he had never heard it before. I admit,…
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Let’s Spread the Action Around… With NLB! (Part 1)
**AUTHOR’S NOTE: I have written hundreds of articles on this blog over the past decade. Until recently I spent a lot of time taking screen shots of GUI consoles for my how-to articles. For the time being, as I try to force myself into the habit, I will be using Windows PowerShell as much as…
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Help! My Servers Aren’t Being Monitored!
This isn’t right… I have System Center Operations Manager monitoring all of my servers for me, but this morning I noticed that several of my servers are in a warning state, but they are greyed out (which implies that they aren’t reporting in properly). What do I do? This is not uncommon, especially in smaller…
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The Things We Do For Charity…
Over the last few weeks I have done some Facebook reposts about the OMAC Juvenile Arthritis Charity Tournament. One of our students at Master Kim’s Oriental Martial Arts College is a kid named Ayden Soares. As you can imagine, Arthritis is a very painful disease, especially for children. When our school decided to get together…
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Insanity Is…
We have all heard this quote before… and it is exactly true. However in your server environment, when you want things identical, then we would turn this phrase around: Insanity: Doing things manually over and over and expecting identical results. I have not spent a great deal of time learning PowerShell… but whenever I have…
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Broken Cluster? Clear it up.
Three years ago I wrote an article about cleaning up nodes of clusters that had been corrupted and destroyed (See Cluster Issues… how to clean out cluster nodes from destroyed clusters). Unfortunately the cluster command has been deprecated in Windows Server 2012 R2, so we need to go to PowerShell… which frankly is where we…
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New (and Free!) E-Books
Last month I posted an updated list of free ebooks that Microsoft Press offers (Free E-Books… Way beyond PDF Files!) which was extremely well received. Well today I was given information that MS Press released two new ebooks this month, both of which are extremely of interest to a lot of my readers. Microsoft System…
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Cluster-Aware Updates: Be Aware!
When I started evangelizing Windows Server 2012 for Microsoft, there was a long list of features that I was always happy to point to. There are a few of them that I have never really gone into detail on, that I am currently working with. Hopefully these articles will help you. Cluster Aware Updates (CAU)…
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Gone Phishing… NO!!!!
I remember the first time I got a phishing request from a bank. Not only was it a bank I had never done business with, I had in fact never heard of them. I looked into it, and sure enough they were a real bank… but that didn’t change the fact that I did not…
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Follow-up to a comment.
Per my comment reply to Peter, this is from the My Certifications > MCSE: Private Cloud page.
