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New Features in Window Server 8

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windows_server_1I was reading and came across an article named “10 Killer Features in Windows Server 8 for IT Pros”

The article does a good job listing out some of the high level features which are new to Windows Server 8 or improved from Windows Server 2008 R2.

For me, my top 3 features which I think are good are:

NIC Teaming – In the past you relied on hardware vendors to support NIC teaming. Now in Windows Server 8, we can have two separate NIC by different vendors be teamed together to provide redundancy and aggregate bandwidth.

  • AD Recycle Bin – Windows Server 2008 R2 first had the recycle bin, but you had to access it through scripting. Now we have a GUI to restore items.
  • Live Migration – Looks like Microsoft is putting Live Migration right into the native Hyper-V and won’t require Virtual Machine Manager. This something we have had for a while in VMWare with Live Motion and VMM 2008 R2 w/SP1 but now we have it for free native to Windows Server 8.

For the full list, check out the post at PC Magazine.

Link to – “10 Killer Features in Windows Server 8 for IT Pros”

Multicast NLB with UAG SP1 and DirectAccess

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Microsoft Forefront UAG

I am working on an implementation of Unified Access Gateay (UAG) SP1 for our DirectAccess implementation here at the board.

The TechNet articles in the deployment guide specify that you must use NLB in Unicast Mode for the deployment.  The guide is located at http://bit.ly/tirUga

If you are using VMWare to host your UAG Array, you know that Unicast NLB has its issues. After doing some searching I discovered this Blog, http://bit.ly/sX7sgX which says that  you can use multicast NLB for UAG Sp1 and that the documentation is incorrect.

TechDays 2011

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TechDays 2011 is coming up soon. Next week in fact. As in past years I’ll be presenting. This year I will be presenting in Toronto and Montreal and the subject will be Securing your Wireless Network using Active Directory and 802.1x

This year TechDays will be taking place in the following cities so make sure to register

  1. Toronto – October 25-26
  2. Vancouver – November 15-16
  3. Montreal – November 29-30

If you  register for TechDays 2011, use this promo code TDSPKR11CAN to get 50% off the conference admission!

My presentation is the first day, last session of the day. So it will be me that keeps you from the door. Be prepared to laugh a little in the session.

I look forward to seeing you all there this year and I will be hanging around all day probably in the experts lounge. Stop by and say hi.