Dario IT Solutions Blog

You may have experienced an issue with a Remote Desktop connection to a Server 2008 in which you see black/white grid lines on all or on part of the screen.

This may look something like this:

It appears that this issue is linked to this update : http://support.microsoft.com/kb/958470/en-us

Changing the setting of the RD connection (bitrate, colors etc) doesn’t seem to help.

This issue will be resolved when upgrading the client’s RDP version to 6.0 or newer.

Hi guys,

It was very nice meeting you all yesterday at the re-birth of the Infrastructure & Management User Group.

Below is the presentation for the main subject we talked about – “Windows 2008 R2 Overview”.

We will continue next month, on December 17th with the subject “Active Directory improvements in Windows 2008 R2”.

In the meantime, share your thoughts and interesting finds at the group site – http://www.linkedin.com/groupRegistration?gid=2389097

Have a great weekend and take care!

I know its a bit late, but here is the presentation I gave on November 3rd at the Microsoft convention – Let’s Talk Business-Tech that was held at Tel Aviv.

During the presentation, my co-presenter Ronen Gabay and myself talked about the new features of Failover Clustering in Windows 2008 R2.

We talked about Geo-Clusters, PowerShell 2.0 extensive support, Cluster Shared Volumes and mainly about how simple it is to create and manage complex cluster (everyone can do it! believe me! ).

We finished the presentation with a nice demo of RDS 7.0 media enhancement when we showed a 1080P HD movie (Terminators 2 Trailer) over RDP 7.0 while doing a Live Migration of the RDS Session Host virtual server that we RDPed into.. very nice!

What do you think, will we start seeing more clusters from now on? or something is still missing?

I’ll love to get your input.

As promised, I’ve uploaded the presentations from the sessions I gave on December 18th at Microsoft Israel. Enjoy.

Check out this nice list of new clustering features just around the corner:

New Failover Clustering features in R2:

1. Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV) – A distributed access file system optimized for Hyper-V allowing virtual machines and their disk resources to reside be on any cluster node
2. Live Migration – Move virtual machines between different physical machines while keeping them running and maintaining client connections
3. PowerShell Support – The scripting language of the future which will gradually replace cluster.exe
4. DFS-Replication support – Make the primary member of your replication group highly available so that it always has access to the authoritative copy of the data
5. Remote Desktop / Terminal Services support - Make the Connection Broker highly available ensuring that clients are reconnected to their same session or virtual machine within a server farm
6. Network Prioritization – Plan your internal cluster network for efficiency, giving the fastest network the highest priority for internal traffic (heartbeat, CSV & Live Migration traffic)
7. Read-Only APIs – This security enhancement allows admins to query the state of the cluster, but not perform any actions, making it ideal for first-level triage who “can look, but not touch”
8. ETW logging channels – New Crimson channel makes cluster-wide events easier to manage
9. Performance Monitor – Clustering counters allow the user to monitor the cluster and tweak it for optimal performance
10. Enhanced Validation – Improvements to the functional test tool with additional tests which execute on production cluster nodes to ensure they are running optimally, with best practices deployed
11. Migration – The clustering upgrade path now supports more workloads and configurations and offers detailed information about what will be migrated and any additional steps required by the user

New Network Load Balancing features in R2:

1. Extended Affinity – Ensures clients are reconnected to the same node to retain cached information if they are disconnected
2. PowerShell Support – The new NLB scripting language which will gradually replace nlb.exe and wlbs.exe

Check out this presentation on advanced topics in the Windows Graphics remoting architecture (RDP 7).

This talk introduces new Windows 7 remoting features and discusses how they are going to be leveraged in Microsoft’s Windows 7 client and server products.

Finally, this presentation covers how you can integrate well with core remoting infrastructure services to enhance your applications to run from anywhere, so that your applications will be available to end-users when they are on-the-go.

I had the opportunity today (16.9.08) to participate in Microsoft�s getVIRTUALnow event, and to present the session “Physical and Virtual Server Management”

I presented my take on data center management, which involves automating management tasks in response to system\application states.

It was impressive to see the number of vendors that were present in the event. Microsoft seem to be quick in building the required ecosystem of partners that will push it’s Virtualization offerings greatly in my opinion.

The main point in my presentation was that when looking at the data center (or IT environment) as a whole, tools like Systems Center Operations Manger and Systems Center Virtual Machine Manager (that has integration built into them from the grounds up) really stand out in the crowd in comparison to tools that are built for a specific environment (like managing only virtual machines).

One of the demonstrations involved Performance Resource Optimization (PRO) which is one of VMM�s top features, as it allows administrators to automate practically any type of response to a given condition, including responding to application, virtualization, system, storage, or network events.

For more demonstrations, take a look at Liran’s post – “Get Virtual Now with Hyper-V Technology“.

Also, You are more then invited to check out a bunch of pictures we took at the event – http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=55996&id=15415483905&ref=mf

OpsMgr 2007 SP1 and SCE 2007 SP1 have recently announced support for Microsoft Windows Server 2008 in knowledge base article 953141.

Along with the release of this support statement, the first batch of management packs that provide monitoring for the Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Operating System have been released to the MP Catalog.

These MPs covers the following technologies:

1. Windows Server Operating System
2. Windows Terminal Services
3. Windows Server 2008 Application Server
4. Windows Key Management Service

Follow this link to a very good post about this important topic – http://blogs.msdn.com/ts/archive/2007/02/14/resources-for-diagnosing-ts-licensing-problems.aspx