Bill Baer /bɛːr/

System Center Virtual Machine Manager Self-Service Portal 2.0 is a pre-built, role-based, self-service portal for both datacenter managers and business unit IT consumers to simplify the provisioning of infrastructures for their applications and services. The System Center Virtual Machine Manager Self-Service Portal 2.0 provides automated workflows designed to help on-board business unit IT departments and enables partners to expose their unique hardware capabilities through familiar Microsoft scripting technologies. System Center Virtual Machine Manager Self-Service Portal 2.

BranchCache If you manage a centralized, regional, or distributed infrastructure with a distributed or clustered user base, a combination of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 may be the best pairing to mitigate the impact of bandwidth and latency penalties that are commonly incurred under such distributions. Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 introduce a new feature (BranchCache) that can reduce wide area network (WAN) utilization and enhance Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies responsiveness when users access content in a central office from branch office locations.

A recently published whitepaper is now available on TechNet that describes the benefits of deploying Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 on Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition and scenarios in which its features can be applied. Excerpt Microsoft® SharePoint® Server 2010 is the business collaboration platform for the enterprise and the Internet. SharePoint Server 2010 has become a business-critical application and an integral part of business processes. To help IT infrastructures to remain flexible and scalable to help support, manage, and secure expanded functionality, an influx of additional users and locations, and increasingly robust applications such as SharePoint Server 2010, we recommend that you choose the Windows Server® 2008 R2 Enterprise operating system during initial deployment.

In recent months there has been a great deal of discussion and debate on disaster recovery and high availability with Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies and with the recent releases of both Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 there are open opportunities to leverage components available natively to these technologies and compliment a SharePoint Products and Technologies disaster recovery design. One of the most significant challenges has been overcoming latency penalties applied through distance between the active and passive datacenters, particularly with Microsoft SQL Server Log Shipping since we’re dealing with SMB and a synchronous process.

Suppose you would like to use Windows Server 2008 as your host operating system, but the system does not provide support for Hyper-V. The good news is that Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 will install and run under Windows Server 2008 providing the following conditions are met (including the Virtual Server Administration Web site): see notes http://support.microsoft.com/kb/948515. You need to run Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 You must have KB948515 applied to enable Windows Server 2008 host operating system support (http://www.

One of the most common configuration inconsistencies I find in SharePoint farms is the Web application path, in most scenarios the Web applications are provisioned under the default root path of C:InetpubwwwrootwssVirtualDirectories. This is usually the result of oversight during the provisioning process. Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 provides a configuration field (see screenshot) that allows administrators to configure the path to the Web application host directory; however, in many cases, this setting is overlooked.

Internet Information Services 7.0 Application Pool Modes introduces changes in how application pools are managed and process requests that involve managed resources. In Internet Information Services 6.0 worker process isolation mode and in Internet Information Services 5.0, isolation modes are set at the server level. The result is that both isolation modes cannot be run simultaneously. In Internet Information Services 7.0 modes are set at the application pool level allowing applications to be run simultaneously on the same server in application pools with differing process modes (Integrated and ISAPI (Classic).

On October 29, 2007 we announced that Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 bits will not be included on the Windows Server 2008 media; however, will remain available as a separate download, as a result changing the installation routine. For those who used evaluation and release candidate builds of Windows Server 2008, Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 was included as a server role, adding the role subsequently configured supporting roles and role services - as a clean installation, this configuration must be performed by the server administrator and includes adding the Web Server (IIS)) role and role services.

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks using SharePoint Products and Technologies with Windows Server 2008 (WS08), specifically running Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) on Windows Server 2008 IIS 7.0 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 SP1 in addition to check-in scenarios such as provisioning WS08 with WSS 3.0, introducing MOSS 2007, and ultimately SP1…I anticipated an improvement in performance, but the new implementation of the TCP/IP protocol suite AKA Next Generation TCP/IP stack exceeded my expectations considering the Web front-ends I used were in our Singapore Data Center - a full 226ms of latency from Redmond.