IT Knowledgebase Articles

1st installment by J. Peter Bruzzese in a guide to RBAC (Role Based Access Control), a new permissions model in Exchange Server 2010. RBAC allows you to define both a broad, as well as a more granular assignment of permissions to administrators, ensuring that they are given the appropriate permissions based on the roles they perform within your organization.

Bruce Mackenzie-Low examines the benefits and disadvantages of MBR and GPT-based Windows disks. The 2 approaches differ in how they track the mapping of physical disk sectors to logical block numbers. MBR (Master Boot Record) is widely accepted, but partition size is limited to 2 terabytes. GPT (GUID Partition Table) was created to accommodate the larger partition sizes and offers greater resilience to corruption.

An overview by David Davis on memory compression, new in vSphere 4.1. Memory compression helps to prevent degradation of performance when you’re running low on memory. It’s not as fast as real memory but a lot faster than swap (on disk). This article includes configuring memory compression on your vSphere virtual infrastructure.

VMware vSphere’s Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) is mainly used for load balancing virtual machines on a cluster. While most virtualization admins will want to run DRS in fully automated mode, there may be certain instances when you would want to enforce some conditions by setting what are known as DRS Affinity Rules. In this article, David Davis explains setting up VM to Host Affinity Rules on vSphere 4.1.

Step-by-step article and video by J. Peter Bruzzese on configuring outgoing & incoming email for SharePoint Foundation on SBS (Small Business Server) 2011. Due to the unique circumstances of Small Business Server, very specific configuration settings are required for SharePoint email. Covers outgoing/incoming email settings, configuring alerts, creating a document library, and creating a foreign connector to the drop folder.

Windows failover clusters can now take advantage of iSCSI storage to access shared data. Using iSCSI reduces the initial investment costs for clusters by allowing you to use your existing TCP/IP networks instead of expensive SANs. This article by Bruce Mackenzie-Low explains how to set up iSCSI-based disks and configure them for use with Windows failover clusters.

How to use the Cluster Validation Wizard, also known as Validate, to perform a variety of tests to ensure that cluster components are accurately configured and supported in a clustered environment. Bruce Mackenzie-Low explains using the Cluster Validation Wizard to systematically test the storage subsystem in order to isolate any failing components, including generation of a Validation Report which documents the tests and their results, along with hyperlinks to detailed troubleshooting information such as failing disks and server names.

Disabling first run welcome screen in IE8 & IE9 via Group Policy Editor or Registry Editor. Daniel Petri provides a walkthrough for disabling the “Welcome to Internet Explorer” page that continues to appear if you reset the IE settings or log in as a different user.

Bruce Mackenzie-Low covers SAN based Windows clusters, the improvments in failover clustering with Windows 2008 R2, and the requirements to consider when configuring disk drives to be used in a SAN-based Windows cluster.

Sean Wilkins discusses QoS Classification and Marking configuration in relation to VoIP Quality of Service implementation on Cisco equipment. This marking is used by devices on the network to prioritize high priority over low priority marked traffic. Also covered are Differentiated Services Code Point (DSCP) values, Per Hob Behaviors (PHB) and Modular QoS Command Line Interface (MQC).