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There is one crown jewel from Microsoft’s toolbox treasure trove that has not received much attention. Xperf, which is part of the Microsoft Windows Performance Toolkit, allows you to dig deeper into performance issues than Perfmon and PAL ever dreamed. In this article, Bruce Mackenzie-Low provides an overview of Xperf for troubleshooting Windows storage performance issues.

2nd installment by J. Peter Bruzzese on 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. The 1st installment covered broad permission settings by employing Predefined Role Groups. Part 2 addresses more specific permission settings at the granular level.

Digital voice port configuration on a VoIP network by Sean Wilkins, focusing on T1 and E1 voice port types. Covers emulation methods, codec complexity configuration and T1 & E1 controller configuration.

What to consider when configuring Windows Failover Clusters, by Bruce Mackenzie-Low. With a little planning and the help of tools like the Cluster Validation Wizard for failover cluster setup, you can implement failover clusters with confidence, ensuring proper setup when choosing partition size, configuring compatible and consistent storage drivers and storage controller settings.

Esxtop is VMware’s command-line tool to analyze performance. David Davis provides an overview and configuration options of this valuable tool for solving vSphere performance issues. Also included are suggestions on top resources available to further your understanding of esxtop.

In this article Tom Finnis explains how to add the Print Services role to a Windows 2008 Server and then shows you how to use the Print Management console to share printers on your network.

Analog voice port configuration on a VoIP network by Sean Wilkins. Includes configuration details for the three main voice port types: Foreign Exchange Office (FXO), Foreign Exchange Station (FXS), and Ear and Mouth (E&M).

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.