Suddenly I realised that there are way too many editions of SQL Server 2008 available. Here is the list of them and a quick comparison of their features.

http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/editions.aspx

Recently I was asked by a participant in one of my sessions, whether single instance storage (SIS) is supported or not in Exchange Server 2010. I did not have enough information at that point in time to give an exact answer.

In the last few days I went through some documentations on Exchange Server 2010 and realised that due to the changed storage architecture SIS is not used in Exchange Server 2010. Please read this article to know more about this change in architecture

BitLocker is great! It can prevent the leakage of data from lost or stolen computers by encrypting local hard drives and removable media. But the reality is that very few IT departments have implemented this technology for their user computers. Reason could be either ignorance or because they feel that it is not important for them.

It’s fine if you don’t want to use BitLocker. But have you thought about it’s misuse? What if a user who is experimenting things with her/his computer decides to enable BitLocker and later lose the encryption key? What if someone enable BitLocker in his/her computer and never return to work? You can assume that data is permanently lost!

So how do you prevent situations like this? The solution is very simple. With the help of one group policy setting you can make sure that BitLocker would not be enabled without a backup being taken to Active Directory. This setting will make sure that IT administrators would be able to recover data in the case of any eventuality.

Yet another free book from Microsoft press.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=ee2a1d38-88a9-43b3-95bc-7e962f0b6030 

Here is a quick summary of major changes in Exchange database

• No more storage groups, databases are configured directly
• Number of databases per server increased to 100
• No more recovery storage group, only recovery database
• Databases are no longer tied to a particular server. This helps in recovering a database to a server with a different name than the original one.

For more information  check the link below

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd877018(EXCHG.140).aspx

The title says it all! The statistics is about Amazon UK

Read on http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/44377/140 

My colleagues from the Windows Server product team have released a free e-book on Windows Server 2008 R2. It’s available for download from the product home page.

This document would be useful for anyone who is using Windows PowerShell to automate Hyper-V related tasks

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=08A9EEB9-86FF-4A4F-8DFA-165BD701ABA9&displaylang=en

It’s a huge document, but worth using it as as reference.

Source: http://nsslabs.com/test-reports/NSS%20Labs%20Browser%20Security%20-%20Socially%20Engineered%20Malware%20Q3%202009.pdf 

By default we all (and should) use virtual hard drive (VHD) files to run virtual machines in a Hyper-V environment. But Hyper-V based virtual machines can also attach itself directly to physical disks (pass-through disks). Following are the factors to be considered before deciding to use pass-through disks.

• Studies have shown that VHD performance can be as high as 97% of native disk performance in terms off IOPS (http://www.qlogic.com/promos/products/hyper-v.aspx ). So the question is do you really need to use pass- through disks to achieve high performance or can you optimize the performance by following the best practices around VHD
• Pass-through disks do not support virtual machine snap shots, dynamically expanding hard disks and differencing hard disks
• A single VHD has a maximum capacity limit of 2TB.  Size of a pass-through disk can be bigger than this

Yet another awesome tool from the Sysinternals team, Disk2vhd. As the name implies this tool can covert a physical disk into a virtual disk. Here is the quick summary of it’s capabilities

• The converted VHD file can be used to boot from Virtual PC, Hyper-V and another physical machine as well
• Works on a machine that’s online
• VHD can be created on the same volume that is getting converted
• Preserves the partition information of the disk

For more details and download click here

I’m going to try this tool for backing up computer.

Check this out http://www.vsallaccess.com , brought to you by Silverlight technology from Microsoft :)

In the next three months my team is delivering a series of webcasts on Security, starting tomorrow. Here is the list of sessions

1. Information Leakage Protection (October 07)
2. Enterprise wide deployment of BitLocker (October 14)
3. SQL Server Security Part 1 (October 28)
4. SQL Server Security Part 2 (November 04)
5. Security compliance management of Windows and Office (November 18)
6. Security for Web servers (November 25)
7. Safe internet browsing (Dcember 02)
8. Tools for removing Malware (December 09)
9. Securing your messaging and collaboration infrastructure (December 16)
10. Perimeter security and unified threat management using Microsoft Threat Management Gateway (December 23)
11. Remote access with Direct Access and Forefront Unified Access Gateway (December 30)

For more information please check this web site http://www.microsoft.com/India/webcasts/ 

Beta versions of System Center Essentials 2010 (SCE) and System Center Data Protection Manager 2010 (DPM)are available now.

Personally I found the following things as very exciting

• SCE now supports management of virtual machines. The virtual machine management part of SCE2010 is based on SCVMM 2008 R2. So SCE 2010 is a true unified management solution for both physical and virtual servers in a small/medium organization.
• Ability to protect client computers and Hyper-V R2 with Live Migration (with CSV) are things I found to be exciting about DPM 2010

Please click on the links above if you want to know more about these products

Microsoft has released a free version of complete malware protection software today. This software is targeted at consumers and branded as “Microsoft Security Essentials” (MSE). MSE is supported on Windows XP/Vista/7. Click here to know more about it. Download link is also available there.

Yet another security expert says that Windows is more secure now. Read on

http://www.pcworld.com/article/172197/vista_windows_7_are_more_secure_than_snow_leopard.html

This is yet another FAQ in my sessions. What are the minimum system requirements to run Exchange Server 2010.

Processor: x64 from Intel or AMD

Operating System: Windows Server 2008 x64 edition. Windows Server 2008 R2 is also supported

For more details please check this site

This is one of the FAQs in all my interactions with IT administrators. Here is the reason

As everyone knows 32 bit computers have a memory addressing limit of 4GB maximum. Since IT departments are looking at virtualization as a tool for consolidating multiple servers, this 4GB limit would not really help them. In order to achieve any meaningful consolidation of today’s and more importantly tomorrow’s workloads we need more than 4GB memory on Hyper-V enabled machines. Hence Microsoft decided to focus on x64 platform to develop and support Hyper-V.

Nevertheless there are scenarios where 32 bit hardware is available and need to be utilized. I suggest those customers to take advantage of Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 

This is a frequently asked question. What are the devices certified to work with Office Communicator for audio and video conversations. Here is the list

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/bb970310.aspx

I have been asked many times by people who attended my session that whether USB drives encrypted using the “BitLocker To Go” feature in Windows 7 is readable in Windows XP or not. The answer is YES and here is the screenshot of “BitLocker Reader”