What you say? Windows Nano Server? Looking great, but…

As we all know by now Microsoft Announced Windows Nano Server edition to be released in the Next version of Windows Server yesterday. Here are some of my thoughts about it :).
In my years as a IT consultant, architect, trainer and scripting fanatic I love to see evolvements in the IT landscape.

As an early adopter for PowerShell back in 2006 when it was sort of launched with Exchange Server 2007 I really love to see what you can do with it. I wrote and still write a lot of advanced scripts to make our lives easier in the admin and migration process. I also am involved in the design and architecture of new Windows based infrastructure and trying to get customers or IT admins to adopt the new and rich possibilities the Windows Server and Windows client OS brings.


For some years now I’m trying to convince a lot of my customers to move on to use PowerShell and Windows Server Core edition (no personally not 2008 (I think this version was not really good), but since 2012), but still a lot of IT Pro’s and IT admins still don’t know how to use PowerShell and what you can do with it. To be more clear, I still see that IT admins for example are trying to change the same setting for 4000+ users within Active Directory. Not very efficient I think and also very fault sensitive. Therefore the adoption of Windows Server Core Edition is not happening as quickly as I would have wanted to see.

And this is where I have double feelings about Windows Server Nano. I personally I think it’s great to see you don’t have any overhead anymore in forms of a GUI, local logon, no more WOW64 support and many other stuff. I love to work with remote PowerShell. I think connecting to a server with RDP and then do your stuff on it is slow and you are limited to a maximum number of sessions. Also all these components require updating and installing a lot of hotfixes and patched and so on.
Removing all this overburden leaves you a much more hardened server, a lower footprint (less harddisk space, memory, etc). It also saves you the installation of a lot of updates that you don’t need and leave you with a lot of potential security risks if you don’t install them.

However, as I wrote earlier, in my experience is that the adoption of these new evolvements with the current generation of IT Pro’s (Yes unfortunately I now a lot of IT consultants and engineers that still don’t know how to use PowerShell) and IT admins is a thing to worry about while getting Windows Nano and Core edition server to be adopted.

I do hope it will be a success and personally I will adopt it and recommend it in my advise and designs to customers, but there needs to be a real change in the IT landscape and mindset of IT related people. I think…

Do you guys have any thought on this?

Let me know… I like to have interesting discussions about it


Reference:
http://blogs.technet.com/b/windowsserver/archive/2015/04/08/microsoft-announces-nano-server-for-modern-apps-and-cloud.aspx

Exchange Server 2013 – A first glimpse – part 1

On 11 july 2012 Microsoft Released the long expected preview version of Exchange Server 2013 (also known as Exchange 15). In this multipart blog I will try to show you a glimpse of what's new in Exchange Server 2013.

• In part 1 I will describe the new features and changes that this new version of Exchange is going to offer;


• In part 2 I will guide you through the installation of Exchange Server 2013;


• In part 3 we will have a deeper look into the management of Exchange Server 2013.

Could not bind port 80 on TMG with Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1

During a new implementation of a reverse proxy solution for Exchange Server 2010 OWA based on a Threat Management Gateway 2010 server. I encountered an issue where I couldn't bind port 80 for redirection to port 443. The server where i tried to install and configure TMG on was a Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 machine.

The following post will guide you thought the issues i had and give you a solution to this problem.

Aanmaken SSL certificaat voor Outlook Web Access via Shell

Om gebruik te kunnen maken van OWA, is het aanbevolen om gebruik te maken van een commercieel SSL certificaat met mobiele ondersteuning. De CSR die aangemaakt wordt in de komende stappen kan gebruikt worden tijdens de aanvraag bij een willekeurige SSL leverancier. Bijvoorbeeld www.sslcertificaat.nl. Hier wordt vervolgens gekozen voor een Comodo Mobile SSL Certificaat.

Libraries in Windows 7

Although this feature in Windows 7 is very handy in accessing your files easy there are some downsides on this feature when deploying it in your organization.

1. If you use the Library feature in Windows 7 on remote files/folders, it requires indexing on the file/folder server which is only supported in Windows Server 2008(R2) or on Windows Server 2003 with Desktop Search 4.0. This is because the library feature needs to have a indexed source folder in order to know where your files are located. To have your Windows 7 client do this, will mean that you need to have 24*7 access to these folders and that's usually not the case.What you can do to have it work is to enable offline folder synchronization on the share you will need to access. This will make a offline copy of the share on the Windows 7 client, so that your client can do the indexing on the folder. Unfortunately this means that you will need a time to time replication to your share on your NAS device.In my understanding i have never seen a third party NAS device with CIFS sharing that can index on your file/folders and have Windows understand it.


2. The library feature is not deploy-able via a GPO. This makes the Central Management of Libraries in Windows 7 a hard one. The philosophy behind Libraries i think is that it's a user feature. If users know what the advantages of properly set libraries are, they will need to create and manage them there own.