AD Recycle Bin – New in Server 2008 R2

This week I continued with disaster recovery testing in our lab, the first machine restored from tape being one of our domain controllers. While checking over the health of the restored Windows 2003 active directory, I remembered that we are using a third-party tool in production to aid in the recovery of deleted items – Quest’s Active Directory Recovery Manager. To be honest, we haven’t had a reason to use the software since we installed it, which I suppose is a good thing. But it is a stress reliever to know that it’s there for us.

Restoring this product in our test lab isn’t part of the scope of this project, but it does have me looking forward to planning our active directory migration to Server 2008 R2, which includes a new, native “recycle bin” feature for deleted active directory objects. You can find more details about how this feature works in Ned Pyle’s post on the Ask the Directory Services Team blog, The AD Recycle Bin: Understanding, Implementing, Best Practices, and Troubleshooting.

While the native feature doesn’t have the ease of a GUI and requires your entire forest to be at the 2008 R2 functional level, it’s certainly worth becoming familiar with. Once I’m done with all this disaster testing, you can be sure this feature will on the top of my list to test out when I’m planning that upgrade.

Check Out TechNet Events

Today I enjoyed a morning at the Microsoft office in SF attending an event in the current series of TechNet Events. Through the months of September and October, the TechNet Events team is traveling around the US providing tips, solutions and discussion about using Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2.

Today’s presentation was given by Chris Henley, who led some lively and informative discussions on three topics – Tools for migration from Windows XP to Windows 7, Securing Windows 7 in a Server 2008 R2 Environment (with Bitlocker, NAP and Direct Access) and new features in Directory Services.

I was excited to see specific information on Active Directory. If you missed the blogs about Active Directory Administrative Center back in January like I did, you’ll like some of the new features in this 2008 R2 tool, including the ability to connect to multiple domains and improved navigation views.

If there isn’t an event near you this time around, check back after the holidays when they’ll head out again for another series.

64-bit ImageRight support? – The "drivers" are in control.

The disaster recovery testing is touching more areas then I even though possible related to what options we can consider in our production and emergency environments. It’s bringing to light how interconnected software has become, and how those connections can sneak up on you, even when one is dealing with them everyday.

A basic premise of our recovery plan is to provide access to our recovered systems remotely, until we can make office space and desktop systems accessible to everyone. In order to keep things “simple” and provide the quickest possible up time, the plan calls for using Windows Terminal Services (aka “Remote Desktop Services” in 2008 R2) technology.

Due to the improvements in the offerings available directly by Microsoft related to remote access and the relatively small number of applications we need to make available, we determined that bringing terminal services up initially would be faster than recreating our Citrix environment during an emergency.

In conjunction with this (and the fact that we have only a small amount of remote use in production) we are currently planning to reduce licensing costs by only providing access using Microsoft products. Windows Server 2008 (and now R2) has many of the features we were looking to Citrix for in the past. While it’s possible for us to meet most of our needs with Server 2008, we’d much prefer to use 2008 R2.

While I was at the Vertafore Conference, one of my goals was to find out their schedule for 64-bit support. As one of our main enterprise applications, its important that it’s available on our remote access solution. Since I was unable to run the software on my 64-bit Windows 7 computer, I wanted know how far they were from addressing that.

Turns out, it all comes down to third-party drivers for peripherals. ImageRight works with several popular hardware vendors when it comes to scanners, including Kodak, Canon and Fujitsu. This allows customers to take advantage of more of the built-in scanner features that come with the hardware, instead of writing a generic scanner driver that could reduce the functionality native to the device. They also use the drivers to provide desktop features that allow end users to import documents directly from their PC.

Because of this, 64-bit support for the ImageRight software is directly related to how quickly scanner vendors make 64-bit drivers available. ImageRight claims that the makers of these key peripheral devices are complaining that Microsoft didn’t give them enough warning between Windows Server 2008 and the release of Server 2008 R2 regarding the official “death” of the 32-bit version of the OS to provide 64-bit drivers for all their devices.

ImageRight is planning to have support for 64-bit operating systems by the end of this year. We aren’t planning on a widespread upgrading of desktop hardware to 64-bit any time soon and will be able to wait without too much suffering. However, it does alter our plans for our remote access changes in the next 3-6 months. A disappointment for sure.

Also, the delay doesn’t help existing ImageRight clients or upcoming new ones that hope to run (or at least begin to test) an important software product on the most current hardware and operating systems available. An interesting domino effect that ends in needing to reconsider what I’ll be using for remote access during my recovery testing this month.

Mark Your Calendar

Mark your calenders, Microsoft has two upcoming Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2 events planned in San Francisco.
TechNet Presents: Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 – September 9th.
Topics include: Migrating Windows XP to Windows 7, Securing Windows 7 in a Windows Server 2008 R2 Environment, and New Features in Windows Server 2008 R2 Directory Services
The New Efficiency – Windows 7/Server 2008 R2/Exchange Server 2010 Launch – October 20th.
Several lectures in 3 different tracks, include topics such as: Introducing Windows 7 and the Windows Optimized Desktop, Windows Server 2008 R2 Virtualization Technologies– Saving IT Costs, and Exchange 2010 Archiving and Retention.
Other dates and cities are available as well. See you there!

Customer Focus Design for Window Server with PacITPros

On May 5th, I helped organize a special event for the Pacific IT Pros user group in San Francisco. Customer Focused Design is a process used by Microsoft to collect feedback about features and requirements that need improvement in future product development.
The goal of this event was to provide Microsoft with feedback related to the future of the Windows Server operating system. The Customer Focused Design team was very appreciative of the time PacITPros spent brainstorming together to during the session. They saw a lot of really good ideas and value come out of the session. Overall, the three groups provided over 300 individual requirements and close to 50 high level requirements where improvements could be made.
That information was distilled into the following series of slides:Group 1 (Kevin Lane) – 15 high level requirements, with 97 individual sticky requirements.Group 2 (Robert DeLuca) – 18 high level requirements, with 54 individual sticky requirements.Group 3 (Pat Fetty) – 16 high level requirements, with 174 individual sticky requirements.
The slides highlight the following information:
“Customer Importance” – this provides the prioritization of the requirements that were generated.
“Current Ability” – This is the PacITPros ranking of Microsoft’s ability to deliver this requirement right now based on the technology Microsoft provides in Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008R2. The ranking numbers are:
1 = Microsoft doesn’t deliver this at all
2-3 = you can do this with significant workarounds and/or 3rd party solutions
4-7 = Mircosoft delivers this with minimal workarounds or other applications
8-9 = Microsoft delivers this with no workarounds
10 = Microsoft couldn’t do this any better
“Improvement Pareto” – The requirements and the ability rankings are calculated together to determine the improvement areas needed for focus. Areas with high importance but low ability are areas that Microsoft needs to put some work into. Areas that are low mean that Microsoft needs less investment and effort to deliver what is needed.
Kudos to all the PacITPros members who participated. This was a hands-on way to have our voices heard directly by Microsoft.