Best Practice Analysers 2011

   

Let Premier Support Ireland help you welcome in the new year with problem free enterprise platforms!
Best Practice Analysers are free tools available for most Microsoft Enterprise products and they are used to determine the overall health of your platform.

Best Practice Analysers are free tools available for most Microsoft Enterprise products and they are used to determine the overall health of your platform. The tools perform read only scans against your environment’s servers and identify items that do not conform to Microsoft best practices.  They should be run on a regular basis as part of your standard operations maintenance plan.  Browse the following groups below to find the platform and analyser you need and follow the links provided to get started.  After running the analyser, you will be able to tell if there are areas which need resolution in order to have fully optimised use of that platform.  If you'd like some Premier Support help to achieve resolution, contact your Technical Account Manager so they can help you decide on the best Premier Support solution available (i.e. Logging a Case, scheduling a Workshop or onsite assessment, etc). 

Windows Server

-       Performance Analysis of Logs (PAL) Tool (reads performance monitor counter logs and analyses it using known thresholds)

-       Best Practices Analyzer for Network Policy and Access Services for Windows Server 2008 R2 x64 Edition (NPAS)

-       Best Practices Analyzer for DHCP Server for Windows Server 2008 R2 x64 Edition

-       Best Practices Analyzer for HYPER-V for Windows Server 2008 R2 x64 Edition

-       Best Practices Analyzer for Application Server for Windows Server 2008 R2 x64 Edition

-       Best Practices Analyzer for Windows Server Update Services for Windows Server 2008 R2 x64 Edition

-       Best Practices Analyzer for Active Directory Rights Management Services for Windows Server 2008 R2 x64 Edition

-       Remote Desktop Services Best Practice Analyzer for Windows Server 2008 R2 x64 Edition

-       Best Practices Analyzer for File Services for Windows Server 2008 R2 x64 Edition

-       Microsoft DNS (Domain Name System) Model for Microsoft Baseline Configuration Analyzer 2.0

SQL 

-       SQL Server 2005 Best Practices Analyzer

-       SQL Server® 2008/R2 Best Practices Analyzer

Exchange and Unified Communications 

-       Microsoft Exchange Best Practices Analyzer v2.8

-       Office Communications Server 2007 Best Practices Analyzer

Sharepoint, Project Server and Office System

-       Microsoft Best Practices Analyzer for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and the 2007 Microsoft Office System (Includes Project Server 2007)

 Forefront, ISA and Security

-       Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server Best Practices Analyzer Tool

-       Microsoft Forefront Unified Access Gateway (UAG) 2010 Best Practices Analyzer Tool

-       Microsoft Forefront Threat Management Gateway Best Practices Analyzer Tool

-       Microsoft Forefront Client Security BPA

-       Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer

-       Extended Security Update Inventory Tool

Developer

-       Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server Power Tools with TFS BPA

-       Team Foundation Server 2010 Beta 2 Best Practices Analyzer

-       Best Practice Analyzer for ASP.NET

 Miscellaneous (Small Business Server, Mobile Device Manager, Commerce Server, Biztalk)

-       Windows Small Business Server 2003 Best Practices Anaylzer

-       Microsoft Windows Small Business Server 2011 Best Practices Analyzer

-       Microsoft System Center Mobile Device Manager 2008 Resource Kit - Best Practices Analyzer

-       Microsoft Commerce Server 2007 Best Practices Analyzer

-       BizTalk Server Best Practices Analyzer

 Let your Premier Support Ireland team know how you get on with these tools and how we can best help you reach your IT goals in 2011!

P2V with Disk2VHD–Part 1 & Part 2

P2V with Disk2VHD–Part 1 

Migrating a physical machine to a virtual machine can be done a number of ways.  You can use System Center Virtual Machine Manager, PlateSpin PowerConvert or a host of other tools.  One of those tools is the free Disk2VHD tool from Sysinternals.  Disk2VHD will take a snapshot of a running machine and write it to a VHD that you can boot up in Hyper-V (or Virtual PC).  The process is pretty straight forward and in Part 1 we will capture the source machine.

You will need to download Disk2VHD and once you have unzip it.  At that point you have two options, the command line or the GUI.  To convert using the command line run the following command:
disk2vhd.exe <SOURCE_DRIVE_LETTER> <PATH_TO_VHD>
As an example to capture the C: drive and write it to C:\disk2vhd\ISA2006.vhd you would run the following command:
disk2vhd.exe C: C:\Disk2VHD\ISA2006.vhd

In the command line you can replace C: with a * to capture all drives in the system.  The other option is to use the GUI.  To do so launch Disk2VHD.exe and you will see the following window:

Simply check the box next to the drive(s) you wish to capture, enter the path to save the file too and click Create.  If you are going to load the VHD in Virtual PC you will need to check the box “Prepare for use in Virtual PC”.  This will correct the HAL and is only required with Windows XP/2003 operating systems.
Part 2 will take a look at loading the VHD in a new virtual machine.

P2V with Disk2VHD - Part 2

Migrating a physical machine to a virtual machine can be done a number of ways.  You can use System Center Virtual Machine Manager, PlateSpin PowerConvert or a host of other tools.  One of those tools is the free Disk2VHD tool from Sysinternals.  Disk2VHD will take a snapshot of a running machine and write it to a VHD that you can boot up in Hyper-V (or Virtual PC).  The process is pretty straight forward and in Part 1 we captured the source machine.  In part 2 we will bring it online in Hyper-V.
With the VHD copied to the Hyper-V Server we simply have to create a new virtual machine.  When you get to the Connect Virtual Hard Disk screen simply select the VHD you captured with Disk2VHD.

You will have to make sure all the hardware settings are similar.  If you had 4GB of memory on the physical machine the virtual machine will need the same.  There are no sizing differences between the physical and virtual machine.  You will also need to make sure your CPU settings are similar and that you have the same number of NICs as the physical machine had.

Once that is all verified you can boot the system.  Leave the NICs disconnected for now until you verify the system is working, then take the old system offline, connect the NICs and you are ready to roll!  Once the VM boots you will need to install/upgrade the Hyper-V Integration Components (depending on the source OS).