Windows Tools and Registry Tips

There is a rule included in VMM 2008 Managment Pack disabled by default. This rule, “Microsoft.SystemCenter.VirtualMachine.Manager.2008.Engine.TaskFailure.rule”, is in charge to generate a Warning Alert in System Center Operations Manager 2007 whenever a VMM Job fails.

The procedure to enable such rule, “Engine Task Failure”, is the following:

1.- From the Authoring view in SCOM Console expand Rules view. You can filter the rule view looking for Virtual Machine in filter box.

2.- Once you have located “Microsoft.SystemCenter.VirtualMachine.Manager.2008.Engine.TaskFailure.rule” to enable the rule right-click -> Overrides -> Override the Rule -> For all objects of type: Virtual Machine Manager 2008 Engine Server:

3.- From Override Properties parameters Check In Override box and set Override Setting to True.

4.- From Override Properties parameters select any unsealed management pack, i.e. “Default Management Pack”, or create a new one, and click on OK.

5.- And it´s ready. Good luck.

It´s a good practice to increase NTFS performace to remove the feature configured by default in Windows 2000, Windows 2003 and Windows XP operating systems, that maintains for every file on the system the date and time of the last operation performed over the file.
Because the quality of the storage impacts directly in the performace of Hyper-V environment it is also a best practice for Hyper-V to remove that audit functionality in Hyper-V parent and guest partitions. But be careful, some applications could depends of that functionality, so you have to assess the applications running into the server to be sure that there are no dependencies.

The way to remove the audit feature is just to modify the registry as following:
You have to create a new REG_DWORD key named NTFSDisableLastAccessUpdate inside the registry path HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem\

In Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 this feature is unset by default.

There is a new feature available in Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 that allows to increase the value of the TCP Receive Window size over its default maximum value, 65,536 bytes.
This feaute that is configured by default, in some circumstances, for example Firewall products that doesn´t implement correctly TCP Window Scaling, could impact the performace of some network operations launched from a Vista/Win2008 machine, some programs may respond slowly or may stop responding.

The command to check the configuration of this feature is:
netsh interface tcp show global

The command to change the configuration of this feature is:
netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled|highlyrestricted|restricted|normal|experimental

Where:

disabled: Fix the receive window at its default
  value.
highlyrestricted: Allow the receive window to
  grow beyond its default value, but do so
  very conservatively.
restricted: Allow the receive window to grow
  beyond its default value, but limit such
  growth in some scenarios.
normal: Allow the receive window to grow to
  accomodate almost all scenarios.
experimental: Allow the receive window to grow
  to accomodate extreme scenarios.
  WARNING: This can dramatically degrade
  performance in common scenarios and should
  only be used for research purposes.

Windows Remote Management and Windows Remote Shell allow us to remotely administration of Windows Vista and Windows 2008 machines. For Windows XP SP2 and Windows Server 2003 there is also an update that align them with WinRM features used in Windows Vista and Windows 2008.
WinRM is installed and configured to start automatically in Windows Vista and Windows 2008, but it is not at all configured.
So, before to start to use it it is mandatory to proceed with its configuration. The command to do it is:
“winrm quickconfig” or “winrm qc” in abbreviated mode.
The command will launch the question “Make these changes [y/n]?“, just type y
Once the service is configured you can query its state using the command:
“winrm enumerate winrm/config/listener”

Now it´s time to execute WinRS in the client that will manage the romote machine. These are some examples about some ways to execute commands into the remote machine:

winrs -r:https://myserver.com ipconfig
winrs -r:myserver “dir c:\”
winrs -r:http://169.51.2.101:80 cmd

And finally, if you don´t need anymore WinRM you can remove it running this command:
winrm delete winrm/config/Listener?Address=*+Transport=HTTP

There is a limitation in the number of logon that a user can perform in a computer that has not connection with its domain controller. In this case, the logon process use the cached logon information stored in the computer.
This number is by default 10 for Windows XP and Windows Vista.
This default behaviour could be changed using the Key CachedLogonsCount stored in the Registry Path HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\winlogon
Valid values for this key are from 0 to 50.
In case you want to deny logon for domain login accounts if the active directory domain is not reachable you can set this value to 0.