With a catch. The topmost certification for windows system administrators, the MCSE (Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer) got new name, while keeping the old abbreviation. Now it’s called Microsoft Certified Solutions Expert.

No. Sorry. In fact, Microsoft created brand new certification, mixed products with the cloud and gave it the acronym of the most successful Microsoft’s certification, coincidentally abandoned since 2003. More...

One of the most frequent questions I get as a trainer, is about certifications and their real value. Opinions regarding certifications vary from “useless piece of paper” to “paramount” and the reason for so diverse opinion is either experience or lack of it. In this post I will try to explain modern IT certifications from a more practical point of view.

During my career of Information Technology Trainer, while spending most time training system administrators and software developers in various disciplines, I’ve also got a lot of valuable feedback from HR specialists and business owners. I’ve organized seminars on certifications to explain their value or in some cases – lack of it, and realized that certifications are like Terra Incognita for vast majority of HR specialists and even IT managers. But it shouldn’t be that way, so this post is also for HR and those who aren’t certified yet but think about whether it’s necessary or not. More...

In one of the previous topics, I was showing how  to deploy Windows 7 using Automated Installation Kit, or AIK. This time it’s more hardcore, and is about Windows Deployment Services.

Using Windows Deployment Services you can deploy your fine tuned Windows 7 image to hundreds of computers in a matter minutes. It’s not the most hardcore way of doing it, as I will show in SCCM course later, but still mind blowing if you are either haven’t heard about it before.

It’s not a rocket science though, so the whole lab is just 16 minutes. Very short indeed, but it contains even the installation phase.

Enjoy!

Russians says – “One is not a warrior at the battlefield”, meaning that one is just too small number for a real war. When the time of real battle is coming to your web site, it’s time to become a … farmer. The geeky one.

Web farm, or Network Load Balancing (NLB) cluster is when there are more than one web server behind a single web address. Of course, it’s not only about web – some other stateless resources can be scaled that way as well – DNS server, for example, or SMTP. However, the most popular use of NLB clusters is web, as most requests in the Internet are going through it.

Network load balancing clusters are rather frustrating topic for many systems administrators, as it’s very common for them to know clustering till the time of their exam. MCSEs and MCITPs of all kinds have to know that stuff, but rarely use it. Who might be more interested in clustering – that’s web developers, who’s web applications serve more and more visitors each day and should be infinitely scalable by design.

Developers

But what it takes to build an application, which could be scaled out by simply adding more hardware? If your application is working fine and attracts more customers than it can handle – that’s when you are wondering whether you’re in trouble. The trouble comes when you realize, that the architecture of your project does not support scaling and situation is even worse if your web developer has no clue about how to make it work in the cluster.

For .NET developers, though, the situation is much better than for PHP developers, for example. They can use SQL server to store the state data (and SQL server may reside on failover cluster, which is the second type of windows cluster that we’ll review later), files can be stored at mirrored network area storage (NAS) and that’s it.

Systems Administrators

For administrators, though, the situation is more difficult. First of all, they are the ones who needs to care about installation, maintenance and management of the cluster. They are the ones who migrate old applications to new clustered servers and must ensure they understand why these applications do not work under new conditions. While usually developers have the harder burden, this time it’s not the case, thanks to Visual Studio and .NET.

There is not much we can say about developer’s part of the job, as there is too little and too simple stuff to do, there is pretty much to say and to show to system administrators.

That’s why I had no choice than to prepare my first narrated lab about creating Windows Server 2008 Network Load Balancing cluster. Enjoy!

Perhaps my future labs will become narrated as well, excerpt for the short and simple ones. It takes a bit more work, since I am not preparing the text and have limited time to complete the lab (always do it in one take), but is definitely more fun, as I can tell more than you want / need to know about the subject.