The Perils of Playing Russian Roulette With Windows Updates

Let's talk about a high-stakes game that you may be unknowingly playing in your server room. It lurks under the innocuous name "automatic Windows updates", but if you've been in the trenches long enough, you know it better as Russian Roulette.

Windows Updates: A Necessary Evil

Ever second Tuesday of the month, our friends at Microsoft bequeath us a fresh batch of patches for Windows. These patches — necessary to keep our machines secure, efficient and bug-free — often require a restart to take effect. But not all of these 'restarts' are equal. You see, sometimes, during the reboot process, instead of simply restarting, the machine shuts down. And sometimes, it won't even shut down gracefully. It's a gamble, a flip of the coin, a spin of a bullet chamber — it's Russian roulette.

The Danger in The Server Room

Now, this game of chance may seem insignificant, just another quirk of the IT industry. But consider this: in many cases, production servers have the "Install updates automatically" setting turned on. A server going offline without warning? That's the stuff of nightmares for any business. It can lead to unanticipated downtime, loss of productivity and worst of all, loss of revenue. Not to mention the chaos it wreaks on your IT team's peace of mind!

Morale of the Story: Let's Be Safe Out There

So, what's the solution? It's simple: Do not enable automatic installation of updates on production servers or any machines that you can't easily power back up. The minor inconvenience of manually installing important updates far outweigh swiftly falling into the pitfall of unexpected system shut downs.

In the world of IT, unexpected surprises are rarely welcome. Let's keep Russian roulette out of our server rooms and ensure consistent, reliable operation for our businesses. And remember, a mindful approach to updates is the mark of a truly professional system administrator.

This is a CPU usage graph of a Windows Server 2008 R2 machine, with all latest patches applied, and Internet Explorer 10 left opened for a few days. It had only two pages opened, both are Microsoft’s own support pages with no active content.

Remote session (RDP) was opened for about 5 days, and every hour Internet Explorer process took more and more memory and CPU, until it took most resources from server.

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I had two problems with my Windows Me 8. At least two which were clearly bugs in operating system and not a usual Dell hardware failure. And seems like both of these problems had the same solution, which potentially should be able to fix some other issues with Windows 8. More...

In SQL Server 2012, we have 4 main options for High Availability: Database Mirroring, Failover Clustering, Availability Groups and Log Shipping. All but Availability Groups (AG) are available in SQL Server 2008 as well. Today we’ll review Availability Groups and how to create and use them.

Before we begin, make sure you understand what is Windows Server Failover Cluster (WSFC). I covered it almost a year ago for Windows Server 2008 R2 and SQL Server 2008 R2, and you’ll need WSFC in order for AG to work.

A few points about Availability Groups to make sure they are what you are looking for:

• Availability Groups are not share-nothing scalability option. They are using shared storage, such as storage area network (SAN), although it’s not a requirement. We’ll speak about share-nothing scalability later.
• For AlwaysOn Availability Groups, you need SQL Server 2012 Enterprise edition or higher. Business Intelligence edition or Standard won’t do.
• AG provide failover with up to 5 readable nodes.
• AG provide you with something like load balancing option, but AG is not NLB. Also, all nodes can work independently, i.e. you can still connect to them to retrieve information. Only the primary node can change information in the database.
• AG does not require working in the same IP subnet, but it requires Active Directory domain. This means, that you can have geographically remote nodes participating in one AG, but they must be members of the same AD domain.
  In case of multi-subnet cluster, you’ll have to implement the file replication solution on your file servers to synchronize the data.
• AG is database-level, as opposed to node-level failover cluster. AG serves group of databases, unlike the simple database mirroring, with 4 replicas instead of one.

Overall, the AlwaysOn Availability Groups are conceptually similar to database mirroring, but provide more advanced functionality and security.

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If you are developer, then you work with relational databases as well. And if you work in a Windows world, most likely your system of choice is Microsoft SQL Server.

With every new DBMS release we find something that changes the way we solve common problems in new solutions. SQL Server 2012 is no exception.

In SQL Server 2012, instead of just enhancing the productivity and robustness of the server, Microsoft solved a number of architectural problems we previously had to deal with in our applications when working with SQL Server.

Problems like saving files in databases, load balancing database clusters and simple restoration of data, finally got the minimum viable solution, which should only improve with time.

This article is about free software I made to automate the deployment of exported Hyper-V machines. More precisely – Hyper-V machines of labs for Microsoft Official Curriculums (MOC), used by students at Microsoft official training classes. It should be interesting for MCTs (i.e. Microsoft Certified Trainers) out there, whose job is to deploy labs in form of Hyper-V virtual machines, as well as for system administrators having the same duty of periodic installation of Hyper-V virtual machines. The installation procedure of a pack of Hyper-V machines could be extremely time consuming. Or should I say - used to be.

I will speak about it as about the solution for a lab deployment problem, but if you are working with other virtual machines, just think about the similarities with your scenario.

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Well, the “unexpected” should be put into quotes, because if you went through the Windows 8 training, then you have some ideas about how it works, but even if you did the training, some things are not clear until you crash at them at full speed.

As I mentioned before, Windows 8 now suspends applications which loose their focus. In Metro applications framework you, as developer, can deal with suspension notice and make sure you save the current state of the application, and  you could use application manifest to create exception from the rule. Say, if your application is a media player or a browser.

However, it turns out that Metro applications are not the only ones to be suspended. More...

Sometimes I need to copy large files simultaneously to several tens of computers. Like – Hyper-V virtual machines for training courses, and sometimes they take up to 60 Gigabytes. Usually these files reside on a single file server, connected to the local network by 1Gbit NIC, but even if nothing else is taking the bandwidth from that file server, copying 60 Gb to 20 machines would take more than 11 hours – that’s the amount of time it takes to transfer 1200 Gb at the speed of 30 Megabytes per second.

I wanted to reduce the overall time of deployment to about 70-90 minutes, or about 10 times. And this article is about how I’ve accomplished that goal.

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A few days ago Microsoft released beta of their new technology called User Experience Virtualization, or UE-V. The name implies that it has something to do with virtualization, but it’s just a buzzword. What UE-V does – it synchronizes user settings across workstations, in real time.

Imagine, that you have to log into multiple workstations, and what you want to have is the same settings of all applications you are using in your work. For example, spelling options in Microsoft Office, the layout of buttons, menus and colors – all the little pains that accumulates into the strong headache of roaming for some.

UE-V vs. roaming profiles

The roaming profile could be the answer, but for most of us it’s not. Some of us don’t even have the Active Directory profiles, but still desire the same user experience throughout the environment (translation to human language: every desktop of yours looks and behaves the same).

The difference with roaming is also in fact that in UE-V you only synchronize what you want to, not everything. So it works faster and has less space for errors.

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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...