RunAs Radio

Richard and Greg talk to Ken Brumfield from Microsoft Premier Field Engineering on the challenges of working in really large infrastructures. What's large? Try 250,000 workstations and 40,000 servers large! Ken talks about how tactical solutions create strategic problems in IT management at this scale, and how to balance "getting things done" with "not making the mess worse." Check out Ken's active directory utilities at http://activedirectoryutils.codeplex.com/.

Richard and Greg welcome Clint Huffman back to the show to talk about analyzing performance monitor logs. Clint is the author of Performance Analysis of Logs (PAL) at pal.codeplex.com. Clint has another collection of favorite tools, including Process Monitor (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896645.aspx), xPerf (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/hh162920.aspx) and DebugDiag (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=49924).

Richard and Greg talk to Buck Woody... they had planned on talking about sqlcms.codeplex.com but ended up instead digging into what it takes to be in an IT career in today's economy. The discussion ranges from the advantages of generalists vs. specialists, consulting vs. employment and how technology is evolving to support these different styles.

Richard and Greg welcome Susan Bradley back on the show. The SBS Diva (www.sbsdiva.com) talks about Windows Server 2008 Foundation, the smaller cousin of Small Business Server. Foundation is aimed at businesses of 15 users or less. Think Microsoft Home Server for small business!

Richard and Greg talk to Jeff Atwood of Stack Overflow (www.stackoverflow.com) fame about being a developer who also maintains infrastructure. Jeff also talks about his new site, Server Fault (www.serverfault.com), which is a Question and Answer site for the IT Professional. Great discussions about adventures in RAID controllers and NIC drivers and how FireBug can diagnose your network problems.

Richard and Greg talk to Pedro Manfredi from Microsoft about High Performance Computing. HPC is the next generation of supercomputing - using off-the-shelf hardware rather than custom built supercomputers. Pedro digs into the new style of applications that are best served with HPC and how development is done. Check out http://www.microsoft.com/hpc for more information.

Richard and Greg talk to Robert Smith from Microsoft Premier Field Engineering about understanding storage performance. The discussion digs into SAN, iSCSI, direct-attached storage, also looking at tools like PerfMon and the Windows Performance Toolkit. Check out WPT at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc305187.aspx and the disk performance issues talked about in the show at http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=929491.

Richard and Greg talk to Allan Hirt about failover clustering in SQL Server 2008. SQL Server got a major update in the clustering side of things for 2008, Allan talks about the changes, improvements and why you'd want to do this in the first place. Check out an alpha version of Allan's book at http://www.apress.com/book/view/1430219661.

Richard and Greg talk to Rhonda Layfield about what's coming in the Microsoft deployment tools for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. They talk about Windows PE - the Windows Preinstallation environment that presents a minimum install environment (fits on a CD or USB key) which is part of Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK). Improvements in the new Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT 2010) that deploys operating systems and application software. Finally, they explore the Windows Deployment Service (WDS).

Richard and Greg talk to Kim Tripp about how developers and DBAs inter-relate around SQL Server. Kim tells a story of how she encountered developers who saw SQL Server as a "set it and forget it" technology. What should the relationship between developers, DBAs and database be? We tackle the topic!