Microsoft Hyper-V comes with a built-in replication feature, which allows for almost real-time replication of virtual servers between two separate physical locations. The primary server handles all company data while it also sends a copy of all data to the backup server at very frequent intervals. In case the primary server fails due to hardware […]

If you’re stuck with old 2003 VM’s, you can make yourself slightly less antiquated by upgrading them in-place to 2008. Since the 2003 servers are most likely running 32-bit Windows, you won’t be able to take the step up to 2008R2 or 2012 though. Before upgrading, make sure you download 2008 Service Pack 2 and […]

Virtualizing aging Windows 2000/ 2003 / 2008 / 2008R2 servers into Hyper-V virtual machines can be tricky, especially if the old servers are partitioned using GPT disks or Dynamic disks. Using the following steps will get you through the virtualization process in a few hours: – Use Microsoft’s free Disk2vhd tool to convert each partition […]

For larger network installations where 100% up-time is a must, we often join all physical servers into a “Hyper-V cluster”. In a cluster, two or more physical servers share the virtual workload among themselves. If one server goes down or is restarted because of Windows updates, all Virtual Machines will remain online and end-users will […]

Whenever Microsoft releases major updates for Windows 10 (creator’s edition, fall creator’s edition etc.) previously installed fonts tend to disappear, which causes Word and Excel documents to become badly formatted. To solve this, open c:\windows.old\fonts and copy all fonts into c:\windows\fonts. This step requires administrative privileges. Restart your computer and voila! All missing fonts should […]

Whether old or new, a PC / laptop will benefit greatly from a new Solid-State Disk (SSD). An SSD typically makes Windows boot 3-4 times faster and it also significantly reduces application load times (Word, Excel and Google Chrome etc will start much faster)