@JaredBusch
We use in-house PBX system so SIP is not an option at the moment. Because we use internet and making calls all day, we fear bandwidth may cause the call quality degraded. Our Phone & Internet are two separate services.

@johnhooks said:

We have Comcast, and in 6 years, I can count 3 times I needed to contact them. Two were because we moved, and one when we got married and my wife changed her name.

I heard a lot of negative stuffs from them. Especially their customer service or how they renew contract without notify you in advance. The renew contract isn't much of a surprise. I've seen a lot of company send on 48 hours notice or worse.

@scottalanmiller said:

General rule, never get phones and Internet from the same carrier, it makes you trapped for no reason.

Are you referring to contracts or am I missing somehting?

@dafyre said:

@LAH3385 said:

Beside the limitation of vendors in your area. Can I get some feedback on major carrier for Phone & internet?

Currently we are using Logix for phone and Verizon for internet. Our contracts will come to an end in November. What are some feedback on ATT, Verizon, TWC, or some other major carrier.
I intentionally left out where I work at because I want your feedback from your current or previous provider.
Thanks!

Stay away from Windstream (I call them Windscream) -- I don't know if they are available in your area, but if they are, stay far, far away.

Thanks! This is exactly what I am looking for

Beside the limitation of vendors in your area. Can I get some feedback on major carrier for Phone & internet?

Currently we are using Logix for phone and Verizon for internet. Our contracts will come to an end in November. What are some feedback on ATT, Verizon, TWC, or some other major carrier.
I intentionally left out where I work at because I want your feedback from your current or previous provider. However, we do A LOT of calls, both long distance and local. (We are small call center)
Thanks!

@scottalanmiller said:

@LAH3385 said:

@scottalanmiller said:

Here is a quick guide, however:

• File Servers: Currently almost always Winchesters because capacity is what matters.
• App Servers: Winchesters normally because everything gets loaded into memory and disk speed doesn't matter.
• Database Servers: Almost always SSDs because IOPS matter and little else.
• Terminal Servers and VDI: Almost always SSD because speed matters and capacity does not and dedupe is very effective.

I forgot to mention. The server is actually a hypervisor with VM (Hyper-V) acting as File Server. Not sure if that make any different. I'm guessing it falls under VDI.

How would that fall under VDI? You said it was a file server, it would be a file server.

Yeah. My bad. Just read more about VDI and it doesn't apply to us

@scottalanmiller said:

Here is a quick guide, however:

• File Servers: Currently almost always Winchesters because capacity is what matters.
• App Servers: Winchesters normally because everything gets loaded into memory and disk speed doesn't matter.
• Database Servers: Almost always SSDs because IOPS matter and little else.
• Terminal Servers and VDI: Almost always SSD because speed matters and capacity does not and dedupe is very effective.

I forgot to mention. The server is actually a hypervisor with VM (Hyper-V) acting as File Server. Not sure if that make any different. I'm guessing it falls under VDI.

@BRRABill said:

I used the EDGE SSDs from xByte in my latest server. That would help with your cost issue.

My thinking was, yeah, it's overkill, but it wasn't much more, and it'll make the system speedier longer.

Of course, had I been buying 1000 of these instead of 1, I would have thought differently, probably.

I already got a quote from xByte. To do Raid 10 with 2TB I'll need 8 drives of 480GB... totaled ~$3K per server.. or almost $6K total
Kingson SSD is half the price.. just that it may not work with Dell Raid Controller.

[I feel like this has been asked before, so Sorry! in advance]

This is kind of vaguely questioned. When do you, admins, think SSD is a MUST HAVE for server? I know IOPS would be the deciding factor, but I want to know where is the line of Good Enough and Over Kill is.

[Back story] This question popped in my head while I was taking a shower . To me I would give EVERY workstation SSDs for no obvious reason... just cause. SSD improve boot speed and other loading speed + it make users complaint less. Win-Win for me and users.
But what about servers? Our File Server utilizing SATA III at the moment and we do not see any poor performance, except network bandwidth. Our IOPS is quite low, less than 100. I wanted to go with enterprise grade SSD for Dell PowerEdge but we just couldn't afford it. We'll need 3-4TB total per server (2 servers total) $$$.

What is your thoughts on this? Is SSD the way of the future for server? Is manufacturer certified enterprise SSD the only option? I saw some use enthusiast SSD like Samsung Pro or Kingston Enterprise.
ps. If you have any idea how to deal with network bandwidth leave the comment below. I have 48port Cisco Gigabit switch. It's couple of years old but still kicking. Any recommendations for replacement switch are welcome as well.

THANKS for reading!

@brianlittlejohn said:

AD Migration Tool.

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc974332(v=ws.10).aspx

Thank! looking more into it right now

I have a new server with Windows 2012 R2 that will be a part of Domain Controller. However, I do not want to upgrade from our 2008 DC to 2012 R2 as I want a clean fresh setup.

I am thinking of start a new forest and add the users and groups into AD later. The problem I suspect will happen is users will lose their CID and their workstation will recognize them as a different user. How do you overcome this problem?

My reason behind this because a lot of things have changed during the past couple of years. This DC used to be use in Web Develop environment so there are A LOT of groups and users. I don't want them on the new server. Nothing wrong with it just.. don't want it. How can I approach this?

So recently I started getting these relayed message saying "Delivery to these recipients or groups is complete, but no delivery notification was sent by the destination server". My initial guess is that the destination server does not support Read/Delivery notification. But is it really that it?

I used to received read/delivery notification on almost every email just couple of months ago. After I upgrade to Outlook 2013 I did not implement the read/delivery notification as I was too lazy to get around to (no judging). So I start the read/delivery notification just after Christmas but I did not receive any notification to any domain. I tried gmail, yahoo, outlook, and many other vendors emails. What happened??

Anyone experience this issue? To make it simple, the read/receipt works when I sent an email to my gmail account.. but now it deliver this:

I have a WSUS server that was configured by my predecessor. I am not sure if the configuration is set correctly or not. Do I need to interact with WSUS server at all? Not even sure where to start

@shybrsky
I would start with going through all the security groups member/member of. We ran into similar problem before where certain admins lose their administrator rights. Turn out they didn't have the rights from the beginning as the member they were given, named admin, does not contain administrators group. They got their administrator rights through another group, named audit, which was removed for reasons. It was a mess for a day.

To prevent this incident from happening again I would use GPO to give every machine within AD the rights for administrators group to gain remote access. In my environment we create a security group named remoteaccess for RDP
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/4980.how-to-enable-or-disable-remote-desktop-via-group-policy-windows-2008.aspx

@dafyre

Weird thing is only hypervisor1 able to view report. visor2 and VM return with error

I really do not think my disk is the bottle neck here.
I did found a setting on GPO [Network/Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS)] It should not have impact on Foreground transfer.

@LAH3385

These are some tests I conduct.
visor1
visor2 (the host where VM resides at the moment)
VM
File size 1.8GB (contain 450 files of 4MB each)

visor1 to visor2

visor2 to visor1

visor1 to VM

visor2 to VM

Connection from my PC to visor1/2 or VM is around 6MB/s to 11MB/s (average around 7MB/s)

@Dashrender said:

set the counters, then move some files around, then take a screen shot and post.

Idle 1min

File Transfer 11 minutes

@dafyre said:

@LAH3385 said:

@dafyre said:

You could also try to move that synchronization slider a few notches towards the middle. That should give you a balance of sync and client access speed. It looks like you have it set to just focus on syncing. This could likely be what is hurting you.

I moved it to 9/10 client access. Very little to no different.

Might be a wise thing to set it back closer to the defaults.

Look at the Perfmon Counters for Disk Read / Writes and Queue Length for both of your servers that are running Starwind?

What am I looking for? How long should I run the test?

@dafyre said:

You could also try to move that synchronization slider a few notches towards the middle. That should give you a balance of sync and client access speed. It looks like you have it set to just focus on syncing. This could likely be what is hurting you.

I moved it to 9/10 client access. Very little to no different.

@marcinozga said:

What antivirus (if any) is running on that server? What happens if you disable it?

No AntiVirus. If any.. it would be w/e built-in into Windows server 2K12 R2