We will describe in this post how to make an inventory of your physical and VMWare virtual machines running Windows Server. For each virtual machine, we will also retrieve on which physical host the server is running. If you have a VMWare virtualized environment this script can be useful to help you decide which type of Windows server edition you need to purchase in order to lower your costs. For more information on how to license MS Windows Server in a VMWare environment you can read this article.
Read more »

I will describe in this post an incident we had in our production environment and the different troubleshooting steps to resolve this issue. When we launched a GPMC, the console froze when we clicked on an OU in order to display the Policy Objects linked to it. The problem occurred only when the GPMC was connected to a particular Domain Controller (PDC emulator in our case), if we switched to another DC the GPMC was OK.

There was no problem with GPOs in our domain: Replication was ok and GPOs were applied correctly on our computers/users objects. But we could not edit anymore GPOs connected to this DC. While the GPMC was hanging there was a lsass.exe CPU overload on the DC until the console was killed. Therefore we had to edit GPOs connected to any other DC, so the production environment was working near normal during the resolution of the incident.

Read more »

We will describe in this post how to indentify an application that causes a CPU time overconsumption on your Domain Controllers. We will use two tools for this: Server Performance Advisor and Wireshark. The first is used if you have a Windows 2003 DC, if OS is Windows 2008 the tool is already included, you access it with MMC snap-in perfmon.msc, its new name is Windows Reliability and Performance Monitor. Both versions have performance counters dedicated to Active Directory, in this post we will use SPA, because the DC having trouble is running Windows 2003. If you want more details on using Windows RPM for AD you can read this article.
Read more »

If lsass process consumes too much CPU time on your domain controller the cause might be clients infected by Conficker. The link to the KB article discusses how to prevent its propagation and how to remove the worm. The purpose of this post is to identify infected clients which cause this lsass.exe overconsumption easily.

This topic was already discussed in a post of AskDS, I’ll add a few comments and scripts which will help you to eradicate the virus on your workstations.
Read more »