Storage options for Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V

An excellent article from Jose Barreto, a technical specialist on Microsoft's storage team.

WinDV

WinDV is a small and easy to use Windows application for capturing videos from DV device (camcorder) into AVI-files and for recording AVI-files into DV device via FireWire (IEEE 1394) interface. Capturing is very reliable thanks to use of large buffer queue. Timestamps recorded on DV tape by camcorder can be used to automatically split captured video into multiple files. During transmitting to DV, several AVI-files can be joined together to form final video recording.

Main features

• small & handy <100kb>
• input / output - capturing from DV device to AVI files (both type-1 and type-2 supported) and recording vice versa
• no dropped frames - memory buffering
• automatic AVI splitting according to the timestamps on DV recordings - every video sequence can be saved into unique file
• easy AVI joining - record multiple files joined to the DV device just using wildcards
• preview of transmitted video in the window
• free - you can download it and use it as you like at no cost

File Shredder

"File Shredder is free desktop application for shredding (destroying) unwanted files beyond recovery."

This tool allows you to shred single files, entire folders, or all free space on a hard drive.

ISO Recorder

"ISO Recorder is a tool (power toy) for Windows XP, 2003 and now Windows Vista, that allows (depending on the Windows version) to burn CD and DVD images (DVD support is only available on Windows Vista), copy disks, make images of the existing data CDs and DVDs and create ISO images from a content of a disk folder."

ISO Recorder adds an option to the right-click context menu of ISO files. It supports 32 and 64 bit Vista and XP.

Unlock Vista Shadow Copies with ShadowExplorer

Certain versions of Microsoft Vista (Business, Enterprise, and Ultimate) offer a utility called Shadow Copy. This allows the user to right-click a file and choose to "Restore Previous Versions" - a very handy thing to be able to do when things have gone horribly wrong!

Did you know that lesser versions of Vista (Home Basic and Home Premium) also store previous versions of files but do not provide a mechanism to access them?

Thankfully, there is a free utility called ShadowExplorer that can set this data free.

FastStone Capture

"FastStone Capture is a powerful, lightweight, yet full-featured screen capture tool that allows you to easily capture and annotate anything on the screen including windows, objects, menus, full screen, rectangular/freehand regions and even scrolling windows/web pages. You can choose to send captures to editor, file, clipboard, printer, email, Word/PowerPoint document or upload them to your website. Editing tools include annotating (texts, arrowed lines, highlights), resizing, cropping, sharpening, watermarking, applying edge effects and many more. Other features include global hotkeys, automatic filename generation, support for external editors, a color picker, a screen magnifier and a screen ruler.

FastStone Capture saves files in BMP, GIF, JPEG, PCX, PNG, TGA, TIFF and PDF formats."

$20.00 Shareware

Microsoft Exchange Server Public Folder DAV-based Administration Tool

Microsoft Exchange Server Public Folder DAV-based Administration Tool

"Use the Exchange Server Public Folder Distributed Authoring and Versioning (DAV)-based Administration tool (PFDAVAdmin) to perform various management tasks related to public folders and mailboxes. The tool checks the permissions status of each public and mailbox folder and corrects any problems found. The ability to bulk export/import the permissions and replica lists make this tool invaluable in achieving greater productivity in managing public folders. The program can also reports content information of each public folder and mailbox folder such as the number of items in each folder, size of folder and most recent modification date of any item in the folder.

Note: PFDAVAdmin is supported when running with Exchange 2000 Server, Exchange Server 2003 and Exchange Server 2007."

Propagate permissions to sub folders, etc.

OpenWengo

"OpenWengo is a community of enthusiasts and developers, creating free software products related to communication over IP. The flagship product of the OpenWengo project is a softphone which allows you to make free PC to PC video and voice calls, and to integrate all your IM contacts in one place."

WengoPhone is a communication tool based on the SIP protocol. "It is more than just VoIP software: it is a full-fledged communications tool that lets you enjoy free calls, video conferencing, SMS, chat over many existing protocols (MSN, AIM/ICQ, Yahoo!, Jabber)"

Screenshots

Jing

Jing is "the always-ready program that instantly captures and shares images and video…from your computer to anywhere."

A simple to use program to capture screen shots and video, Jing allows you to distribute via:

• Screencast.com
• Local folder or network share
• Clipboard (images only)
• FTP server
• Flickr

It's currently free. :)

BackupPC

"BackupPC is a high-performance, enterprise-grade system for backing up Linux and WinXX PCs and laptops to a server's disk. BackupPC is highly configurable and easy to install and maintain.

Given the ever decreasing cost of disks and raid systems, it is now practical and cost effective to backup a large number of machines onto a server's local disk or network storage. This is what BackupPC does. For some sites, this might be the complete backup solution. For other sites, additional permanent archives could be created by periodically backing up the server to tape. A variety of Open Source systems are available for doing backup to tape.

BackupPC is written in Perl and extracts backup data via SMB using Samba, tar over ssh/rsh/nfs, or rsync. It is robust, reliable, well documented and freely available as Open Source on SourceForge."