For a long time, I’ve been wanting to blog about PAL – the Performance Analysis of Logs tool developed by Clint Huffman. It’s available from Codeplex and it should be part of your standard administrator toolbox!

What is does is very simple but also very powerful: it analyzes a perform counter log and compares it against some well-known thresholds. Out of the box it comes with a threshold file for each major Microsoft server product (Exchange, SharePoint, SQL, …) that you can use to build your counter log. So not only does it analyze your logs, it also suggests the counters you should use and how to interpret them!

The thresholds are based on recommendations from the different product groups and support teams at Microsoft.

The report generated by PAL is really astonishing – as you will see at the end of this post.

To use it with a Windows Server 2008 machine however, you’ll need to do some extra manual steps. Here’s how:

1. Start PAL
   
    
   
2. Navigate to the “Threshold file” tab and choose the set of counters you want.
   
    
   
3. Choose the Export to “Perfmon Template File” button and save the generated html file.
   
    
   
4. Copy this html file to a Windows Server 2003 machine.
   
5. Open perfmon on the Windows Server 2003 machine, go to “Counter Logs”, right-click and choose “New Log Settings From…”.
   
    
   
6. Point to the html file you copied to create a new counter log. You don’t have to specify any options here if you’re going to use it later on a Windows Server 2008 machine. If you want to analyze this particular 2003 machine, set the options you want and start the trace. Skip to step 10 in this case.
   
7. On your Windows Server 2008 machine, issue the following command:
   
   logman export –n “[name of your counter log]” –xml [filename to export to] –s [2003 machine]
   
   This will export the counter log from the 2003 machine to a readable xml file for use on the 2008 machine. Do you still follow?
   
8. We can now use the generated xml file to create the same counter log on a 2008 machine. Open perfmon, go to “Data Collector Sets”, “User Defined”. Right-click and Choose “New”, “Data Collector Set”.
   
    
   
9. In the wizard, choose “Create from a template” and point to created xml file.
   
    
   
10. When created, start and stop the trace as required. If you can, leave it running for some days to have representative results! The resultfile (.blg in Vista, Windows Server 2008 or Windows 7 and .csv in Windows Server 2003 or Windows XP) can be found in the C:\PerfLogs directory by default.
    
11. Copy the generated output file from your 2008 box to your PAL workstation.
    
12. Open PAL again, navigate to the “Counter Log” tab and point to the copied output file.
    
     
    
13. To start the analysis, go to the “Execute” tab and go!
    
     
    
14. You will be amazed by the results!

Are you thinking about how to accomplish something particular in W2K8? Look no further. Microsoft has released the Windows Server 2008 Step-by-Step Guides.

When you are running Windows Server 2008 on your development pc, be sure to install the "Desktop Experience" feature. This is the only way to get the Webclient service that is needed to integrate your Office programs with SharePoint.

Andrew Woodward has an excellent post about this issue: Windows Server 2008 developing SharePoint - Can't connect from Office clients

Looking for information about installing WSS 3.0 with SP1 on W2K8, I stumbled across the following Technet article:

Install a stand-alone server on Windows Server 2008 (Windows SharePoint Services)

What is interesting is that you should manually adjust your registry settings to be able to backup your application with Windows Server Backup!

Microsoft released the Windows Server 2008 Reviewers Guide which provides a comprehensive technical overview of the features and functions of this new OS.

What's covered in this guide?

• Introduction to Windows Server 2008

• Server Virtualization

• Centralized Application Access

• Branch Office

• Security and Policy Enforcement

• Web and Applications Platform

• Server Management

• High Availability

• Better Together - Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista

Download Full Reviewers Guide (250 pages)

Download Short version of Reviewers Guide (23 pages)

After using Windows Vista for over a year now, I took the dive and installed Windows Server 2008 on my Fujitsu-Siemens Lifebook E-8310 laptop. So far a great experience: all my Vista drivers work like a charm and almost all applications are working. What I really like is the modular approach on this OS: you only install what you use. Performance is at least on par with Vista, sometimes I think it is even faster.

I'm definitely not the only one doing this: Installing Windows Server 2008 on a Laptop And if you want a nice step-by-step on how to set this up go and see here.