Computing on Demand PC News & Reviews
Local Server provides a quick view of properties, Events, Services, Best Practices Analyzer, Performance, and Roles and Features.
Properties is a quick view into your storage environment from a conversational standpoint. Things like your computer name and the workgroup, last installed updates, IP address, time zone, etc. To be honest, if you don’t already know the IP or hostname of your NAS, you probably will not be looking at this page anyway.
Events will inform you on any events that have happened within the last 24 hours and are considered Critical, Error, or Warning by default. You can adjust the settings to include Informational events and expand the time period to 3 days, 7 days, or Custom. Additionally, you can choose to show events for a HUGE number of event classifications. By default, Application, Setup, and System are enabled.
Services will allow you to quickly view and modify services on your storage server. The list is complete and right clicking on a service will reveal a menu that can either allow you to start a service, stop a service, restart a service, pause a service, resume a service, or copy.
The Best Practices Analyzer is only useful if you are using Best Practices. Personally, there is no better description for this than the one provided by Microsoft on TechNet: Best Practices Analyzer (BPA) is a server management tool that is available in Windows Server® 2012 R2, Windows Server 2012, and Windows Server 2008 R2. BPA can help administrators reduce best practice violations by scanning roles that are installed on managed servers that are running Windows Server 2012 or Windows Server 2008 R2, and reporting best practice violations to the administrator.
Performance is fun to watch… You get a nice graph that displays CPU usage and Available Memory Usage over the last 24 hours.
Roles and Features will show you a list of roles associated with your storage server and right clicking can quickly remove the role or feature. You can also quickly add Roles and Features.
The All Serves option shows you much of the same information. However, it is broken down by server and includes a list of your Storage Servers and their IP address. A quick right-click on one of your storage servers brings up a menu that will allow you to Add Roles and Features, Shut Down Local Server, Computer Management, Remote Desktop Connection, Windows PowerShell, Configure NIC Teaming, Configure Windows Automatic Feedback, Manage As …, Refresh, and copy.
