One of my favourite TechNet blogs is by the storage team at Microsoft. A post that’s gone up recently by Ned Pyle grabbed my attention today – Safely Virtualising DFSR. I have a bunch of virtual DFSR hosts in my environment, virtualised across both VMware and Hyper-V. As Ned points out, you can virtualise pretty much everything these days, but multi-master replication technologies require a bit of special attention.

I won’t go into it too much here, as the blog post explains it much better than I could, but the big takeaway is that hypervisor snapshotting your DFSR machines is a big no-no.

If you don’t follow this guidance and attempt to use saved states/snapshots or attempt to restore a virtual machine using a custom host side restore solution, that VM will stop replicating forever. The server logs DFSR events 2212, 2104, 2004, and 2106. DFSR overwrites locally originating changes on a restored server as conflicts from other servers. The restored server and its p ...

I am LIKING Windows 8 - everything I love about using Windows 7/Server 2008 R2, except all bright, shiny and new-like.

I'm also liking that the skillz are instantly transferrable, even with the pre-beta.  So, I've been tooling around with a couple of IT Pro-related tasks, specifically deployment and virtualisation, and here are my shameless cross-posts to what I've found so far:

Sysprep/OOBE experience in Windows 8 Server

Deploy Windows 8 with SCCM 2012

As ever, there's more to come :-)

Hello,

Lying in bed last night, I had a revelation about where I can see us heading in the next few years. This is mostly reliant on better broadband though (hello NBN!) but regardless I believe my idea is where we are heading.

Firstly, if you use more than 1 PC/device then you'll know the frustration of having to either do multiple installs of applications you use, or re-do settings. A good example of this is your browser's favorites/bookmarks list. Sure you can type in the websites, but it's nice to have a full list to just choose from. To fill this void, services like Delicious http://www.delicious.com/ popped up - your bookmarks in the cloud! Now it doesn't matter where you are, you can access that same list.

Email went the same way - Outlook is nice to use, but it doesn't help you when you're at work and want to check your personal emails. Again, the solution was to have your emails in the cloud and sync all your devices/PC's to that single point, or even just use a web interfa ...

Dear VMware,

 Hi there! It's me again. I thought it was a good time to write again.

After my last letter, I was concerned that you might not love me anymore. To be honest, I don't truly know that you loved me before, but you certainly did love the money for our licensing. But I now feel that we're still friends at the very least.

Now, we can't pretend you haven't taken a significant hit from the overall vSphere community. You really did make a monumentally bad move that made a lot of customers cranky. Even with all the noise made by customers who were affected, you made all manner of absurd efforts to rationalise it, to essentially prove customers wrong - and all for naught. The simple fact of the matter was that you made a really dumb move, and you took a big PR hit for it.

My last letter suggested that you could still fix it - and it looks like you've made some genuine effort, to your credit.. And by no means do I take credit for changing your mind! I think there were ...

Dear VMware,

 How are you? I'm fine. Sorry I haven't written before, but it's high time I did.

VMware, I know you like money. I know you've made a lot of it over the years. I'm sure your parent company, EMC, is thrilled at your financial performance and market capitalisation. I know if I owned your company, I'd be pretty happy. Virtualisation is a hot topic, and seems set to continue that way.

To be honest, I don't mind giving you money, generally. I've got a lot of value out of you over the years - especially with vSphere 4.x and hot features like vDS (and the ability to use the Cisco Nexus 1000v, which we love), not to mention the old standbys of vMotion, HA, and DRS. There's a good reason we pay maintenance, and an even better reason we upgraded to Enterprise Plus. And hey, you even gave us a great discount to upgrade to it! We've had a lot of value out of our maintenance.

I understand that you feel entitled to that money as a result. Hey, I can even handle getting e ...

As I mentioned in a previous post, I'm doing some work with SCCM 2012 at the moment, and one of the things I'm interested in looking at is how SCCM 2012 handled non-Windows-based mobile devices (ie: iOS and Android).

I have an iPod Touch which I don't mind tooling around with (given that I don't actually use it for anything related to its primary function), but I don't have any Android devices to hand.

Fortunately, there's an x86 port of Android called, unsurprisingly, Android-x86 which works quite well in a virtual environment.  And despite the fact that Hyper-V's capacity to support Linux is, quite frankly, pretty limited, Android-x86 installs and plays quite nicely on a Hyper-V host.

This is how I put it all together - read on.

Yeah, this Cloud thing.  You know that thing which is mentioned in every second I.T. news article.  What is it and is it really that magical silver bullet?

Firsts things first, a lot of people are confused about this cloud thing.  I think most people don’t really know the difference between a Virtual Server and the Cloud. 

A Virtual Server is just that, a single server doing something like looking after your web site.  You can increase the memory and do other things to make it grow like additional storage – but you will hit a physical limit of what the the Virtual Server can offer you.  To go further, you then need a second Virtual Server (which could take hours and hours for the Vendor to deploy) and some kind of magic, such as a load balancer in front of it to split the requests up (ie, web traffic).  You would then need to spend a lot of time setting u ...

Background

I have a test network at work which I use to 'mess around with', learning new technologies, programs, and systems. There isn't anything operational on the network, but if I lost anything it would be annoying.

The centre of the network is a Dell server that is currently excess to requirements, part of an EMC Avamar pilot a couple of years ago that is no longer required (the server, certainly not Avamar).

Server Specification

Dell PowerEdge 2950

About 12 months ago, I installed VMWare ESXi 4 on the server, and it has been running flawlessly since then. It's not taxed very much, usually having only 2 VMs running on it - a Server 2008 R2 A ...

As Paul Cunningham from Exchange Server Pro correctly points out in this post Microsoft does not support Live Migration or vMotion of Mailbox Servers if they are part of a DAG (Database Avalaibility Group). Paul also mentions something which Scott Schnoll talked about at Teched last week, that Microsoft does not support high availability solutions in the hypervisor, i.e. VMware HA. Refer to the following line in the system requirements:

"Microsoft doesn't support combining Exchange high availability solutions (database availability groups (DAGs)) with hypervisor-based clustering, high availability, or migration solutions that will move or automatically failover mailbox servers that are members of a DAG between clustered root servers. DAGs are supported in hardware virtualization environments provided that the virtualization environment doesn't employ clustered root servers, or the clustered root servers have been configured to never failover or automatically move mailbox servers that are me ...

This is a cross-post from my blog

I recently had a catch-up with Stuart Strathdee, Chief Security Advisor for Microsoft Australia, who is out and about throwing his weight into Microsoft’s message encouraging users and businesses to ditch IE6 as soon as possible.

Personal computers running IE6 still make up a significant share of online systems, which is quite a scary prospect given that its ability to handle security modern security threats is negligible.  Engaging with customers is going to be an ongoing challenge for Microsoft - it can be extremely difficult to persuade users to make any sort of change to their systems if there’s no obvious reason to do so.  Unfortunately most home users wouldn’t know if their machines were compromised or not, so as long as malware can sit quietly without causing obvious problems like crashes or popups, infections can go for a long time without detection or resolution.

Continued business us ...

Note - this is a cross-post from 4sysops

Microsoft Application Virtualization is generating a lot of interest throughout the IT community. It allows IT professionals to abstract application management away from SOE maintenance, and offers a highly flexible environment in which to manage and deploy applications.

As an App-V administrator, one of the tasks you may find yourself performing is moving the system database to another SQL server. This process has a number of gotchas because the database is referenced in a number of places which can prevent the App-V management service from starting, so here is a list of tasks to perform which will ensure a successful database move.

In our live scenario, we migrated the App-V database from a SQL 2008 SP1 server running a named instance under the Network Service account, to a SQL 2008 SP1 server running a default instance under a domain account.

Backup and move the database

1.&n ...

As I haven't been working on a many new projects of late I haven't had the opportunity to discover new technologies or find some awesome solutions.  What I wanted to blog about today and hopefully open up some good discussion is my favourite products and the solutions that I would use if I had the opportunity to develop an Enterprise in a green field setup.

First up let's talk hardware and specifically storage.  I don't believe that there is currently a better storage option then NetApp. I've worked with EMC, NetApp, HP, IBM and HDS storage devices and have never found a better device then the NetApp gear.  The WALF (Write Anywhere File System) is a great way to store data.  The other killer feature of the NetApp is the ability to present a LUN via CIFS, NFS, Fibre or iSCSI and switch between them (if licensed) provides a very flexable storage environment.  On top of this is there are a number of other features which are standard ac ...

Yesterday I downloaded and installed Citrix Xen Client.  Xen Client is a desktop Hypervisor which allows virtual machines to be run on the bare metal without the need to first run up a full operating system.  This works in much the same as vSphere or Xen Server in the Data centre.

I should preface this post by noting that Xen Client is currently pre-release software and as such plays up a little.  My first installation attempt was on a Lenovo x201.  Whilst the install completed okay and the Hypervisor loads, the graphics drivers are missing and as such I was unable to load the GUI.  I had been warned during installation that the x201 was not on the Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) and rightly so it seems.

Running over to Citrix.com I noted that the x200 was on the HCL so I grabbed one from the desktop team and installed Xen Client again.  This time I was presented with a client screen.  The interface here is very simple.  Across the top of the s ...

At my work place, we implemented our DR site with VMWare ESX 2.0 back in 2006. It was a great way to do DR with less physical resources, and further served as a pilot for a possible adoption in our production environment. We were suitably impressed, enough to go forward with a production rollout in 2007, using ESX 3.0.

Since then, we’ve upgraded to ESX 3.5 and recently, to vSphere 4.0. Both our production and DR environments benefit from the capabilities of VMware, and some SAN, server hardware, and VM OS upgrades have made the environment great – in some ways, faster than dedicated physical machines. Particularly now that we have i7 cores in our production environment!

We primarily run Windows VM’s, being a very heavily Microsoft-based environment. x64 VM’s perform extremely well, and especially now that we’ve upgraded from Windows 2003 R2 to Windows 2008 R2. vSphere even made the pilot process for R2 easy, with provisioning and installation done in a matter o ...