Everything-Virtual

Category: Microsoft

  • Desktop Operating Systems – A move away from Windows??

    I have been a Windows guy from a very early age (actually I was a DOS guy before becoming a Windows guy) and it’s with surprise that I find myself in my current predicament. I recently had a go of the Microsoft Windows 8 Consumer Preview and unfortunately found myself really disliking it, don’t get me wrong I think from a tablet point of view it will work wonders but when I sit and watch videos like this you just know that Microsoft have goofed and it’s not just me who has this view on the new Microsoft OS.

    Now I understand that Microsoft haven’t released the final product yet and that things ‘could’ change but tbh I don’t think that Microsoft plan on changing it too much. With this in mind I started looking around at different Operating Systems to use at home, I have a number of different machines around the house doing all sorts and I won’t be changing all of them away from the Microsoft platform. I currently have a Mac Mini that works as my iTunes library for the families iPhones\iPads and a dedicated Management PC for my blogging and VMware lab which will all be staying as they are, that just leaves my gaming rig and my wife’s small Shuttle PC (which she uses for the household budget (YNAB) and gaming (WoW)).

    (more…)

  • Installing Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 in my Home Lab

    I recently decided to upgrade my vSphere 4 lab to vSphere 5, one of the things I did at the time was consolidate my SQL environments to a single platform (I have in the past had SQL 2005, 2008 and various SQL Express environments up for one reason or another), I decided at this time that I was going to install a dedicated SQL server (VM of course) that would be my single source for any db. requirements.

    I decided to install Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 as this happens to be the latest supported product (Denali having only just come out I am not sure on the number of the products that support it), like most of my environment SQL 2008 R2 will be hosted on a Windows 2008 R2 server joined to my AD domain.

    Installing SQL 2008 R2 isn’t taxing, for the most part it’s a next next next but there are a couple of caveats that you need to be aware of, especially if you’re going to be using it as the host for any VMware products.

    Using my TechNet subscription I downloaded SQL 2008 R2 to run the installation.

    (more…)

  • Installing Windows 8 Customer Preview on VMware Workstation 8

    Last week Microsoft launched the Windows 8 Consumer Preview, rather than installing the preview onto any of my existing hardware I decided to give it a go on VMware Workstation 8 before trusting it to a dedicated machine.

    As this is pre-release software Microsoft advise that there may well be bugs and application compatibility issues (another reason to give it a go on a VM) but generally speaking and after experiencing the Windows 7 preview when that released I am sure that this will be fairly straight forward (the Customer Preview can generally be viewed as a RC with this being close to what the RTM release would look like (unless there are some very serious bugs discovered during testing of this release)).

    The recommended specs for running the Windows 8 Customer Preview are :-

    1 GHz or faster processor
    1 GB RAM for the 32-bit release or 2 GB RAM for the 64-bit release
    16 GB available hard disk space for 32-bit or 20 GB for the 64-bit
    DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver

    The Windows 8 Consumer Preview can be downloaded free from http://windows.microsoft.com/en-GB/windows-8/consumer-preview or via your Technet or MSDN subscriptions.

    Follow the step by step process below to successfully install the Windows 8 customer preview on VMware Workstation 8.

    (more…)

  • Installing Raxco PerfectDisk 12 – vSphere Bundle Trial

    I have been a big fan of the Raxco products for a while now so when I heard that they had a new product about to launch I decided to do a blog post about it.

    Raxco launched PerfectDisk12 in June of this year but have already released two Service Packs for the product (one in each subsequent month), I started testing with build 275 but have now upgraded to the latest release (Build 285).

    (more…)

  • Active Directory Web Services Event Log Errors – vCenter Server (4.1u1)

    I am going through a project at home to centralise my ESXi and Windows Event Logs using Splunk and Snare and part of that process was going through my Event logs to try and fix any niggling issues.

    Going through my vCenter event logs I discovered some errors in the ADWS logs that I did a Google for and came across a post from Gregg Robertson over on his site that resolved the issue.

    (more…)

  • TS200 Server – Kernel Debug errors 🙁

    Well having a single Win 2008 R2 server running Hyper-V is proving to be a bit of a problem for me.

    Over the last couple of weeks I have installed my virtualised environment onto three of my four TS200 servers. I am running 2 ESXi boxes with the third machine running Win 2008 R2 with my DC running on the ESXi cluster and my vCenter server running on my Hyper-V machine.

    All was good for the first couple of days, however over the weekend I started experiencing issues with my vSphere client dropping connection to the VC, upon closer examination I have discovered that my Hyper-V box is experiencing Kernel Debugs and powercycling, it’s doing this every 24 – 36 hours and I haven’t managed to figure out why (that may be a lie as I have seen some disk errors in the event logs that may be the cause but a little investigation so far shows no problems with the disks).

    I may well have to trash the Hyper-V side of the server and move everything over to vSphere (which I know I should have done in the first place).

    First things first however, I will be moving the vCenter server off my RAID 5 array (hardware raid using the Lenovo\LSI Raid Controller with the Hardware Feature Key) and see if it’s a problem with the array (will remove the controller from the server in it’s entirety) and power up the server for a couple of days.

  • My HomeLab – Setup Part 1

    It’s begun, over the weekend I started to put together my-homelab.

    In order to build up the environment detailed on my Home Labs page, I used 3 of my Lenovo TS200 servers, 2 of them with e3440 Xeon processors (ESXi) and 1 with the e3460 Xeon processor (Hyper-V). These are all quad core, eight threaded, single processors tower servers in which I’ve installed 16gb ram for the ESXi and 8gb ram for Hyper-V. Only the Hyper-V server has disks installed (4 x 750GB SATA drives in a hardware RAID5 setup (courtesy of the M1015 and Adv. Feature key) and an additional 250gb OS disk. The remaining 2 TS200’s are utilising the internal USB slot for ESXi.

    Building the Environment

    Over the weekend I finally had everything I needed to put my environment together, I wired up, plugged in and powered up a total of 9 devices that will be used in my home lab.

    3 Lenovo TS200 Servers
    1 Iomega IX4-200d 2TB NAS
    1 HP 8 Port KVM
    1 Netgear GS724T Switch
    1 HP 19in Monitor
    1 Management PC (QX9650 based gaming rig that’s been retired for 6 months)
    1 HP MicroServer

    Using instructions found in the following article “Installing ESXi 4.1 to USB Flash Drive” I pre-provisioned my 2gb Cruizer Blade USB keys with ESXi and installed them straight into the server (you have to love VMware Player )

    An additional step in configuring the environment up was to ensure that IP addressing was logical, because I will be using the entire server infrastructure on my home network I needed to ensure that I didn’t run out of network addresses (or more importantly use DHCP addresses in the server pool).

    I have configured the network up as follows.

    192.168.x.2 – 192.168.x.99 – Server and Networking Infrastructure
    192.168.x.100 – 192.168.x.150 – Workstations (DHCP)
    172.16.x.10 – 192.168.x.20 – iSCSI Traffic (and management PC)
    10.x.x.10 – 10.x.x.20 – vMotion Traffic

    The 172.16.x.x and 10.x.x.x networks are going to be vlan’d up to isolate the traffic from the rest of the network.

    Building the Storage

    Due to the my failure of increasing the disk capacity on my Iomega IX4-200d unit I have had to throw in an additional storage device, I have changed the role that my MicroServer was going to be doing (it was going to be a backup server utilising Microsoft DPM server). With that in mind I have installed OpenFiler on to the MicroServer, a nice and easy installation compared to NexentaStor (which failed to install due to my lack of CD drive as I am using the 5th SATA port as another drive).

    Both NAS devices will be configured for iSCSI services and will be used to connect both ESXi servers.

    I’ll point to the excellent post on TechHeads site on configuring OpenFiler for use with vSphere.

    The specifics for the lab is that both the OpenFiler and IX4-200d devices will be connected to the storage LAN (172.16.x.x) and not the main VM LAN. The IX4 device will be used for the VM’s whilst the OpenFiler storage will be used for the VM backups that I’ll be doing later.

    The Active Directory Domain Controller will also install directly onto the IX4 whilst the vCenter server will be installed onto the Hyper-V server (utilising DAS storage).

    Installing the Active Directory Domain Controller

    VMware’s vCenter Server requires Windows Active Directory as a means of authentication, that means that we need to have a domain controller for the lab. Steering clear of best practice (which requires at least two domain controllers for resilience) means that I am going to just install one for the moment. I sized the DC VM to be fairly small: 1 vCPU with 512MB RAM, 40GB hard disk (thin provisioned) and 1 vNIC connecting to the lab LAN.

    The setup was a standard Windows Server 2008 R2 install, followed by Windows Updates before running dcpromo.

    Host “WIN-DC01”
    Domain “MY-HOME.LAB”.

    Next up is the vCenter server. We’ll continue with that journey soon.

  • Goals for 2011

    Well folks, it’s nearly the end of 2010 and it’s been an interesting year.

    I have decided that next year I have a number of goals that I want to attain, these are.

    * Sit and pass my VCP vSphere 4 Exam
    * Improve my VMware product knowledge (VMware View in particular)
    * Produce more technical content for this site (as well as my-homelab.com)
    * Move more into the VMware Virtualisation platform market and less of the Microsoft one.
    * Become a recognised VMware blogger (I want my vExpert).
    * Continue to improve my home lab environment.

    Obviously to get some of those out of the way is going to require a lot of hardwork and dedication, hopefully I will be able to show everyone that I can do just that.

    Have a great New Year and see you on the flipside.

  • Netgear GS724Tv3

    I had been looking for a new switch to use in my home lab, I needed something that could handle jumbo frames as well as vlan’s, it also needed to be larger than 8 ports as I have a large number of machines that would be connected to it.

    I had initially looked at the Linksys (Cisco) SLM2008 with the idea that I would link them together but decided against that when I saw that there were some deals to be had with the Netgear GS724Tv3.

    After some searching online I managed to find one for £150 inc shipping so I snapped it up.

    Within 30 hours I had it delivered to me 😀

    This will be set up over the next couple of days and will replace my existing switch infrastructure (a Netgear 8 port Prosafe Un-Managed switch).

  • Hardwork – Does it pay off??

    Hopefully I will be finding out more today.

    I am trying to persuade work that virtualisation is definitely the route to go, senior management are buying in but unfortunately junior management aren’t. That means a convincing business case is needed.

    I sure hope that my working with various resellers is going to pay off otherwise chances are my contract won’t be renewed at the end of the year, if that’s the case however it means my VCP will be closer because I will take that time out to study for it.

    More on this later 🙂