Aperture

So, why will somebody want to run a Hyper-V Virtual Server with Domain Controller role in production? There are lots of reasons, but the main one is simple: It’s a cool think.

Domain Controllers & Global Catalog Servers are not resource hungry machines in case of small-medium organization. Global Catalog data store is not huge if you have only a few OUs & couple of hundreds objects (groups, users, computers, GPOs and other Active Directory objects).  If you talk about geographically spread organization with multiple domains and Global Catalog replications within the forest, it’s wiser to switch to physical machines, but for the sake of this article we will assume that you either administer the infrastructure of a small-medium sized business, want a secondary DC in your network (great candidate for a Virtual Domain Controller) or you just want to be cool (like I am 8-)).

Continue Reading »

Users of S3000 & S5000V/X/S chipsets running on Microsoft Windows Server 2008 will experience “General Access Denied” error when Hyper-V host machine is restarted after Intel IPMI driver installation.

IPMI or “Intelligent Platform Management Interface” is a piece of software that sends status messages from vital system parts also allowing management applications to interact at low level hardware layers for real-time system health checks (yes, also temperatures, fan speeds, voltages, etc.) / configuration changes.

Intel IPMI driver is installed by one of the following products: Intel Active System Console 3.0; Intel Server Management Pack 3.0; Intel One Boot Flash Update Utility 9.7; Intel System Configuration Utility for Windows 5.0.1 & Intel System Event Log Viewer (SEL) 2.0.1.

Continue Reading »