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-)).

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Tags: Domain Controller, Hyper-V, NTP, Time Sync, Virtual Server, Virtualization, W32Time, Windows Server 2008

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.

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Tags: Hyper-V, Hypervisor, Intel, IPMI, Virtualization, Windows Server 2008

The Past…

I remember the good all Windows 95 / 98 times installed over FAT partitions. Back-up was fairly simple at that time. All you needed to do was to install a fresh system with the OS, drivers and required applications. When satisfied with the results, just start your PC in DOS mode and use any command line archiving utility to back-up your Windows and Program Files folders. My archive had only 150MB at that time…

If anything went wrong, you would just start your PC in DOS mode, delete the Windows & Program Files directory and unpack your backup (could even be a self extract file) and… taaadaa! Up and running.

Since the introduction of NT (BTW: NT are the initials for New Technology) systems and NTFS (New Technology File System ) a utility was bundled with the OS named NTBackup (ntbackup.exe) which could be used to backup your file system (the whole or portions of it). The application was actually designed by Veritas (ring any bells?) The only downside of NTBackup was that initially it supported only tape drives as backup media, and neither of us had a minimum 2k$ to spend for a DLT tape drive unit.

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Tags: NTBackup, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server Backup

We all know, and some of us even used virtualization software such as VMWare Workstation, VMWare GSX Server, Microsoft Virtual PC or Virtual Server, but very few of us got access to real hardware assisted virtualization. Except from proprietary systems such as IBM Regatta (Alpha based mainframe), hardware virtualization was nearly inexistent in entry-mid level WinTel server market. Things started to change a few years ago when hardware assisted virtualization was build in by entry-mid server CPU manufacturers (Intel & AMD). Another option became available at the time: VMWare ESX Server.

VMWare ESX became the preferred software to manage hardware assisted virtualization. With support for virtual networks and clustering, ESX started to conquer market share. Companies started to talk about high availability (via clustering of virtual machines), server consolidation (no need for a physical platform to host Active Directory Services, PKIs, IAS, Web or other non storage demanding roles), platform on demand (with a few mouse clicks you have a full blown system running or revert to a previous system snapshot), etc.

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Tags: Hyper-V, Hypervisor, IIS7, Intel, Virtual Server, Virtualization, VMWare, Windows Server 2008, Wordpress

I’ve build before servers in my life, for different peoples and companies, but never for myself. Usually with a brad name like HP, IBM, Dell and others things are pretty straight forward: you choose a model, customize it according with your needs, and also have the option for the equipment to be shipped fully configured (from hardware perspective), or buy the barebones (case + motherboard) and components separately and start assemble on your own.

Here, when you start something from scratch, it’s a bit trickier, because you have to pay real close attention to all details. (for example, a CEB form factor motherboard will not fit in a E-ATX case, and vice versa). What type of CPU cooling is required? Unless the server is rack mountable and the case design supports passive cooling, stay out of setups with heat sink only as most likely you’ll have around 30 seconds of operation time until thermal shutdown. What power supply to use? Very careful here. Consider the following aspects:

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Tags: Hyper-V, IIS7, Intel, Virtual Server, Virtualization, VMWare, Windows Server 2008, Wordpress, Xeon