Windows Server 2012

Windows Server 8 was renamed to Windows Server 2012 just about 17th of April 2012. This name is much better for the whole product continuity. Remember Windows Server 2000? Yea, I know. Anyway this latest flavor has a totally different work up and GUI. One of the interesting part is that you could strip away the GUI from Windows Full installation using a Powershell command. Interesting, although I am wondering what are the reasons that an admin would want to do that. He or she might as well install the server core from the beginning.

One thing that will hit you from the start and will hit you hard, will be the Metro client interface. This interface is typically found on mobile like OSes. Another feature that will be interesting is the added capabilities on the Hyper-V. There is now a 64TB limit on the virtual disk as compared to the maximum of 2TB-512MB of the VMware offering. Another interesting feature is that now, there is a capability that you could essential migrate VMs on Hyper-V without any shared storage or network resources! Please take note that I haven’t personal test this feature yet. So keep tuned as I do more tests on this latest offering from Microsoft.

VMware Error: Cannot SVMotion after 32% why?

Hi guys,

I thought I would share with you regarding this problem that I had consistently on my VMware environment at work. The environment:

1. 16 ESX 4.1.0 update 381591 (Update 2)

2. Storage is EqualLogic 8 groups with 16 HDD SAS each.

3. DELL M610s

I had some problems when I svmotion a VM between the same shared SAS storage. I get this error:

I used PowerCLI to move the server and is the error I get in command line:

When I checked the vmware.logs, for the VM, it says that the operation timeout. I did a google search (IT admin best friend according to wlsiew) and found that I need to probably increase the timeout rate for that particular VM. That did solve my problem. Here is the SC when I did the change. One thing to note you can only do the change only if you power off the server:

So far, I can only replicate the problem on SAS disks only. I haven’t encountered the problem on any other kind of storage. This tip was taken from the VMware website. So does anybody else have this problem?

Windows 2008 Server Core – Creating a windows 2008 server core cluster

Hi guys,

Its pretty late here. I know. Doing some late night, sugar and coffee laced studies here. But at last I found my holy grail. To complete a windows 2008 cluster based on server cores. AD running on a server core.

Scenario,

What if you have a organization which is tight on budget and running low-end servers (Old DELL 2850/2600…. hahahhaha… Love to pick on DELL). Anyway, in my scenario which is even tighter is that, the 3 server core servers running in my MS vitual server, 1-DC and 2-Failover cluster.

You might ask me, how did you configure shared storage???? Well, my friends, let me introduce to you iSCSI! This will be the future. The technology is already developed so far ahead that the network technology seems to be lagging at the moment. Of course to run this you need to have a superb fast backbone or you will have issues. Anyway, I created a iSCSI target and managed to get my server core working to talk to the shared storage. The shared storage is actually a virtual file on my virtual server!!! How cool is that.

Best still, I managed to do all this in my comfort of my living room… heheheheheh sounds to good to be true right! Anyway, I am soon going to tear the whole thing down again so that I can rebuild from scratch and video shot that as well to share it with others. Hope you guys and girls can wait a while longer… I feel a bit of pain tearing it down after 5 hours doing it… hehehe anyway for the greater good!!!

So please wait and stay tune for the video… will sure make you worth the wait.. 🙂

See ya!

Windows 2008 Server Core – Adding Server into AD 2008 Domain

Hi guys,

In my excitement of creating video tutorials, here is another one for all of you. How to join to a 2008 – Active Directory Service. Its pretty simple stuff. Some of the pitfalls are:

• You must ensure that your DNS is pointing to the domain controller or the AD DNS server
• For Server Core, you need to install all the VMTools kit for VMware. This is because of of the box, windows 2008 server core doesn’t have the correct network drivers to use. Therefore you will need to install the VMTools kit in your VM Server. To do this, first you will need to click on Install VMTools in your File Menu in VMServer Console. Then, there will be a dialog box appear in your vm guest for you to choose “Yes” to install the VMTool. Next, go to your server command line, and type D:/ or whatever the CD ROM is configured to and type in setup.exe. You will need to accept and then click next. You will that the VMTools will completely install and wala… there you have a server core vm guest with networking. Then you can configure your networking needs using the netsh command
• Another one interesting thing that I found out that was, using the netdom join “machine name” /domain:{domain} /OU:{OU=xxxx,DC=xxxxx,DC=xxxx} you can define where you want the machine account reside in AD OU group. So for this tutorial, I have defined it in an OU container called ServerCore. This was a first for me.

Let me know what you guys think of the videos. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Please share any open source software that you guys are using to do this kind of videos. I am targetting to do one with voice very soon. Hope that works out. I also will be putting my watermark on them in the future. You will never know…. .So hope you guys can enjoy some Windows 2008 Server Core goodness…. Enjoy:

Windows 2008 Server Core – Checking for installed components

Hi guys,

Here is my first attempt at tempting to do some video tutorials. I was thinking how much I have benefited from video tutorials. People like me, who don’t like to read, can always turn to this ready available source of knowledge. This is what I love about open source and the internet. All the software used for this tutorial is done using OPEN SOURCE Software… So thank you very much for help me produce this. The software used are CamStudio and VirtualDUB. You can do a google search and checkout their sites. I would also would like to thank WingLoon.com for his help in guiding me.

Anyway, so here is a video to help see what components are installed in windows 2008 server core. Since its all based on command line, there will be no GUI to help see what is installed. Check out the last portion where I do a short filtering system on the line. Anyway enjoy!