[There's a reason that Yoda is the unofficial mascot of SBS. Size indeed matters not.] Building a box - THE OFFICIAL BLOG OF THE SBS "DIVA"
Wednesday, February 15, 2006 12:12 PM bradley

Building a box

Well it's beta season which means I have to decide which beta gets a real phyiscal box and which one gets a virtual one.  While setting up virtual machines is getting easier and easier, I still sometimes like the old fashioned, real, physical box to test with.

My normal way of building a box is to do like many others... install disk one...leaving plenty of room for that operating system.  Now I'm still partitioning off server drives, but normally for workstations, I make the whole thing one drive.  I then stop after the SBS disk 1, ensure I've partitioned off the rest of the disks like I like them and then I finish the standard install.  I then stop, run the Connect to Internet Wizard... ensure that Sharepoint is functional before progressing to the Premium install.  Then I lift up Sharepoint to SQL and instlal ISA.  But I make sure that standard is good and solid before adding any third party stuff, line of business apps, antivirus, you name it.

Remind me I need to get a KVM switch as right now I have keyboards all over the place.

You might also want to check out Daemon tools (if you install version 4 of the tools ensure you unselect the adware) and "Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel for Windows XP" as two tools to make mounting ISO's and using them to easily install especially in virtual settings.

So?  Have you played with VMware?  VPC?  Virtual Server?

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# re: Building a box

Wednesday, February 15, 2006 2:36 PM by Matt

I can't even begin to express how much easier Virtual Server has made my life. In the past I had to scrouge up old hardware to fiddle around with. Now I just take an older server that nobody uses, load it up with as much RAM as I possibly can and away I go.

In fact in the very near future I am going to be setting up an SBS box with 3 member servers and 2 clients - all virtualized. I'm just waiting for more RAM at the moment.

I know that some of the big boys even use VMs in production - they can be great for DR purposes.

# re: Building a box

Wednesday, February 15, 2006 4:02 PM by Scott McDermott

I've found Virtual PC too limiting (at least compared to VMWare workstation) for testing. VMWare workstation has so many features that make life easy for testing things, it's the obvious choice for me.

I use Virtual Server 2005 in a couple places. At home I'm running a FreeBSD instance in it on my SBS2003 server and it's been working great. I use it at my office for various projects that need a small machine and for long term testing of servers. Very nifty and it does everything I've needed.

Of course, now that VMWare Server is free, I may have to look into that and see how it compares, since I wouldn't mind having virtual machine extensions for more operating systems.

# re: Building a box

Wednesday, February 15, 2006 7:29 PM by Andy

From my experience, VM's are great however....
SBS on a virtual pc/server is incredibly slow to boot up - i've just done the 2 day sbs2003 exam cram course and it took forever to install/boot. On my home pc (with not enough ram) it took over 8 hours to install and about 30 mins to boot up.

Symantec AV's tamper protection complains about virtual server and thinks I'm trying to destroy my hard disk or something - my solution was to convert the disk image with the free vmware reader (I did have to reactive sbs though).
Seems to work faster in vmware.

# re: Building a box

Thursday, February 16, 2006 3:41 AM by Nick Pieters

I'm using vmware. From the 5.x version you can make snapshots, so when testing something i first make a snapshot, then screwing it.

When that happends i go back to my previous snapshot :-). And i'm also noticing more performance with Vmware then Virtual pc.

I don't think the vmware gsx server is free, there's a player and with pre-made images like ubuntu.

# re: Building a box

Thursday, February 16, 2006 3:30 PM by Scott McDermott

VMWare GSX has been replaced by VMWare Server, which is free. http://www.vmware.com/products/server/

# re: Building a box

Wednesday, April 26, 2006 2:53 AM by Matt Ridings

While I personally do a large amount of virtualization on both MS and VMware software within my own company, we don't actually do a great deal of it at our clients. The one place we have used it at clents however was not to do some nifty new technology deployments...but rather to take old NT server installations that at some point would be transitioned out, but which couldn't be brought into the domain, and couldn't be upgraded due to old backoffice applications, and throw them onto virtual servers within a SBS server. Trust me, there is no substitute for dealing with old servers in which the client may not have the original software, manuals, etc. so a whole new rebuild is out of the question. We ran the vmware pc to virtual prep migration tools in those cases and it worked well. Took a little tweaking but overall much less than it would to have attempted to do something with the old server.

Matt Ridings
MSR Consulting