Windows SBS 2008 prefers to back up to a removable USB drive, which is a problem if your SBS is virtualized in Hyper-V, which doesn’t support USB. There are workarounds, such as FabulaTech’s USB over Network, which I’ve used, and like. But the current version (4.2) has issues, as I posted a few days ago. I expect them to resolve those, but in the meantime, here is a purely Microsoft solution – use Hyper-V R2’s new dynamic storage capabilities!
Dynamic storage? Yup. Hyper-V R2, whether as a role on Windows Server 2008 R2, or as the standalone Hyper-V Server R2, supports hot add and removal of VHDs. This gives us a way to indirectly support USB hard disks.
First, this only works with R2, so make sure you`re running the latest version of the Hyper-V Manager. You`ll need a Windows 7 or Server 2008 R2 machine with the Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT) installed.
Next, make sure you`re VM has at least one SCSI adapter added to it. If you create a new VM in Hyper-V R2, this happens automatically, but if you created the VM in the original version of Hyper-V, it may not have a SCSI adapter. Before this will work, you must have a SCSI adapter added to the VM.
Now, plug in your USB hard disk, and format with NTFS from the host. (If you`re running Hyper-V Server R2, you may need to use diskpart.exe for this. ) Next, in the Hyper-V Manager, click on New, Hard->Hard Disk in the Action Menu to open the New Hard Disk Wizard.
Select Fixed Size, and click Next.
Point to the removable USB disk and supply a name for the VHD. Click Next and specify the size of the VHD. Make it essentially the full size of the USB disk.
Click Finish and the virtual hard disk will be built. This can take a while, be patient. Once the VHD has been built, you can add it to a running VM. Select the VM in Hyper-V Manager, and open the Settings for it.
Select the SCSI controller in the left pane, and Hard Disk in the right pane.
Click Add, and then enter the path to the VHD on your USB hard disk.
Click OK and the VHD is available in the SBS VM.
Now follow standard SBS steps to configure SBS Backup to use the virtual disk you just added. (For details on SBS Backup, see Windows Small Business Server 2008 Administrator’s Companion.)
You’ll need to add and remove disks using the Hyper-V Manager to avoid issues for the SBS Backup, or, alternately, you could write a PowerShell script using WMI to manage the process.
Charlie.
Given what I’ve been seeing since the release of version 4.2 (and now 4.3) of FabulaTech’s USB over Network software, I’m recommending that users stick with version 4.1 or even earlier. I’ve had multiple unexplained hard crashes that have no other apparent explanation. When FabulaTech releases a new version, I’ll do some serious load testing before I implement it in production. Stay tuned.
Charlie.
UPDATE: I’ve been running version 4.3 for a while now, and haven’t experienced the level of crash version 4.2 was giving me. Hopefully, they have resolved the issues. It’s to be noted that FabulaTech was very proactive when I uninstalled and reported the problem to them, and even provided a beta build to test. So they do take issues very seriously, a good sign!
Further UPDATE: I spoke too soon. Version 4.3 has just BSOD’d my HP server. Not a pretty sight. And at least one other MVP, Wayne Small, has had similar issues, also on HP hardware. That’s it, I’m pulling my recommendation. I’ll be testing a similar product from KernelPro, but no recommendations there until I’ve had a change to really beat up on it. Including on my production HP server. Expect a full post on the issue in a week or two.
The new version of StarWind’s iSCSI SAN software is coming soon, and promises to add full high-availability clustering, with fail-over and fail-back support. While I’ve had a look at their video demo, I haven’t had a chance to actually install it or play with it yet, so no full review, obviously. What I like about StarWind has always been that it’s an affordable solution in the small to mid-sized business space, where paying 10’s of thousands for a SAN just isn’t in the cards for most of us, but where we have a very real need to rationalize our storage options.
What I’ve been concerned about, however, has been the risk of putting all my eggs on a single iSCSI server. Now true, if you build/buy a good, highly redundant server, build it with multiple NICs, a good RAID 6 array with a hot spare or two, and give it redundant power supplies, you’ve gone a long way towards protecting yourself. BUT, if you have a catastrophic motherboard failure, say, you’re out of business until that StarWind server is rebuilt. Well, now you will be able to rest a good deal easier when version 5 is released. Yes, you’ll have to buy and build a cluster to give you high availability, but you knew that was going to be the requirement regardless.
It looks like they’ve also significantly updated their management interface, something that isn’t likely to get any objections here. All in all, I’m looking forward to getting my hands on the new version.
Charlie.
If you noticed that the blog suddenly went back to basic ugly, that was an unfortunate and unanticipated side effect of preparing to move my blogging to a new location. We'll be moving to http://msMVPs.com/blogs/russel shortly, but in the process of getting things configured for that move, we appear to have lost our look and feel a bit. Susan has enough to worry about handling the move, so I'll just wait until she's done before trying to fix the look.
So, why am I moving? Because, frankly, 64-bit is no longer particularly interesting in and of itself. It's become the norm we all use on the server side, and is fast replacing 32-bit even on the desktop for new machines. So the problems specific to 64-bit are going away, and thus the need for a resource devoted to them is less important. So it made sense to change and move to a more general purpose blog. Which is, ultimately, what I'd already been doing, so this just reflects that reality.
Does this mean I don't care about 64-bit any more? Hardly. It just means the world has caught up to those of us who were on the bleeding edge of the transition. So, what will I focus on moving forward? Hard to say. A bit of this, a bit of that. Software and hardware that I really like. And probably some I don't. For example, I'm hoping to get my hands on a new version of StarWind Enterprise Server shortly. Version 5.0 will add high availability active-active clustering of your iSCSI storage, something usually only available on very, very high end SANs. I've also been looking at a new deployment technology for Windows 7 from Prowess called QuickDeploy. Expect to see posts on both of these soon, but probably not until after we make the move to the new digs.
Charlie.
As many of you know, I wrote the book on Windows Small Business Server 2008, as well as earlier editions. It’s an operating system and a good deal more, giving most small businesses (up to 75 users or devices) pretty much all the infrastructure and enterprise environment they need.
We’ve run our writing business on SBS for years, and we recently moved our production environment over to SBS 2008. This was the last piece of the puzzle, and we’re fully 64-bit here except for two old workstations that don’t have the hardware for it, and that can’t quite go away yet.
This does, of course, leave us with a question? What to do with that old SBS 2003 R2 server? It’s only 32-bit, but it has 3GB of RAM, and lots and lots of RAID array. Maybe we’ll turn it in to an iSCSI SAN, using StarWind’s iSCSI software. That would be a good way to repurpose the hardware and let us rationalize our storage here a bit.
So, back to SBS 2008, which is what started all this. The Official SBS Blog has a new post on Why small businesses use SBS, complete with links to some smoking deals from Dell and HP, amongst others. Check out the blog for some compelling reasons to consider SBS 2008, grab a copy of our book on it for detailed planning and configuration information, and then make the move to 64-bit on the back end and you’ll love the differences.
Charlie.
In case you missed it, John Howard has updated his HVRemote utility. This little gem, which keeps getting better and better, can completely configure both the client and the server to enable you to connect to a Hyper-V server from your Vista or Windows 7 desktop. You’ll still need some way to actually manage the server, and that could be the RSAT tools or the PSHyperV project on Codeplex. IAC, grab the new version of HVRemote. John has added even more intelligence and troubleshooting in this version.
Charlie.
This is just going to be a quickie. I’m busy working on a new book for Microsoft Press, and as part of that I needed to set up a failover cluster to test Hyper-V’s new Live Migration. Well, the folks at StarWind Software were nice enough to send me an NFR version of their StarWind Enterprise Server to use. I admit, I was a bit concerned, since it can be a daunting task to get most iSCSI SANs up and running, and I wasn’t at all sure how well a purely software solution would do. Well, I must say, I’m very pleased and pleasantly surprised. This has been easy to set up, and the documentation on their site has complete, step-by-step walkthroughs that a quite good. The defaults for setting up iSCSI target LUNs work just fine, and the management interface is quite easy to use.
The whole thing took under an hour to get up and running, with no need for any sort of esoteric understanding of what LUNs are, or how to configure MPIO, or what CHAP stands for, or anything fussy like that. And it let me set up a Live Migration with no muss or fuss. Nice. And I haven’t even begun to use some of the other goodies this supports, like iSCSI tape and DVD targets.
Charlie.
Well, sorry about that. Got a bit distracted after I started writing up my experiences with the ML350 and buried in a project and forgot to get back here. And I’m still a bit buried, so I’ll keep this a bit shorter than I might otherwise.
First, the good stuff: Overall, I love this server. It’s quiet (well, as long as the ambient temperature stays under 30 degrees or so), which is a real plus in a small business where the server may well live in a room where people have to work. It’s a workhorse. It runs at 95% memory utilization 24/7, with CPU utilization running in the range of 5-10% most of the time. That’s pretty good, and means that if I could put more RAM in here I could definitely run more VMs. The thing that makes all this possible is the incredibly good disk I/O subsystem. With a P400 RAID controller, and 8x 2.5” SAS disks for the main array, plus a separate Adaptec SAS controller that runs a pair of 750GB SATA drives (RAID 0) for miscellaneous transient storage (ISOs and such), and a pair of SAS drives in RAID1 for the boot disk, this server can really handle a lot. I could wish it had more network I/O built in. If I were buying one today, I’d spec it with at least one, and probably two, quad-port GigE NICs. More and more I’m finding that networking is my limiting factor. I’ve added an Intel dual-port server NIC, and that helps, but it’s just not enough for the kinds of things I end up doing.
Overall, this is an extremely well build server, and it’s a joy to work on. I had to swap out a couple of FB-DIMMs that went out in our last heat wave, and it was trivial to do it. Everything is well marked and easy to get at, and I only had to unclip the fan shroud to easily pop the DIMMs.
So, what don’t I like? The base I/O isn’t that great, with only a single NIC (Broadcom at that), and only the P200i for a built in RAID controller. But both of those are easily fixable. Less easily fixed is that the only way to upgrade the CPUs from dual-core to quad-core is to change the motherboard. That really is annoying, since with the dual-core CPUs the box is limited to 16 GB of RAM. If I could just buy new CPUs, I could easily extend the life of this server by quite a bit, since the quad-core CPU configuration supports 32 GB of RAM, and at a very reasonable cost. But that’s not an option.
And one ongoing annoyance is that the built-in iLO port, which takes the place of a second NIC, is of very limited usefulness without buying a very expensive add-on software package. Give me a break, HP! It should not cost extra to use the iLO as a spare management NIC for whatever I want to use it for. (And I have the same complaint about the iSCSI addon for the integrated multi-function NIC.)
So, would I buy one? Oh, yeah. And I’d really love to get my hands on the new G6 version, which looks like a very worthy successor. But that’s probably not going to happen any time soon, unless HP sends me an eval unit again.
Charlie.
I've had my Acer Ferrari 4000 for four years now, and it has been a great laptop. Yes, I wish I had a dual core. Yes, I wish I had a laptop that had 4 GB or even more. But honestly, the Ferrari was still a quite good little laptop, iwth a great display (1680x1050 on a 14" screen is hard to find!), a perfectly usable keyboard, and the whole thing is a carbon fibre case that looks cool and weighs in at under 6 Lbs. But a few weeks ago, just as we were getting ready to go on vacation, it came up dead. Not a little dead, not limping, but power on, no boot, no BIOS, D E A D. I was totally bummed, and knew I just didn't have the spare $$ floating around to buy anything to replace it that I really wanted. But after I'd had a chance to recover from the shock, I did a quick search on eBay for solutions. First I asked my friend Barb if it were possible to squeeze an Acer 5000 motherboard into the 4000 case, since I know she has both laptops. Nope, not an option. Too bad, I could have used a dual core. Then I searched for a repair solution and came up with this offer: For a flat $175, including return shipping and all taxes, they would fix pretty much anything on the laptop by doing component level repair of the motherboard, etc. And in the small percentage where they couldn't fix it (~5%), they'd ship it back to you for $25 and refund the rest of your PayPal payment. I checked the seller's ratings, and they were 100% good, so I figured I had very little to lose and bought the package.
I pulled the hard drive out (they say right up front they'd prefer NOT to have it), and dropped it off at Pony Express, who packaged it up and sent it off for me, and two days later, on a Friday, I get a call from the seller saying they'd received the Ferrari and were beginning work on it and giving me a work order number.So far, so good. I like communications, it gives me confidence.
Now besides the wouldn't boot, there were a few other little problems that had cropped up over the years. Three of four USB ports were dead, for one. And the PCCard slot was also pretty much dead. I'd been living with both problems. They were an annoyance, but not really more than that, though the PCCard slot was getting to be a real pain, since I couldn't run a second wireless network. And my networking here is a bit "interesting", so that was a nuisance. I'd listed all of these problems on the sheet I'd taped to the top of the laptop, but frankly I was just hoping they'd get me back to the booting stage. Anything beyond was nice, but not essential.
On Wednesday of the next week, I get another call (I'm still on vacation at this point, but I'd given them my cell number). They've repaired several things already, but they're going to have to replace the CPU. Great, I figure this is where they stick it to me and expect more money. Nope. Not even a hint of that. What they're calling about is that they have the 1.6 GHz model CPU in stock, but will have to order the 2.0 GHz one so it will take a couple of extra days, or they can put the 1.6 GHz processor in, my choice. I said I'd prefer the 2.0 GHz,and she said no problem, they should be able to get it locally, and would ship when it was completely repaired.
Well, just when we get home from vacation, there's the email with the tracking number. Great, that will mean an extra trip to the Pony Express office, but we'll deal with it. Well, last night I actually got the Ferrari back in my hands, and I am completely satisfied. All four USB ports are fully working again, the laptop booted right up into 64-bit Windows 7 when I plugged in the hard disk, and even the PCCard slot is working, with my D-Link DWA-652 in it! The one thing they didn't fix (and this is completely disclosed in their flat rate offer, so I have zero complaints) was the broken Del key on the keyboard. It just needs a dab of glue to keep the cap in place, but I haven't bothered since it mostly stays where it's supposed to be anyway.
Now, if you think that a flat rate of $175 for repair is a bad deal, and you'd rather just get a free estimate and go that way, they do that too. http://laptoprescuer.com/ is there main location. But I really liked the confidence of a prix fixe . I knew the Ferrari was worth $175 to me, if it was working. And I had a pretty good idea that they'd have to do quite a bit of work to get it all fixed. I have no idea what they would have charged had I opted for a T&M deal, and frankly I don't care. But however you go about it, I highly recommend them. They did exactly what they promised, they did it in about the time they said, and they communicated clearly and appropriately at every step of the process. And I think at a very fair price.
Charlie.
I got my HP ML350 G5 just about 26 months ago, and as I was sitting here today, thinking about it and what a difference it has made, I thought it was time to provide a real world look at it's strengths and weaknesses after living with it for over two years. We all see reviews of new hardware, and they're interesting, but it's not often we get a chance to hear how a machine is to live with, day in and day out over an extended period. After all, it's easy to love it during the honeymoon, when it's new and fresh. But how is it after the bloom has worn off? Certainly in some cases, not nearly as exciting and lovely as when you first got it.
And, since I seem to be stuck in a marriage metaphor today, the ML350 and I are now very much like an old married couple. Maybe it's not quite as exciting, and certainly the ML350 is no longer young as it was, but we do seem to fit well together.
Just to save you looking back at specs, this ML350 was just about the top of the line when I got it. Obviously, that's no longer true, but it's still pretty impressive:
2 - Xeon 5130 dual core processors
8 - 2 GB FBDIMM RAM modules
8 - 72 GB, 15,000 RPM, 2.5" SFF SAS drives
1 - HP Smart Array P400 RAID controller w/ 512 Mb
2 - Power supplies
To this all HP portion, I've added:
1 - Adaptec 48300 SAS controller
2 - 36 GB, 10k, 3.5" SAS drives (RAID-1 system disk)
2 - 400 GB, 7.2k, SATA-II drives (RAID-0)
(in case you're wondering, the RAID-0 is for storing ISOs and other downloads. Everything on it is completely replaceable, but it lets me use the SAS array strictly for storing VMs on.)
Now that we’ve got that out of the way, we’ll look at what I like and dislike about the ML-350 next.
Windows 7 will support a new version of Virtual PC known as VPC7. The big feature that VPC7 adds is application publishing using RAIL technology. This enables the application to directly integrate into the Win7 desktop and Start menu, running as if the application were local, instead of running on a VM. Cool stuff, and essentially the same technology as used by TS RemoteApps.
Win7’s Virtual XP Mode includes a pre-licensed and activated Windows XP SP3 virtual machine that uses the RAIL technology to automatically publish applications that are installed in the XP VM as RAIL applications in Windows 7. Great, and this works just fine for most applications you’ll want to install, and is an excellent solution to legacy applications that aren’t Vista/Windows7 compatible. However, Microsoft seems to think that the native applications that are part of the VM’s operating system aren’t anything we might want to have available in Windows 7. Wrong answer! I actually use and like Windows Mail and do NOT like Windows Live Mail. But Windows Mail has been removed from Win7, so now I’m running it in a Windows Vista VM and auto-publishing to Win7. The catch? For an application to be published, it needs to be added to the Programs folder of the All Users profile, so I had to open up the Vista VM and copy over the shortcut from my personal profile to the All Users profile and that fixed that.
Other applications, such as various Windows games and even Windows PowerShell, are even tougher to get published. Even after you move the application’s shortcut to the All Users profile, it still doesn’t appear in Win7. Why not? Because there’s a Registry key that specifically excludes some applications. Sigh. Sometimes I wonder why MS makes it hard, but here’s the easy fix – remove the application from the Registry key that controls this:
“HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Virtual Machine\VPCVAppExcludeList”
All the usual caveats about editing the registry apply, so “You’ve been warned!”. :-)
For a detailed and very well documented post on how to publish PowerShell v1 from Virtual XP Mode, complete with screen shots, see Shay Levy’s post.
Charlie.
A very interesting post on the official Windows Team Blog: Windows XP Mode for Windows 7. If I read this correctly, it looks like we’ll have a virtual Windows XP embedded directly into Windows 7, with the ability to run applications directly from Windows 7. From the description and the screen shot, this sounds like it has the equivalent to TS RemoteApps, but in this case connecting to a locally running virtual Windows XP. Now that would be cool! And a real solution to any lingering application compatibility problems, since you’d have an embedded 32-bit Windows XP running in your Windows 7. Legacy 16 bit application? No 64-bit compatible version? No problem, run the application in the virtual XP machine.
One thing that this seems to say, however, is that it’s only coming for Business and Ultimate versions of Windows 7. If so, a shame, since I can definitely see a place for this in Home Premium.
Update: Now that Win7 and VPC7 are publicly available, I’ll have a bit more to say shortly, including a tip on autopublishing.
Charlie.
Microsoft announced last week the release of a new edition of Windows Server 2008, The Windows Foundation Server 2008. This a limited version of Windows Server 2008 that requires no CALs, and is only available from hardware OEMs. You can’t go out and buy a copy without buying the hardware it goes on. And that hardware is going to only be available from folks like HP, Dell, Acer, etc. Your system builder won’t be able to build or sell you a copy, at least not this first go round. Let’s look at the limitations/requirements first, then some of the opportunities for this new server.
Limitations and Requirements
- x64 only (hardly a limitation from our perspective!)
- 8 GB RAM maximum
- 1 CPU socket (but as many cores as that allows.)
- 15 Users maximum
- No Hyper-V. Not as Parent, not as Child.
- Hardware OEMs only. No system builder, no retail
- If installed in AD environment, must be at the top level of the tree.
This last one might take some explanation. This doesn’t mean it needs to be in a domain, it could certainly be in a workgroup, and if it is in a domain, it doesn’t need to be a domain controller, though it could be. But it does mean that you can’t use this as a DC for a subdomain or even as a member server in a departmental subdomain.
Opportunities
Windows Foundation Server has all sorts of possibilities, especially given the price points we’re likely to see. It’s certainly NOT a replacement for either Windows Home Server or Windows Small Business Server, since it has none of the value added features of those two products. But, on a small network, it would be perfect as:
- A Terminal Server for TS RemoteApps
- A "Branch Office in a Box(tm)" server by installing the following
roles: - RODC
- DHCP
- DNS
- File Server (with Role Services:)
- Print Server
- NAP with RRAS for VPN back to main office
- Could, should you choose, be installed as Server Core
- Backup Domain Controler
The catch to all of those choices is that it is LIMITED TO 15 USERS. None of
these options are possible on an SBS network of >15 users. Full Stop. Also,
NO CALs are required for this Server. (Well, except TS CALs if you use it as
a Terminal Server.)
I’ve seen all sorts of speculation about what this is, but most of it is utter horsepucky. Don’t complicate this or make it into something it isn't. This
is just a low end server with nothing special. Period. It has no value add at all, but will be available at a very good price point. I’m expecting to see complete servers, with hardware and Windows Foundation Server pre-installed for under $500 USD. But it is only for smaller networks where there are never more than 15 users. It doesn’t have any of the extras of Windows Home Server or Small Business Server, no special wizards, nothing extra at all. But for very small businesses, it definitely adds a low cost option that has a lot of functionality. Overall, I’m pretty excited, and I’d love to get my hands on one of the new servers to do a full review. I can see a lot of uses for this to supplement our SBS networks, or as a standalone solution. And it’s pure 64-bit only.
Charlie
A few months ago, I wrote about how to connect your iPod to your TS RemoteApps Server running under Hyper-V, which really simplified my life and made it simpler to keep everything in one place. I made that even easier by running FabulaTech's USB over Ethernet server on my main Windows 7 workstation, so I didn't have to get up and go into the server room to connect my iPod. Well, now that Zune supports Audible books, I took my old version 1 Zune and updated it to the latest software and gave it to my wife, who needed a new player since her ancient Zen Nano died. She has an iPod, but doesn't like it much, but just loves the old Zune. The radio works well here in our remote location, the picture quality is good, and the sound quality is way better than either the Zen OR her iPod. So, the challenge was how to get it installed on the Terminal Server so that it could be accessed over TS RemoteApps. With the Apple software, that was trivial, but the Zune software just wouldn't do it. Sigh. So, a bit of poking around (and asking Susan Bradley, who is way better than Google) found Robert Larson's post, which covered how to get it installed. Good, but now we need to get it into my Hyper-V. OK, FabulaTech to the rescue, and I finished installing the Zune software and sync'ing the Zune. (If you get prompted to update the version of software for the Zune over the Internet, ignore the prompt. It won't work anyway. As long as you've got a reasonably recent version that you've deconstructed, just use that.)
Next up was Audible. Installed the latest version of the Audible Manager (5.5.0.0 for this exercise). No problems, but it's not seeing the Zune. No sweat, tell it to Add Device, and it will give me a list of devices and download the software for them. Wrong Answer! That works fine for Apple software, but for the Zune? It needs to be loaded As Administrator. What a pain! OK, exit the Audible Manager, and restart it As Administrator, and now add the device. OK, that works, after a reboot, and we're in business. Just activate the device, and download the titles to it.
All in all, harder than it should have been. Ironic that Apple devices and software work better in Windows than Microsoft devices and software does, at least in this case.
Charlie.
UPDATE: Well, it turns out to be worse than I thought. While I can get the Zune to sync normal music and photos, the Audible content won't actually transfer to the Zune. Not sure why, but not at all happy about it. Audible Manager sees the Zune, can see any content that is there, and says it will transfer books. But then it stays stuck at 0% transferred. All in all, a far worse experience than with iPods. Sigh.
Update: After trying every trick I can think of, I’ve sent off email to the folks at FabulaTech to see what they can come up with. We’ll see. I’d really like this to work.
One of the problems I have working on many different computers and constantly rebuilding even my main workstation for whatever beta build of Windows happens to be available, is having a "stable" environment for some of the little things that make my life work better. One of the ways we do that in the office is to run Windows Small Business Server 2008 Premium Edition. We used the SBS second Server license to virtualize the main SBS server and also a virtual Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition running the Terminal Server Role. As we said nearly a year ago, TS RemoteApps is seriously cool. In fact, the more we use it, the more we love it. TS RemoteApps is the single biggest new feature in Windows Server 2008 (and thus SBS 2008.) In my opinion, it's even cooler than Hyper-V, and that's saying a lot.
But all that is really just background. I use TS RemoteApps to run many of my main productivity applications, including Outlook 2007, Word 2003 and Windows Mail. I even run OneNote 2007 over TS RemoteApps from some computers, though I usually load and run it locally on my main workstation. But I also use TS RemoteApps for more important applications - namely, running iTunes and connecting to my iPod Nano! That way, I don't run into activation issues when I'm continually rebuilding machines - both iTunes and my Audible account run off the Terminal Server, making life much easier.
Ah, that's nice, but how do you connect to your iPod? After all, Hyper-V doesn't support USB devices. You're right - Hyper-V, like every other Microsoft virtualization product, doesn't support USB. And that's a real nuisance! But then, along comes FabulaTech with their USB over Network product. As we described earlier, FabulaTech has a real winner here. We have been using it for several months, now, and couldn't live without it. Not only does it handle our SBS backup drives, which we'd expect, but it works great with our iPod as well. So now we have a nearly perfect solution - our iPod connects to iTunes running as a TS RemoteApp, in a Hyper-V child partition, available transparently to any machine on my network.
Charlie.
I ran across an excellent article on Windows memory use today. http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3602/sponsored_feature_ram_vram_and_.php This article covers both the limitations of 32-bit Windows memory models, and the ways to get your applications to work well in x64 Windows. Written primarily for game developers, it's still an excellent read for those who have struggled with understanding why their Windows XP or Vista can't use all of their 4 GB of RAM. Or why they can't have all 8 GB used by Vista 32-bit.
Charlie.
As I was rebuilding my main workstation again (life running pre-beta OS's is always fun), I was very much appreciating the simplicity of Windows Home Server. I have my main workstation set up as an 80 GB OS drive (C:) and data drives of D: and E:. Whenever I install a new build on the computer, I add it to my Windows Home Server list of computers and never think about backups again. If I do something ill-advised (aka, stupid) and blow up the install? Simple, put in the recovery CD, boot from it, and in under 35 minutes I am back to yesterday's state. Completely. WHS has just replaced my munged partition with a known good image and I have nothing else to do but use it. This set it and forget it simplicity is simply awesome. A friend of mine, Kevin Beares, just had his wife's computer "owned" by the latest Facebook Trojan. He was able to completely recover her system in under an hour (laptop drives are slower!) and be certain that there wasn't any trace of the trojan on her machine. Another user saved by WHS.
I've said this before, in various places. Windows Home Server is simply the best backup program on the market today. Full stop. I like some of it's other features, but I can get them from other places and in other ways. I run Windows Small Business Server (SBS) at home, so I don't need the remote access features. And since I have a server here, I keep most of my documents on that main server, not on WHS. But WHS is the first line of backup for that SBS box, and the backup for all the workstations on my network. And it's saved me several times already when I've had hardware or other failures.
Charlie.
I've seen folks disabling the Windows Firewall on Hyper-V Server and on Windows Server Core in order to get Remote Management to work correctly. Bad idea, and not necessary. Instead, you should enable the appropriate firewall rules to allow Remote Management to work, without disabling the firewall. I covered this setup in both my Windows Server 2008 Administrator's Companion, and again in my upcoming Windows Small Business Server 2008 Administrator's Companion books, complete with scripts for it. But since I'm seeing it more and more on the newsgroups, I'll go ahead and post the firewall script from the SBS book here - it will configure a Hyper-V Server as well. (Full configuration scripts for Server Core are included in the books, and are on the accompanying CD/DVD. This script assumes you've already configured your NICs and set server name, etc. )
echo off
REM initsetup2.cmd
REM
REM initial setup for a Server 2008 Server Core installation.
REM command file 2 of 2 for Hyper-V and SBS
REM
REM Created: 4 September, 2007
REM ModHist: 08/30/08 - added WinRM command
REM
REM Copyright 2007, 2008 Charlie Russel and Sharon Crawford. All rights reserved.
REM You may freely use this script in your own environment, modifying it
REM to meet your needs. But you may not re-publish it without permission.
REM Use netsh to enable remote management through the firewall for
REM all profiles. This is the minimum to allow using remote MMCs to work
REM from other computers on the network.
netsh advfirewall set allprofiles settings remotemanagement enable
REM allow remote administration group
netsh advfirewall firewall set rule group="Remote Administration" new enable=yes
REM Allow remote desktop through firewall
netsh advfirewall firewall set rule group="Remote Desktop" new enable=yes
REM Enable Remote Desktop for Administration, and allow
REM downlevel clients to connect
cscript %windir%\system32\scregedit.wsf /AR 0
cscript %windir%\system32\scregedit.wsf /CS 0
REM Now, run the WinRM configuration script. -q is for quiet.
winrm quickconfig -q
UPDATE: John Howard has a new tool that will supposedly do the entire job for you. Given what I've seen from him before, I'd definitely give it a try! It's called hvremote and he talks about it on his blog here: http://blogs.technet.com/jhoward/archive/2008/11/14/configure-hyper-v-remote-management-in-seconds.aspx
Old timers here will know that I simply love Dave's Quick Search Deskbar (DQSD). And that there was a semi-custom solution to running it in 64-bit that I used. Well, with a lot of hard work and persistence, we now have 64-bit support built into the mainstream of DQSD. Whenever we build a new version, we'll be building a 64bit version side by side. YIPPEE!
The installer is still a batch file that has my hands all over it, though with a lot of excellent suggestions from Kim Gräsman, it is cleaner and a bit smarter. But it works, and appears to be smart enough for general use. So please - go download it and check it out. It's one of those little things that the more you use it, the more useful it becomes, and at some point you'll wonder how you lived without it. For example, I wouldn't be able to read my newspaper funnies any more without it (since the local paper has only a dismal selection). But now, with the comx search? I get the latest version whenever I need it. :D
Direct download link is here:
http://internap.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/dqsd/dqsdx64-4100-beta.zip
Update: Thanks to Carlos, on the microsoft.public.windows.64bit.general newsgroup, we've identified a bug in the batch file installer. Please extract the files to a temporary folder on your system drive (C:\ normally) and run the install from there. The fix for this will be in the next beta drop - it's already committed. And yes, a really dumb error on my part, if you're wondering.
--
Charlie.
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