Category: Windows Server

Bye Bye Essential Business Server …

… we knew you so little!

Microsoft today announced the discontinuation of EBS as a product.  Sales will stop on June 30th.

It could be argued that EBS was a flop, unlike it’s “little” sibling SBS which is a raging success.  EBS seemed like a stretch looking back on it.  It tried to do things that medium/large enterprise administrators hate.  It tried to squeeze as much functionality as possible into a 3 or 4 server package.  Many of the potential companies who were in the target market already had invested in multi server architectures for one reason or another.  They preferred to pick and choose the components and deploy them as and when required.  The all-in-one-package bundle isn’t as suitable for these medium sized companies as it is for the SBS customer.

The real target market was always going to be small and the complexity in building this package was huge, especially when you consider all of the different product groups and time lines involved.

End Of Life Coming Soon

Folks, this summer the following products will be end of life, i.e. no support of any kind for the following products:

  • XP SP2 – upgrade to a newer service pack
  • Vista RTM – upgrade to a newer service pack
  • Windows 2000 – upgrade to Windows XP SP3 or later, Windows Vista SP1 or later, or Windows 7
  • Windows Sever 2000 – upgrade to Windows Server 2003/2003 R2/2008 or migrate to Windows Server 2008 R2.

Go to the Microsoft product life cycle site for precise details.

For the server replacement, I’d strongly consider you look at moving to an x64 server operating system.  Making the jump now will ease future upgrades.  A few notes:

  • Microsoft hates upgrades because they are messy.  Problems are inherited/created.
  • You cannot upgrade from x86 to x64 or vice versa.
  • You cannot upgrade from a full installation to a core installation.
  • You need the correct licensing for the server and the CAL’s.
  • Check application compatibility.
  • Test, test, test and verify with application/hardware vendors before making changes.

0x0000007C BUGCODE_NDIS_DRIVER Blue Screen on Windows Server 2008 R2 with NLB

There is a blog post by a Microsoft employee that describes an issue where a virtual machine (Hyper-V or VMware) running Windows Server 2008 R2 will crash.  The VM is configured with Windows Network Load Balancing.  Their research found that the problem occurred with “certain” antivirus packages installed.  They didn’t (and probably won’t) specify which ones.  The two proposed solutions are:

  1. Configure NLB before installing the antivirus package
  2. Uninstall the antivirus package

Restore Windows XP/2003 Backups To Windows 7/Server 2008 R2

Many people will be (or have already done it) making the jump from Windows XP or Windows 2003 to Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2.  Home users and small businesses will have been using NTBackup and will now face a new Backup and Restore tool that uses VHD instead of .BAK files.  So how do they restore an old backup?

Microsoft released an x64 and x86 update on Monday to allow you to restore old .BAK files.

“Utility for restoring backups made on Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 to computers that are running Windows 7 and Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2”.

Credit: Bink

Use NVSPBind To Manage TCP Bindings on Core

Are you using the Server Core installation alternative for Windows Server 2008, 2008 R2 or Hyper-V server?  Want to managing the TCP protocol bindings?  It’s the sort of thing Hyper-V administrators will do with NIC’s dedicated for virtual networking.

John Howard has discussed how to use a free tool called NVSPbind to do just this.

Core Configurator 2.0 Is Relased

The tool that makes Windows Server Core Installation more palatable to people has been upgraded to support Windows Server 2008 R2 Core Installation.  This tool allows you do do common tasks via a limited GUI instead of searching the Net for the command line alternatives.

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The tasks you can do with it include:

  • Product Licencing
  • Networking Features
  • DCPromo Tool
  • ISCSI Settings
  • Server Roles and Features
  • User and Group Permissions
  • Share Creation and Deletion
  • Dynamic Firewall settings
  • Display | Screensaver Settings
  • Add & Remove Drivers
  • Proxy settings
  • Windows Updates (Including WSUS)
  • Multipath I/O
  • Hyper-V including virtual machine thumbnails
  • Join Domain and Computer rename
  • Add/remove programs
  • Services
  • WinRM
  • Complete logging of all commands executed

You can download it now.  It’s interesting to see that it is written in PowerShell and is totally open source, i.e. you can amend it.

Free eBook: Introducing Windows Server 2008 R2

Microsoft has released a free ebook called “Introducing Windows Server 2008 R2”.  Apparently it will “get you up to speed on how R2’s new features and capabilities work, including Hyper-V and RDS virtualization, management, IIS and the new Web application platform and, of course, all the synergistic goodness between Windows Server and Windows 7”.

BranchCache Deployment Guide

Customers running Windows 7 Ultimate or Enterprise in the branch office network might like BranchCache: cache downloaded web or file share files either on a P2P basis in the VLAN or on a Windows Server 2008 R2 machine in the entire branch office.  Microsoft has released a deployment guide for BranchCache.

“BranchCache is a wide area network (WAN) bandwidth optimization technology that is included in some editions of the Windows Server® 2008 R2 and Windows® 7 operating systems. To optimize WAN bandwidth, BranchCache copies content from your main office content servers and caches the content at branch office locations, allowing client computers at branch offices to access the content locally rather than over the WAN. This deployment guide provides instructions on deploying BranchCache in both distributed cache mode and hosted cache mode, and allows you to deploy Hypertext Transfer protocol (HHTP), Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS), and Server Message Block (SMB)-based content servers that are Web servers, application servers, and file servers, respectively.”

Upgraded HP BL460 G5 From W2008 to W2008 R2

The first step in our upgrade from Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V to Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V is to upgrade the VMM server.  I decided to upgrade the operating system before upgrading the VMM 2008 R2 installation.  Of course, a Windows Server Backup job was run to start things off.

I mounted the ISO for the OS installer in ILO and ran the upgrade.  That took a while.  When I logged in I found that NIC teaming was broken.  Uh-oh!  I downloaded HP PSP 8.30 and ran that.  Another reboot.  Still no NIC teaming.

I found out which of the EXE’s was the installer for the HP NCU and re-ran it.  It told me this version of the OS was unsupported.  So much for HP support for Window Server 2008 R2 in HP PSP 8.30!

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Here’s the simplest way to do some application compatibility.  I right-clicked on the installer and selected properties.  I opened the compatibility tab.  In there I ticked “Run this program in compatibility mode for:” and selected “Windows Server 2008 (Service Pack 1)”.  Now I reran the installer.  All was well and I could enable NIC teaming.

I figure that I’ll be waiting a while longer before upgrading our Hyper-V hosts 🙁  Anyway, until then, I’ll upgrade VMM 2008 to VMM 2008 R2.