Month: February 2009

Windows 7 Beta Deployment Beta Toolkits

That’s a lot of Beta in one sentence.  MS has released a single bundle containing beta releases of the below for deploying Windows 7 Beta.

  • Windows Automated Installation Kit (Windows 7 Beta)
  • Windows Automated Installation Kit for Windows 7 Beta documentation
  • Windows 7 Walkthrough: User State Migration Tool
  • Windows 7 Walkthrough: Deployment Image Servicing and Management
  • Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) 2008 Update 1

    • Funny Error Box

    I’m using IE8 RC1 to use a GMail account.  Someone sent me a link to a document that I needed to read but they unfortunately sent me a link to their internal SharePoint site.  I clicked on it and got the following:

    image

    I’ve blurred out the name of the Google Mail company account holder.  The error itself is a popup so I guess it’s the workings of Google.

    Formal RedHat Support Coming To Hyper-V?

    A buddy sent me a link just a little while ago to read.  Port25 on TechNet is reporting that MS and Redhat have agreed to formally test each others OS’s on their own virtualisation platforms.  That’s incredibly good news for both sides.  RedHat is the most popular Linux in the enterprise.  (I think SUSE’s future is intriguing on MS networks – but I’m not a *nix person so take that with some salt).  If all goes well, we’ll see integration components appear for RedHat on Hyper-V from MS fairly soon along with formal support.  MS will also forward relevant support calls to RedHat on your behalf if necessary.
     
    "Bravo!" to both parties for getting together and helping out their customers.
     
    There’s more in this blog post, press release, and webcast.
     
    You know, add in the support of OpsMgr 2007 R2 for RedHat on top of the cradle/grave & top/bottom health and performance management of hardware, virtualisation, VM, operating system, service and application with VMM 2008 and you got something really special right there.
     
    Credit: Tim Berk.

    Installed Windows 7 Beta 1 On My Laptop(s)

    I’ve some work coming up where I need to have Windows 7 running on my laptop.  I went and bought a spare 250GB SATA drive for the laptop and was ready on Saturday (away from home) to rebuild.  I used to own a HP DV9000 but it died (the day before a presentation in the UK) so, short of cash, I bought a cheap Sony Vaio at €680 or thereabouts.  I opened the chassis because there’s no panel to make the drive easily accessible.  That left me with around 20-25 screws of about 4 different sizes in a container.  Then I saw that my laptop’s hard drive was effectively welded to the motherboard.  It was screwed into a bracket.  The screws were recessed behind the motherboard and the upper half of the case.  The bracket was secure underneath of the motherboard.  Eeeek!  My work machine is a dell and the hard drive on it is removable by undoing two screws and pulling out a panel on the side.  My DV9000’s drives were under two panels in the base.

    That left me with no choice but to do a wipe.  I “migrated” my user settings and data to a hard drive.  I copied my more recent photos out as well as some VM’s.

    I’d downloaded the x86 DVD for Windows 7 from TechNet and burned that to a DVD-RW.  I fired it up and installed.  I found the installation took longer than Vista.  There’s little that I had to do, just like in Vista.  I logged in and found this was no x86 installation.  TechNet had supplied me with an x64 ISO image … the filename was actually “en_windows_7_beta_dvd_x86_x15-29073.iso” so I hadn’t made a mistake.  I recovered my user settings (that worked superbly).

    I installed Office 2007, Visio 2007 and VMware Workstation 6x.  WHAT?  Yes, I like MS virtualisation but Virtual PC doesn’t do what I need.  I need real snapshots and better networking that VPC can offer.  I rebooted and found I had a new user account on my machine for a VMware service.  Disabling that account would cause the service to fail and stop VM’s from starting.  So I re-enabled it.  I would later find that VMware Workstation broke networking on my machine and would require a restore to a restoration point/rebuild (which I did).

    Office seemed to work fine.  My PST and settings were safely captured with no difficulty.  My Documents was populated with everything.  I’ve a few other bits’n’bobs in Live Mesh that I’ll recover.

    I started messing with the thing on Saturday night – what an exciting life I lead!  Valentines Day is for the weak minded who’ve fallen prey to the greatest marketing ploy ever launched.

    The laptop scored a 3.0 in the performance rating.  General operations were very quick.  Booting up was fast as was sleep/restore.  Windows Media Center was a bit sluggish but this is a beta 1 release and full of bug check code.  I like the new gadgets.  There’s no sidebar – you just dock your gadgets on the right side and can control their opacity.  Wallpaper was a bit buggy – sometimes disappearing or going back to it’s original size.  Photo rating in Explorer was not as good as in Media Center.  I also found I had to refresh explorer manually to reflect things.  Media Center seems to rely a lot on indexing so it can go out of whack with Explorer.

    Libraries wasn’t as painful as I had expected.  A library is a logical view of files from many designated folders.  You can specialise a library for documents, music, pictures, etc.  Unfortunately, you cannot build other search criteria into a library yet, e.g. “files that meet these criteria only”.  It would be excellent if they did that.

    There’s new functionality called DeviceStage for integrating with devices such as printers, cameras, phones, etc.  The list of compatible devices is pretty small right now.  Hopefully that will increase.  Nothing I own was on the list so I haven’t tried it yet.

    There’s a nice new addition for SOHO’s and homes with a few machines.  HomeGroup is like a workgroup with a password.  If you set your machine up you can be prompted to set up a HomeGroup and are given a password to print out.  You can easily share every document, song or photo on your machine with others on the HomeGroup network.  MediaCenter appears to be aware of this.

    I got back to the house yesterday evening and tried to get online.  Here’s where the pain started.  I ended up doing a fresh build thanks to the aforementioned screwup of networking thanks to VMware Workstation.  My wifi NIC was online and I could scan my network and those of the neighbours.  However, no matter what I did, I could not get online.  My work machine was fine and my Sony was fine when it ran Vista.  I got on the wired network (in the hallway) and IE8 ran fine.  I did some googling and found people having the same problem but with no resolution.

    I decided to use my spare SATA drive and plug it into my work Dell Latitude D530.  It was up in no time but it too could not authenticate with my wifi.  I tried different wifi settings but no luck.  It appears that Windows 7 is incompatible with my Linksys WRT54GS.

    Doh!  Luckily there’s a spare laptop at work that I can use.  I’ll run it with Win7 on my wired network in my home office, rebuild my Sony with Vista and I’ve already replaced the Vista drive back into the Dell.

    EDIT:

    I finally got my laptop online with Windows 7.  I upgraded my firmware (finally worked when I reset the router and used a Vista machine with IE7.  Imagine using Vista for resolving compatibility issues!?!?  That didn’t fix my wifi problem for Windows 7.  I then changed the wireless channel from 13-2.472GHz to 11-2.462GHz.  The profile on the Win7 laptop kicked in immediately and I’m now typing this update using my Windows 7 laptop with IE8.

    EDIT #2:

    OMG!  The battery life on this thing is frackin’ fantastic now.  I can get over 3 hours on a full charge using the out-of-the-box "power saver" mode with the wifi on.  I wonder how much I might get with a custom "super power saver" mode?

    I downloaded the beta versions of the new Live stuff.  Windows 7 really comes alive when you "complete" it.  I also like how fast my laptop is now compared to what it was like with Vista.  I wonder how much faster it’ll be like when we get to Release Candidate stage?

    Very Weird VMM VLAN Networking Issue

    I had an odd issue that consumed my entire afternoon today.  We deployed a couple of VM’s into a private VLAN using VMM 2008.  The network admin did his usual stand up job and passed me on details to network the servers.  I configured the first and it couldn’t access the network.

    We suspected networking because in my experience “if it isn’t DNS then it’s the network”.  It could have been something simple with the VLAN configuration or firewall rules.  The network admin came back and said everything checked out in Cisco world so it must be the blade enclosure.  I really doubted it.  I take care of the blades but the network admin has bad memories of virtual connects, trunk links and shared uplinks.  I double checked everything and it was fine.

    Time to troubleshoot.  By now the second VM was networked and having the same issue.  Neither VM could ping each other.  I moved one onto another VLAN and it worked fine.  OK – the virtual connects must be OK.  I moved the other VM onto another cluster and suddenly it worked OK on the new VLAN.  Hmm – that ruled out the blades and the Cisco network leaving the host.  However, I knew that the hardware was fine because the other VM’s on that external virtual network (physical NIC) were fine.

    I decided to change the external virtual that the VM was bound to.  I’ve left my two physical NIC’s for VM’s unteamed (no s/w installed yet) until I had a supported solution from HP.  So, I have Virtual Network 1 and Virtual Network 2 configured for the two NIC’s.  I changed the VM from VN1 to VN2 and suddenly it worked.  I moved it back to VN1 to diagnose.

    OK – so is it the virtual network?  Nope, because all the other VLAN’s and VM’s on it work OK.  So this brings it down to the VM.  The integration components were installed by VMM.  The VM was created by VMM.  I powered it down and recreated the NIC.  No fix.

    I went directly to the Hyper-V console.  It’s clear here that a VMM created synthetic network adapter has some difference to a Hyper-V created synthetic network adapter because they have different names.  I removed the VMM created NIC and used the Hyper-V MMC to replace it.  I booted up the VM and it worked.

    AHA!  For some reason, VMM is creating non-functional synthetic NIC’s on my Hyper-V hosts.  I’ll have to contact MS about this one.

    Operations Manager Management Pack Authoring

    I loved Microsoft Operations Manager 2005.  With a little bit of time and work, it was possible to get in deep and really understand how everything worked, especially the monitoring.  Everything was so logical.  Like another product I worked on years ago, Novadigm EDM, it was possible to find the starting point and logically diagram everything from discovery through to monitoring and then alerting.  Using that knowledge you could use the Administration console to author your own management packs quite easily, from windows log monitoring and text file monitoring right up to SNMP monitoring.  I could bring someone through MOM 2005 from A-Z in two days.

    OpsMgr 2007 changed things drastically.  It’s a much more complicated beastie.  Getting it up and running is still relatively easy.  After that I recommend doing some reading before going any further.  I liked Sams “System Center Operations Manager 2007 Unleashed” because it was a very real book with real world recommendations based on best practice from MS.  After that, customising existing management packs is a doddle.

    But creating your own management packs from scratch is really hard compared to OpsMgr 2007.  Management Packs becamse musch more complicated to add more power and flexibility, as well as some “intelligence”.  There’s loads of MS blog posts on how to create a management pack but they cannot be used in the real world, e.g. create a monitor for all machines to look for alert XYZ from an application that you may only have on 1 or 22 boxes.  MS released a management pack authoring console but it was undocumented as far as I could see.  I remember talking to a PSS engineer about it and he had heard the same thing from other customers.

    But that has started to change!!!  I just read a blog post from MS that led me to here.  There are some basic guides (with screen shots) on how to do stuff like discovery (something I’ve struggled with to be honest), monitors, rules, etc.  I hope this is a sign of things to come because authoring was the only thing I was not entirely happy with in OpsMgr 2007.  Doing some documentation like this is a fantastic step in the right direction.

    Windows Server Cluster Management Pack for Operations Manager 2007

    Microsoft has updated the OpsMgr 2007 management pack for failover cluster management on Windows 2003 and Windows 2008:

    “Some of the conditions monitored by this management pack are as follows:

    • Configuration or hardware issues that interfere with starting the Cluster service
    • Connectivity problems that affect communication between cluster nodes or between a node and a domain controller
    • Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) settings that affect the cluster; for example, permissions needed by the computer account that is used by the cluster
    • Configuration issues with the network infrastructure needed by the cluster; for example, issues with Domain Name System (DNS)
    • Issues with the availability of a cluster resource, such as a clustered file share
    • Issues with the cluster storage”

    I’d suggest that you download, test and then deploy (after satisfactory testing) this ASAP if you’re running Hyper-V clusters that are managed by OpsMgr 2007.  I will be doing just that.

    Windows Server 2008 R2 Best Practices Analyser

    MS has included a BPA or Best Practices Analyzer with Windows Server 2008 R2.  It looks at technologies including:
     
  • Active Directory Certificate Services
  • Active Directory Domain Services
  • DNS Server
  • Web Server (IIS)
  • Remote Desktop Services

    •  

    There is some information on using the BPA on the aforementioned documentation for Windows Server 2008 R2.