Too long.

What with work, kids, work courses, work and what ever else life has been going at 100%. The house is starting to wind down now as we have some big events soon.

Hopefully all will be OK, next week will tell on one, and probably by mid Aug the other big event will be over. now that's the family stuff over onto the other stuff.

Did a AD2008 and Hyper V course recently for a few days. All about some of the new things in Server 2008, AD DNS and of course Hyper V. And it was fun, saw some stuff, got to play with Hyper v away from the work load, work problems for a dew days and that's always cool. Its a nice product, missing some stuff in comparison to VMware server, but easier than MS virtual Server. Well it is in my head - I always seemed to have a mental block that I never bothered getting fixed on Virtual Server. It goes back to the horrible days I spent preparing for my MS exams.

Either way on with the info. I have a number of VMware virtual machines that I worked on, used, and just generally broke. I had what I called templates for these machines, so when I was bored, had done to much to repair it or just forgot to take snapshots, i blew them away and started again. Now trying out HyperV seemed like a good idea, but I couldn't find out how to convert from one to another. apparently there is a MS product coming down the tracks SCCMVMMTC$$%£$"£$ or something like that, but I don't have those bob's. VMware has a converter that's does other funky stuff, and again I don't have their bob's either.

I have Google, time, a great resource in the Minasi Forum, gratious plug, www.minasi.com and well a big happy server box at home that likes challenges. So I came up with this. Its heavily modified, borrowed, robbed and other stuff, but it works.

This will bring a Windows OS, from a physical box, or a VMware Server or any other variant into Hyper-V.

Install latest version of Hyper-V onto Server 2008, link at the bottom. Now changed, so Google some more folks. Its RTM for the last 2 weeks so should be picked up by Microsoft Updates on a purchased Server 2008 with Hyper V Role installed.

On the VMware version uninstall VM tools from your VM.
Shutdown the VM
Add a new IDE disk drive to your VM; (any size will do 2GB will make it quick)
Change this to be IDE Device 0:0, you will probably have to move the CD ROM drive to the other IDE port or channel.
Boot up your virtual machine with both drives connected and check that it detects your new IDE drive (along with a primary IDE channel and a disk device driver). You should be able to see the new drive as "not initialized" in Disk Management.
Power off your virtual machine and remove the newly created IDE disk from your VM (you can delete it from disk as well).
Do not power on your VMware Machine again!

Convert your VMDK file to VHD format using the Vmdk2Vhd utility, link at the bottom. Conversion performance was a lot quicker converting an image from one physical disk to another physical disk, over twice as fast.
Move image from VMware Server machine to Hyper-V machine.
Create a new Virtual Machine in Hyper-V.
Make sure you select “Use an existing virtual hard disk” and select the VHD file that you just created.
Power it on.
Install “Integration Services” and reboot when prompted

Assign the original IP address(es) to your new network card(s)
Check Network Discovery is on, and your host machines Network Addresses.

Do another reboot
Check that everything is running and working OK.
I found DNS had shutdown as well as DHCP.

Links.

HyperV RC1
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=7EDAA89F-9F64-488D-93C0-858D2D8799DF&displaylang=en

VMDK to VHD
http://vmtoolkit.com

Normally you need to use Ctrl-Alt+Left arrow to release the console, but you can double tap the Windows Key to do a similar job, except when in Full Screen Mode.

I've been up to some other training as well. Got lucky enough to get sent on ESX configuration training, but that'll be next week.

Virtualization - the bad stuff.

This is important stuff, especially if your new to it like I am, and don't have the budget for iSCSI, SAN or whatever else is out there.

Have a backup of the data on the VM.
Raid is not a VM Data backup.

Have a backup of the VM.
Raid is not a VM VHD backup.

Have a backup of the Host machine.
Raid is not a backup of a Server.

Have notes on all the machines, including at least the following and anything else you care and if you have extra please email them to me at mcglynn.joe@gmail.com.NOSPAM -

IP's of all the machines both virtual and Physical.

Server names, FQDN and Netbios.

An odd one, but how long the physical machine needs to reboot, trust me, if your sitting there waiting for a machine to reboot and you thing that it should do it in 2 minutes, the 5 minutes it may take to reboot is real long and lonely.

Physical drive sizes, nice to know what should have been there.

Virtual drive sizes, again nice to know what should be there.

A set of Server XXX or whatever is your flavour disks, nothing like trying to rebuild a server when all you have is a XP Service Pack CD.

As a friend of mine calls it, a lifeboat machine. You need another box to run your VM's on if your main box crashes, I mean after all, isn't this part of the reason we are here...

Notes on the complete build, what did and did not go right. What programs are installed on each VM. This is real important if you have to rebuild a VM that did something...but what was it... Belarc will give you a nice report of all installed software.

All of this stored somewhere else other than on a VM or the Host machine. A printout is good, a CD is good, but whatever works for you.

A VM toolkit. start looking at some of the VM or VHD tools out there and see what can or cannot help you if a VHD disk gets corrupted.

Belarc - nice report on a server, hardware software etc.
http://www.belarc.com/free_download.html

VM Back - Driver Disk to open a VHD
http://chitchat.at.infoseek.co.jp/vmware/vdk.html#top


WinImage - a program to allow you take a look at the data on a VHD
http://www.winimage.com/

Hope this is of some use.

Joe

Norfolk Airport.

Just so I remember next time.
The VB Resort Hotel is about 20/ 25 minutes from the Airport.
The Marriot where we stayed in 2007 was about 45 minutes.

Thanks to Dave for the lift.

Minasi Forum 2008

I have to leave.....I've had a great time, but between un-notified flight changes etc I had to leave early and I'm sad about that. I'm missing the end of JamesNT's talk on SQL, the finial words from Eric and Mark and the roundtable.

I was a bit aprehensive about the meeting as I wasn't sure that I'd have an interest in all of the stuff, but just the sheer energy comming from the speakers about their subjects is enough to infect their interest in you. I've had the hardest time trying to get my head around power shell and why I need it. But Don Jones, great speaker, made a point thats hard to not accept. If you want to be a 'high level IT' person in the windows world, you will have to be a Power Shell user. And PS2 is on its way. Everything in the Windows world will aparently be controlled from this interface.

For all its scareyness there appears to only be a few things in it. 16 Verbs as per some places, but 14 in others and approx 130 Nouns. Help actually works, and its almost close to readable language. At least I'm a bit more confident that I'll learn this thing.

Verb List
http://www.computerperformance.co.uk/powershell/powershell_nouns.htm
Noun List
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms714428.aspx

I need to finish this up, but I think a plane is waiting.

Ooops

Its been an age since I've put anything up here, yet I have a lot of stuff emailed to myself that I'm supposed to put up here!

Where does the time go?

OK I'm going to put up some rought stuff and edit it later....yea right!

SKU011.CAB Missing

This one I've met several times recently and this is the best fix I've found for it;

This is due to incomplete installation of an office...
You can check this MS article (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/896866/) for this issue.
You can search for the file for download on net. Sometimes, if the version of office is Basic, just word, excel and outlook you can repair it with the Basic Office CD.
You can have some registry modification, but before doing it, just back-up the registry keys.
Go into Registry Editor(Start->Run->Regedit)
Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Delivery.
There should be only 1 directory under Delivery, which is your DownloadCode (indicated by some numbers)
Select that directory [or all if more].
On the right side of the screen, right-click on CDCache.
Change the value to 0 and the problem is solved.

Handy link to find ouyt the key of the MS Office that you are using is
http://www.skaro.net/cd-keyreader/

Following on from this I also ran into problems trying to add Exchange Mail accounts for people in a Domain with roaming profiles and a few otehr things.

Even though I had the right Server name and user name, Exchange could not resolve or find the user mailbox.
In ADUC (start->programs->admin tools->Active Dir Users & Computers)
Exchange Advanced tab - show exchange list, tick that box, and hey presto the users appeared again.

Wireless

I found this and as of yet have to try it all out, but it seems good

To secure their wireless access points without making it to maddening, we could try the following.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=587
Info on what/ how to secure a wireless access point with a radius server.

http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-1035-6148579.html
how to install a radius server.

Ok, bed calls, I'll tidy this up again.