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Hyper-V

Hyper-V Server: Installing, configuring and troubleshooting

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It’s been a few weeks since its release but I finally managed to put my hands on to Hyper-V Server. I was very curious about it: A free operating system released by Microsoft working only as an HyperVisor it makes wonder about a lot of things. Also recently I’ve been working with VMWare ESX Server 3i, that is also the hypervisor working directly on the machine, and I had a good experience (I really loved the monitoring and reporting features that you can use). From the moment I started using Hyper-V Server few troubleshooting tasks needed to be done. Installing Hyper-V Server If you ever installed any operating system, ever, you should not have any problem with this. You’ll of course see that the process is identical from Vista and Windows 2008. To get started with Hyper-V Server there’s available the Hyper-V Server 2008 Configuration Guide. If you want to avoid almost any command line to be executed from now on, Hyper-V Server has a simple tool where you’ll load a menu to access most of the configurations you will need. You can access it using this cmd: C:windowssystem32hvconfig.cmd But I’ll execute the next steps using the command line features, so this procedure will apply as well for Windows 2008 Server Core. Managing Remotely To start using Hyper-V Server you will need Hyper-V Console on your Vista SP1 (remember: there’s no other option for an Hyper-V Server to be managed […]

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Events

Cells on Camp 08: Mendoza

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Like I mentioned before, I participated on another Microsoft Universidades event here in Argentina. This time I visited the City of Mendoza, at the Universidad Tecnologica Nacional. The event was mainly organized by an old Student Partner collegue Fernando Hualpa together with Ángel Arcoraci and Marcelo Quevedo. On the Microsoft side, I made the trip with Pablo Listingart and the one and only Alejandro Ponicke. Some of the topics on this one day event were: XNA: Little story about gaming and with a short example about XNA. Expression Blend: Using Expression suite of Visual Studio. Hyper-V: Using Hyper-V together with Physical to Virtual migrations. Windows 2008 + IIS 7: Linux interoperability. Ponicke’s machine with 192 cores and 200gb of memory Even though  I didn’t have much time to walk around Mendoza, it is a lovely city that I recommend to visit. I really hope I get the chance soon enough to spend some time there. Cheers!

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Cool Stuff

@augustoalvarez: Twitted

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Ok, for several weeks now I’ve been a twitter user. It started when I saw a little sketch about the evolution of blogs. Sounds like a discuss topic isn’t? This “twittering world” is something that got me thinking: why it does exist and why so many people us it?. I’m sure that can be a lot of answers about it, from twitter lovers and twitter haters. I’m pretty sure that can be hundreds of examples where people only twitters for no reason other that to twitter (and to get other people’s attention). But what about if it’s more than that? What about if you also want to share experiences, knowledge, information? It would take something like a geek twitter to do that… but be certain that there are million of those from whom you can learn a lot of things.   And what about if you it’s not a geek twitter? I think this is still a great social experiment where you can learn a lot of things, like start to knowing other persons on their normal (not in a geek way) life. I’m a believer that smallest and simplest aspects on people’s life is what defines a person. Why not twitter can be a tiny way to understand all that?.   Don’t want to make a whole deal of philosophical discussion about it; so I want to share with you my experience and some of the people that I […]

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Certifications

Getting certified: MCITP DBA

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Since forever I’ve been excited about taking a Microsoft’s certification: the different types of certification you can get within Microsoft technologies, the deep knowledge and experience, and the recognition value were some of the things that always made me feel like good reasons to get certified. But I never thought that my first achievement regarding to this was going to be a SQL Server certification: Microsoft Certified IT Professional Database Administrator (SQL Server 2005). 70-444 just passed. Alberto Ortega (left), me and Pablo Cababie (right) I never was an expert on SQL, but it sure sound like a great challenge to take when we started discussing this with my team-mates. So, we started a few weeks ago with some practicing and learning practically from scratch in many aspects.   70-431 SQL Server 2005: Implementation and Maintenance This is in deed the exam where you should start your SQL certification. Not only you get to know about installing SQL Server, you also get to know the differences between the different versions, and several basis about SQL management. This exam has 35 questions and 12 simulations. The simulations are mainly oriented about using backup features. Certifying this exam you will get also the Microsoft Certified Technical Specialist (since it was my first exam I also got the Microsoft Certified Professional, MCP,  with this). More info here. 70-443 Designing a Database Server Infrastructure by Using Microsoft SQL Server 2005 This exam was a little […]

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Events

Code Camp 08: Now back to Buenos Aires

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Another Microsoft’s Academic event and this time the UAI (Universidad Abierta Interamericana) received the Code Camp. Hundreds of students and professionals attended to this event organized by Microsoft Universidades that introduced over 40 conferences along the day, on which I had the pleasure to present a renewed version of Windows 2008 + II7. On this occasion, besides working IIS with PHP, I showed a simple way using a working Linux + Apache server, making this an iSCSI server that can provide storage to remote machines, that they see this remote storage as local attached hard drives. And of course, all the benefits of serving this sites on IIS7 with Failed Request Tracing, Reporting, etc. NAS solution using iSCSI (graphic from http://www.wikipedia.org/) Taking a side all the geeky stuff, it was really fun working on this event with Southworks and other friends that also participated as speakers or organizers. The other southies that presented here: Alberto Ortega, Matias Woloski, Johnny Halife, Pablo “Lito” Damiani, Ezequiel Jadib, Martin Salias, Angel “Java” Lopez, Paulo Arancibia, Federico Boerr and, now a former southie, Miguel Saez; also good and old tech partners like Alejandro Ponicke and his crew participated. And talking about my home town, GENTI and .NetSgo (academic cells also) came all the way from Santiago del Estero to participate. Some of the southworks crew at the event stand Introducing the company to a few people also SDE’s cells With Miguel Saez And continuing […]

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Events

Cells On Camp: Presenting at my home town

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Recently, on August 25 and 26, I attended as a speaker on a Cells on Camp event (a preview of another Microsoft event, Code Camp) given in Santiago del Estero (Argentina), my home town. I presented about IIS7: Interoperability with PHP. Presenting at cells on camp Playing around with applicationhost.config It is always special to participate on any event, but I have to say that visiting back my home town (I don’t do it all that often) and my University it has another type of feeling. My professional life began with those events and activities: I belong (now as a remote member) to a study group called GENTI (Information Technologies Study Group); we started it at October/November of 2005 with a group of students and professors of the University, together with Alejandro Ponicke (Microsoft’s South Cone IT Evangelist) as a mentor. We began learning everything from scratch, we didn’t have much experience or knowledge but we sure knew what we wanted and we went after it. GENTI crew back in 2006 On our first public event (May 2006) everything went perfect; the auditorium was too small for all the people that attended (~ 350 on the first conference and with 300 seats available). Alejandro Ponicke supported us with a few conferences; I also participated as a speaker. And I met a great friend of mine: Johnny Halife. Code Camp 2007: Memories with Johnny Halife So, whenever these types of academic […]

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Deployment

Installing and Configuring WDS (Windows Deployment Services): Full Images Deployment (Part III)

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At this point we’ve already installed and properly configured Windows Deployment Server on Windows 2003/Windows 2008 (Part I); and we created a full image (programs and features installed) on our Windows Vista and uploaded it to the server (Part II); the only thing missing is creating the answer files that will be used on the images to achieve the full unattended installation of our operating system. For those using Windows Server 2003 SP1, we reviewed that among the requirements for WDS installation there was installing Windows Automated Installation Kit. This kit also gives us an important tool for the unattended files creation, the Windows System Image Manager. So, it’s recommended for any other platform used on WDS to download this kit and install the System Image Manager. This tool it’s not a requirement for creating the unattended files. Installing WAIK Preparing the Files Using System Image Manager System Image Manager provides us the way to, using the .wim (or .clg) file for an installation, select the components that are necessary within the answer files. This way we can be sure that the answer options selected are used on the right place at the right time: Open System Image Manager for Start Menu. Click on File and click on Select Windows Image. Select the .wim file that we previously created or just use the file from the installation media (install.wim). You can also select the catalog files (.clg): these are the […]

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Active Directory

Windows Server 2008: Creating and Maintaining System State Backups on Your Domain Controller

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I was very excited when I started to play around with the first beta versions of Windows Server 2008 and experiment with the latest security improvements. At first, I wanted to start with one of the more basics and important things on this new server: Active Directory. Several improvements were made on security matters that we can find it related to Active Directory: Read-Only DCs, more group policies, auditing enhancements, etc. After installing a small lab to check all these features, I finally arrive to another important Active Directory matter: Backing up and Restoring Data from a Domain Controller. I was pretty disappointed at first when I realized that there was no easy way to backup a system state from a Domain Controller. Even more disappointed when I couldn’t find out the way to schedule a system state backup! Well on this post I want to review the way to simply schedule a system state backup on a Domain Controller and maintain those backups by removing the old ones from the backup catalog. Requirements a. A secondary hard drive on the domain controller. It cannot be a network drive.The only storage point possible for backing up your server is using a secondary hard drive that can only be attached locally. b. Having the Windows Server Backup feature installed. The first thing that you must know to start backing up data from Windows Server 2008 is that the backup tool is […]

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Deployment

Installing and Configuring WDS (Windows Deployment Services): Full Images Deployment (Part II)

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Ok then, after completing the first configurations made on the Part I of this guide we can perform a clean but attended network installation of Windows Vista. There are two main steps to take and complete a full image and unattended deployment: 1. Creating the base image to deploy: OS, programs and other special configurations + uploading it to the WDS server. 2. Making an unattended file to be used with that image. Creating the Base Image Note: On this series of posts we are only considering to deploy Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008 images. The files used on WDS Native mode as unattended files are only valid to those operating systems, if you want to make unattended deployment with Windows XP or 2003 OS; you will need to use RIS or WDS Legacy Mode. The first step it’s pretty simple, it consists on installing the operating system with all the features, programs and configurations that you want. But there are some considerations first: After you complete the image, there’s a process where you release all the specific data involving the computer where it’s installed, like the Security Identifier (SID), computer name, etc. Here are some of the things that the image won’t keep after the release process: · Computer name· Owner and Company name· SID· Domain or workgroup membership· TCP/IP Settings· Regional and keyboard settings· Specific hardware drivers. This refers to specific computer hardware, like video or audio […]

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Deployment

Installing and Configuring WDS (Windows Deployment Services): Full Images Deployment (Part I)

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I’ve prepared a complete guide to configure a WDS Server on Windows Server 2008 or Windows Server 2003 to deploy complete operating systems images, this is the first part. In this post I’ll be setting the WDS requirements, installation, first configurations and images needed. Introduction Deploying operating systems it’s always a hard thing to do. Annoying, uncomfortable, but necessary for every environment. Why? Because every desktop computer on every organization has their own life cycle (even servers, a longer one, but cycle at last). Even if your organization doesn’t have many desktops and even if those desktops don’t seem to need an image refresh in several months; the dynamics of today’s technology makes your base operating systems to change: Updates available, service packs, a new version of your organization’s software, newer operating systems, etc. And don’t forget the consequences of any user’s intervention: overloading the hard drive, personal software installation, etc; transforming always into a need to a fresh new installation. No need to keep enumerating things that normally happens; you probably know all of them. Common Base Image Life Cycle The bottom line is that a good and automated system to deploy your full operating systems images will significantly (and I do mean significantly) improve your daily tasks: Making an awkward job of following the installations steps for maybe 2 or 3 hours and transforming it to 30mins of a complete unattended provisioning. Here’s where Windows Deployment Services comes […]

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