OWSUG.ca

Wish List Item – Flexibility mapping an ISO image in SCVMM

Brad Bird — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 23:35:21 GMT

I was asked earlier this week about differences between managing VMs using Hyper-V and managing them with SCVMM.

For the record, even if you import the Hyper-V host into SCVMM to be managed centrally you can continue to manage said host from Hyper-V manager. This is not the recommended way of doing business for a couple of reasons. 1 reason is since you purchased SCVMM, managing your hosts and VMs centrally is a key benefit.

If you have configured things like intelligent placement settings based on key system resources and you indirectly alter your setup by managing your VMs with a separate tool, you may be unknowingly causing your VMs to move needlessly whereas if you were managing these VMs centrally, you would see what you’re doing because you are in the same tool where this was all configured.

Also, in Hyper-V “imaging” or stateful image backup is done using snapshots. In SCVMM these are called checkpoints, the techniques may also differ slightly between Hyper-V and SCVMM and you are doubling up on the files which may be configured to be stored in different locations. These are not small files either…

One area in particular that I actually prefer sometimes to use Hyper-V manager is in mapping an ISO file to the optical drive on the VM. In SCVMM the ISO file must be in the library to do this. There are situations where you would not specifically want to have the ISO file in the library but simply to browse to the file location and mount it.

My wish would be to see there be 2 options in the VM properties for the optical drive when using an ISO image. 1 option would use the SCVMM library and the other option would allow you to map to the ISO image from a file system location.

There’s my 2 cents.

March 31 OWSUG enabled Energize IT Event

Brad Bird — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 22:10:27 GMT

I am excited to announce that Microsoft is coming to town to host EnergizeIT Community Connection: From the Client to the Cloud on March 31^st in Ottawa and I’d like to make sure you get the invite.

EnergizeIT: Community Connection: From the Client to the Cloud
TO REGISTER: Click here.
REGISTRATION START TIME: 6:00-6:30PM,
EVENT START/END TIME: 6:30PM-9PM
LOCATION: Algonquin College. Ottawa, ON

SESSION OVERVIEW: Windows Azure. Office System 2010. Visual Studio 2010. Windows Phone 7 Series. The Microsoft-based platform presents a bevy of opportunities for all of us. Whether you are a Developer or an IT Professional, knowing how these will impact you is critical, especially in the new economic reality.
This evening Community EnergizeIT event will help you understand Microsoft’s Cloud Services vision. You will find out about the possibilities that these technologies help realize and the value that they can bring to your organization and yourself.

Microsoft advisors will explore the Microsoft-based platform through a scenario that will demonstrate different points of view - from developer to IT Pro, from consumer to the information worker. From the client to the cloud, this fun-filled demo-intensive exploration will excite you about the possibilities of the Microsoft-based platform. You’ll see how to build next generation applications with technology like Silverlight, .NET 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010. You will find out how to consume those applications on a variety of devices, like mobile devices running Windows Phone, netbooks and PCs running Windows 7, as well as the web. You will learn about how the Microsoft-based platform allows you to connect with your colleagues no matter where you are –office, coffee shops, or your own living room. You’ll also see how you and your colleagues can be even more productive with Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010.
EnergizeIT Community Connection: From the Client to the Cloud is your opportunity to learn how to harness the power and flexibility of the Microsoft-based platform from the client to the cloud.

To learn more about the EnergizeIT program visit www.microsoft.ca/EnergizeIT.

Enjoy the event!

Sincerely,
Brad Bird

Real World Azure: An Overview of Cloud Computing

Canadian IT Professionals — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 21:33:19 GMT

The other day Rick posted an entry on cloud computing and asked “As IT Pros who save the world every day at work – what do you think about all this “cloud” stuff?” It led to a lot of comments and questions. Our colleagues over at TechNet Edge have started to answer the questions around cloud computing specifically aimed at the IT Pro. It is a four part series which will cover the IT Pro aspect of cloud computing. Part 1 is available and in it IT Pro Technical Evangelist Joey Snow...(read more)

Query for a portion of a NetBIOS Name

SMSUG.ca — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 13:00:46 GMT

select * from dbo.v_GS_COMPUTER_SYSTEM where name0 like '___m%'...(read more)

Security Bulletins for the Regular IT Guy – Episode 13 - 3/9/2010

Canadian IT Professionals — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 18:29:00 GMT

Over pints Pierre Roman, Bruce Cowper and Rick Claus decided they would put together a concise and timely podcast each “Update Tuesday”. The object is to keep it simple by letting you know in plain non technical language what the updates are, what they resolve and why you should care. Have a listen directly from the embedded Silverlight player OR subscribe to the feed and download it to your iTunes / Zune software. As always - if you have suggestions on making it better - please pass on your comments....(read more)

Recovering data from a ‘Partly’ cooked piece of hardware – Part 2

Brad Bird — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 23:57:14 GMT

I determined that the enclosure’s controller board is indeed “partly” fried. I used the enclosure with another system and it caused the system to freeze but no POST issues. This would have been a PAIN to discover.

The drive survived though despite some slight data corruption. I lost my Virtual Server 2005 R2 install from the backup as there were too many corrupted files. I simply restored it as is and uninstalled it and then reinstalled it, I did not lose any virtual machines is what was important.

The blitzed drive needed to undergo a 3.5hr long nail biting chkdsk though…

Overall, my 4GB system has been happily recovered and I only lost an external drive enclosure as casualty.

Theoretically, I could take the controller board to an electronics repair shop nearby and it would likely be a relatively inexpensive repair. I may yet go that route…

Lesson learned, check the devices for power requirements and check the adapters for power output!

Recovering Data from a “Partly” Cooked Piece of Hardware part 1

Brad Bird — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 14:56:16 GMT

So I was thrilled yesterday to get everything setup the way I needed so that I could connect my eSATA drive to my 4GB DC/SQL 2008 server so that I could back up my data and finally grow my system partition…

I had everything perfect, then I made a noob mistake. I grabbed the first loose adapter I could find that fit, plugged it in and powered everything on…

The drive light went on for a second and then off… strange…

I checked the drive, all was well. I checked the adapter… AC/AC current! damn!

Being the stubborn sort, I figured this was barely powered for 3 seconds I could get away with connecting it correctly and what do you know, the drive powered up correctly. Thing is, it causes my system to hang at the POST when it is connected…

I am sorry to say that I am aware of what the problem is, only because I have been down this road before…

The trick when this happens, is to cause the POST to complete and connect the drive immediately after so the OS can use it.

I did and as planned that worked… like many IT folks, I got busy doing something else and forgot the state I left everything in and let the system power up with the drive connected.

I came back many hours later, completely forgetting the drive connected to my system is unreliable at best and absent mindedly back up my entire data partition to it, move the swap file and reboot.

Because I am a cursed man, this one time when I would have needed it to, my system did not freeze at POST (thus serving as a reminder that I have a bad external drive connected) and booted successfully into windows further NOT reminding me of my external drive’s plight…

OK, so now I stopped all important services which have running code on my data partition and delete the data partition since it is backed up… right???

The system prompted me to boot which I did and once again, the system sneakily booted into windows…

Excellent, now I grew my system partition as planned and put the data partition back slightly smaller and busily started restoring my files…

My system slowed to an unbelievable crawl… then froze!

I force restarted it and guess what? It froze at POST….

Memories of my jogging pants being pulled down in gym class came flooding back, oh yeah and the fact all my data was now backed up on a partly cooked piece of hardware!

Thank god for the Best Buy’s and Future Shops of the world and their awesome exchange/return policies…

I normally buy small hardware items there despite higher prices explicitly for the exchange/return policy :).

So until Best Buy opens, I’ll busy myself restoring chunks of data until my system freezes and then reboot and try again! Fun times…

More to come!

Latest tinkering and Virtual Lab craziness – Make it work on a budget…

Brad Bird — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 00:22:32 GMT

I have 2 major systems which I use for my home Virtual lab. 1 system is a 4GB dual core 64-bit small form factor PC which hosts my DC, SQL 2008 server, and VMM 2008 R2. The other is my quad core 16GB system which hosts most of my VMs on Hyper-V R2.

I recently ran into an issue where I need to grow my system partition on my DC so I went out and purchased some much needed storage to replace an existing 500GB SATA drive which my 4GB system will inherit.

Well, I ran into a couple of issues… First, the small form factor bit me in the behind. See below:

There is no room for a second hard disk, unless I pull the DVDRW drive which I don’t want to do, any additional storage must either be stuffed in the case, connected via external USB, or eSATA. Since this system is essentially a server, eSATA is both performing enough, and budget savvy :).

OK, not so bad… I purchased an external hard disk enclosure some time ago which until now has been being used for external USB storage but it came with an eSATA header to connect to a system internally, great!

Next issue, the bracket may be ok for a standard desktop PC, but it is just a little too high to fit in my small form factor system. See below:

Hmm, ok so I tried to remove the header port from its’ bracket and fit it to the existing cover plates which came with the case. See below:

As seen, the cover plate has slots in it which are just a little too big to secure the port… Last week, when hanging some wall mounted DVD racks, I had a similar issue with the mounting screws so I purchased some washers to seal the deal and happened to have some left.

Perfect! A perfectly stable and aesthetically pleasing solution.

The price was right too!

Battle to get SQL 2008 properly installed in my System Center Virtual Lab

Brad Bird — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 10:38:48 GMT

I finally have more than 5 days at home to get some work done which was on the back burner. 1 major task I will complete is to make my home office lab accessible remotely. I’ll do this with either Direct Access (if I can get the consecutive IP addresses), TS Gateway, or Live Mesh failing the previous 2.

I had been using both dedicated lab systems previously for other labs and have installed SQL 2005 which had since been completely uninstalled (or so i thought).

I dedicated 1 physical 64-bit system which supports 4GB of RAM and does not support hardware virtualization to be my DC, SQL server and SCVMM server.

I decided to install SQL 2008 SP1 as the DB host.

The install for SQL 2008 is fairly straightforward and I have done it before on several occasions. I was plagued with several issues… All in all, this fight took 3 days of off and on time.

Firstly, I was not able to change the default path for the Shared Features, I kept running into what I found was a known issue with the RTM installer, see blow:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/955458

Thing is, this is not consistent. I have used the same install media on this same system with no issue… weirdness…

That was one issue.

Next, the issue was getting Reporting Services installed in SQL 2008. The setup wizard would fail to install RS correctly (it would list the failure). It would still install the SQL Reporting Services windows service and would list it as an installed component in the instance for a repair. Yet, I was unable to get it to work…

After numerous sanity checks and idea bouncing with my colleagues and fellow MVPs Wes MacDonald and Edwin Sarmiento, I figured it was time to remove SQL entirely using whatever ‘manual’ procedures are out there and try again.

The manual uninstall procedure can consist of actually using the uninstaller from Add/Remove programs or Programs and Features but often does not and is not a clean process as this can involve registering/unregistering DLL files, deleting registry keys, etc…

After removing all components of SQL 2008, I scoured the system for any possible remnants of SQL 2005 using this procedure:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/909967

Interesting, I found a surprise at this step:

Step 2: Run the command to uninstall the SQL Server components

At a command prompt, run the following command:

"%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft SQL Server\90\Setup Bootstrap\ARPWrapper.exe /Remove"

Somehow, there was an instance of SQL 2005 reporting services hiding in the woodwork! So I removed it…

I diligently made sure that I rebooted my system after every uninstall/reinstall…

Now, when I attempted to reinstall SQL, I still could not get reporting services to install but discovered that when I attempted to run a modify install to add/remove features, I would receive an error stating that although I was asking to modify the default instance of MSSQLSERVER, my instance of MSSQLSERVER had an instance ID of 1.

Wow, somehow the SQL installer was interpreting that there was still a SQL instance in my system somehow. OK, because I am not a SQL guy, I pinged fellow MVP Edwin Sarmiento for another sanity check to determine if simply deleting all SQL files from my system and uninstalling SQL 2008 again should purge my system from any SQL instances. Edwin confirmed yes… and suggested I backup any databases and logs if I wanted to restore the data later which was very diligent of him but I did not need the existing data anyways and so did not mind losing it.

Edwin also informed me that in his experience the RTM installer was ‘buggy’ and I should patch the install by slipstreaming my install media as this has solved many problems for him in the past. Since this seemed reasonable and in line with some of the issues I had been seeing, I went for it.

The procedure to slipstream the SQL 2008 install media is here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/petersad/archive/2009/02/25/sql-server-2008-creating-a-merged-slisptream-drop.aspx

This process took several hours with all of the data copying I needed to do and the media creating in the end needed a dual layer DVD since the slipstreamed media is larger than 4.7GB.

OK, next I made sure after uninstalling all SQL 2008 elements from Programs and Features that I deleted all SQL folders and files from all drives on my system to eliminate the possibility of the system detecting any SQL instances.

Now, I tried again installing this time with the slipstreamed media. I selected database services, reporting services, and management components. The system also did not complain when I changed the default install path for the features and databases. This was a good sign…

I followed through and successfully completed the install with Reporting Services as well this time!

Since I slipstreamed my install media, I also did not need to go back and service pack my install. Hopefully this experience will help someone not lose 3 days like I did!

I am Virtualizing so How is it that I still need more Machines?

Brad Bird — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 17:16:58 GMT

The never ending pit of despair…

I am using Hyper-V and SCVMM to their fullest across all of my machines. I am keeping the systems running optimally as far as performance.

Now what do I need?

MORE! I need MORE!

I think like most ITPROs I was content with less before when hardware was a limitation. Now that virtualization has exploded I am still finding I need more hardware. Sort of…

Now, like the customers I deal with, I am finding that I need better quality scalable hardware and can no longer run a lab with a couple of clone PCs…

Virtualization is great but like all things in life, it has its’ price.

End of support for Windows 2000, XP SP2 and Windows Vista RTM

Canadian IT Professionals — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 16:00:21 GMT

As we announced in 2008, support for Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) will end on July 13, 2010. Support for Windows 2000 will end on the same date. Support for Windows Vista Release to Manufacturing (RTM) will end on April 13, 2010. NOTE: There is no Service Pack 3 for the 64-bit version of Windows XP. If you are running the 64-bit version of Windows XP with Service Pack 2, you are on the latest service pack and will continue to be eligible for support and receive updates until April 8, 2014. To...(read more)

Free Windows 7 and MMS

SMSUG.ca — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 12:04:13 GMT

Do you want a free copy of Windows 7? if so check out this post! http://www.myitforum.com/forums/m_215495/mpage_1/key_/tm.htm#215495...(read more)

ConfigMgr / SCCM Documentation Script v1.24

SMSUG.ca — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 14:58:29 GMT

The ConfigMgr / SCCM documentation script has been updated to v1.24 for more details please see http://tinyurl.com/yfpgocw...(read more)

Setting up a KMS Server

Todds Blog — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 12:30:00 GMT

Instructions on how to setup a KMS Server for Windows 7 activation using Windows Server 2008 R2....(read more)

PowerGUI Pro is now available!

Poshoholic — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 21:48:01 GMT

Extra! Extra! Read all about it! PowerGUI has gone Pro! You’re favorite PowerShell engine is now available in a cool new package. PowerGUI Pro has all of the same great features that you know and love from PowerGUI Freeware plus it allows you to: Use PowerShell from your favorite mobile device with MobileShell! Protect your scripts using integrated version [...]...(read more)

Office Count

SMSUG.ca — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 20:45:07 GMT

select DisplayName0, Version0, Count(*) From dbo.v_Add_Remove_Programs ARP Where DisplayName0 like '%office%' Group by DisplayName0, Version0 Order by DisplayName0, Version0...(read more)

JOTD – March 1 2010

SMSUG.ca — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 18:56:04 GMT

...(read more)

Temporary Post Used For Theme Detection (98f066f1-7b28-4fcd-bf0e-b9a1e76e6ea8 – 3bfe001a-32de-4114-a6b4-4005b770f6d7)

Poshoholic — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 16:04:14 GMT

This is a temporary post that was not deleted. Please delete this manually. (54de4b76-7ae5-4aa6-ae01-ecd38647e373 – 3bfe001a-32de-4114-a6b4-4005b770f6d7)...(read more)

Tip of The Day – Desktop Icons

SMSUG.ca — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 14:13:50 GMT

Back at TechDays Ottawa I was using my laptop to give a presentation on Hyper-v live migration. Anyways Rick walked into the room as I was just about to “clean” my desktop of folders and icons as I always do before a presentation. Rick said “Let me show you this cool feature of Windows designed just for presenters!” Then he proceeded to right click my desktop, point to View then unselect Show desktop icons . After doing this all of my icons “disappeared” from my desktop. So if you have a presentation...(read more)

JOTD – Olympics

SMSUG.ca — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 03:29:48 GMT

Ellen told me about this article, it not really a joke but it is funny. http://www.winnipegsun.com/comment/columnists/greg_weston/2010/02/12/12858676.html...(read more)

RunAs Radio – Rolly Talks about Project Server 2010

Canadian IT Professionals — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 17:37:13 GMT

As part of EnergizeIT 2010 we have partnered with RunAs Radio to produce some podcasts on Office 2010. The first podcast of this 4 part series was posted yesterday. If you don’t already subscribe to RunAs Radio I encourage you to do so. It is a great podcast aimed directly at IT professionals. ------------------------- In this episode Richard and Greg talk to Rolly Perreaux about Microsoft Project 2010 and Project Server 2010. Project moves into the 64 bit world in 2010 and a host...(read more)

Services in the Cloud. Should you really Give a Crap - yet?

Canadian IT Professionals — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 13:03:00 GMT

(Thought that title might get your attention) Over the last month or so – I’ve had my head in the clouds working away on creating a scenario based demo for EnergizeIT that leverages the scalability of the cloud and “transportability” of existing .net code and “n” tier architecture. I’ve been living the life of an IT Pro influenced in a “Dev” world for the most part. I don’t know how many of you IT Pros deal with in house developed apps and are considering Azure – but it got me thinking of a more...(read more)

Made in Canada / USA????

SMSUG.ca — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 18:46:08 GMT

John Marcum send me this picture from his cellphone… Don’t ask me how you can have something manufactured in both Canada and the USA! ...(read more)

70-669 MCTS: Windows Server 2008 R2, Desktop Virtualization

SMSUG.ca — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 18:19:53 GMT

MS is looking for people to beta test a new App-v / Med-v Exam. Seats are limited but if you are into App-v or Med-v Check out their blog post. http://borntolearn.mslearn.net/2010/02/recruiting-beta-candidates-for-exam-71-669 Hey Jeff, What Docs are there that I can used to Study for this?...(read more)

Managing Your Virtual World

Canadian IT Professionals — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 23:45:09 GMT

“Virtualization without management is more dangerous than not using virtualization in the first place.” ~ Tom Bittman, Gartner VP & Analyst There are many good things about using virtualization in your infrastructure: consolidation of physical servers flexibility to respond to business needs time savings when ramping up new services However, this same flexibility and agility lends itself to chaos if left unchecked as virtual servers can crop up all over the place in response to business requests....(read more)