Hyper-V R2: Dynamic Storage

This video looks at the new Dynamic Storage capability in Hyper-V R2, which enables the addition or removal of storage (VHD or Pass Through Disk) to/from a running virtual machine, with no downtime.

Duration: 6m 51s

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Hyper-V R2: Initial Installation & Configuration

This video walks through the installation of Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 R2, and also looks at some of the key changes in this release, such as Processor Compatibility, Core Parking, and more.

Duration: 17m 37s

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Exchange Server 2010 SP1 Is Available for Download

Microsoft released the SP1 beta at Tech Ed North America in June. Since then, almost 500,000 SP1 mailboxes have gone into production in Technology Adoption Program (TAP) customer environments.

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How to Backup Exchange 2010 for Free

So, more and more companies deploying an Exchange 2010. And as you know, the next step after Exchange Implementation MUST be a backup configuration.

And now is a very surprising point. Many sysadmins are willing to pay over for complex backup solutions which they don't necessarily need.
As "Exchange Dinosaur" (I still remember Exchange 4.0 :))) I would like to say that one of the best backup (and what is more important, restore solution) always was Microsoft NT Backup. Since Windows 2008 Microsoft has removed NT Backup and replaced it with "Windows Server Backup Feature"

First, I need to mention the aspect that Microsoft has enabled Windows Server Backup to take VSS backups of the Exchange databases, so the following can work on Exchange 2010 and Hyper-V, on Windows 2008 or Windows 2008 R2.

As an additional note, Microsoft has extended Windows Server Backup Feature in Windows 2008 R2, and I really recommend to install Exchange 2010 on Windows 2008 R2 and not on Windows 2008. The reason why I say that is because of a new feature that's come with the Windows Backup Server of Windows 2008 R2. On Windows 2008 R2, backups can be taken from both the Active and the Passive databases of a DAG (Database Availability Group). This is very cool news because, in Windows 2008, backups could only be taken from the Active Node.

Ok, I should stop taking and should start to show you how to implement a FREE Backup of Exchange 2010 :) ...

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Cached Exchange Mode in a Remote Desktop Session Host environment

Cached Exchange Mode in a Remote Desktop Session Host environment: planning considerations is a technical whitepaper recently released by Microsoft.

Historically, Microsoft Outlook has only been supported in an RDSH environment when it is deployed in Online Mode and connected to a Microsoft Exchange Server. This is still the recommended configuration for Microsoft Outlook 2010 when it is deployed in an RDSH environment. However, customers who deploy Outlook 2010 now have the supported option of enabling Cached Exchange Mode when Outlook 2010 is installed in a Remote Desktop environment. Cached Exchange Mode might be ideal for deployments in which Outlook is connecting over a high latency connection to an Exchange server that is located remotely. For the relatively few users who access Outlook through a remote desktop, this might be the ideal configuration. However, Online Mode against the Exchange server is still the most scalable and optimized configuration for large deployments.

This white paper covers three major areas that you should consider when you deploy Outlook 2010 with Cached Exchange Mode in a Remote Desktop environment:

• Storage footprint
• Performance impact
• Networked Storage

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TechNet Magazine – August 2010

The August 2010 edition of the TechNet Magazine is now available for online reading.

• Editor's Note: Cloudy with a Chance of E-mail

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Fully Unattended Windows 2008 and Windows 7 - 1227 Lines of scripts

Last few months I've been working on a project for one very big Canadian Company.
Now I can say that this project is coming to the end :).

I was concentrated on building a solution for fully unattended deployment procedure of Windows Server 2008 Servers and Windows 7 Workstation.
In total this project covers 200 Servers and about 1000 Workstation. I've used a lot of tricks and tips in this project and built a lot of scripts to automate EVERYTHING :).

Today I asked myself, "How many lines of code you wrote in all scripts for this project?"

So, after very simple maths I can say, all my scripts for FULLY UNATTENDED Windows 2008 and Windows 7 system contain 1227 lines :).

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How to Disable IPv6 via Group Policy (GPO)

I've already mentioned many time that I'm disabling IPv6 almost on all my servers and workstation.
In today days, I really don't see a reason to have it enabled (maybe in next few years, but not now).

If you search my site you will find few ways how is possible to disable IPv6. Personally, I'm preferring to disable it systemwide, it means I disable IPv6 as a component. Here is how I do that.

Let's see today how to disable / enable IPv6 via Group Policy (GPO)...

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Interview Questions … To Ask The Interviewer

Aidan Finn published on his blog very interesting post. He named it "Interview Questions … To Ask The Interviewer".
I'm totally agreed with Adam and decided to republish his post here, at CuruIT.com :)

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Hyper-V Backup and WAN Replication

When Microsoft has released a Hyper-V the first question that I've asked myself was "How do I Backup / Replicate Hyper-V?"
In VMWare world one of the best applications for replication is Veeam, but they have nothing for Hyper-V.

Continue at CuruIT.com

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What happens when you Sysprep a system running Hyper-V on Windows Server 2008 R2?

The short answer is: Everything just works.

The long answer is as follows:

Prior to Window Server 2008 R2 (namely in Windows Server 2008) you could run into a couple of problems.  In Windows Server 2008 R2 Microsoft has implemented a Sysprep provider to ensure that everything goes smoothly.  This provider does work during two of the phases of Sysprep:

Generalize

The generalize phase of Sysprep is where an installed version of Windows is prepared to be duplicated – and all installation specific information is removed.  During this phase Hyper-V makes a couple of key changes:

• The installation date information for Hyper-V cleared.  It will be automatically regenerated when the system image is deployed to a new system (or rebooted locally).
• The dynamic MAC address range is cleared.  This will also be automatically regenerated when the system image is deployed to a new system.  This step is necessary to ensure that you do not get duplicate MAC addresses on multiple Hyper-V servers if they are all deployed from the same base image.

Specialize

The specialize phase is run after the system image has been deployed to a new computer.  Hyper-V makes the following change as part of this phase:

• Enable automatic launching of the hypervisor in the boot configuration data (BCD) store.  Because a new boot configuration data store is created as part of the image deployment process, and because Hyper-V stores information in the boot configuration data store – we need to make sure this information comes across to the new system.

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iSCSI: Building a Private Cloud with StarWind and your Hypervisor

Live Webinar, Wednesday, August 18, 2:00 PM EDT
During this session, StarWind will explore the role of iSCSI Shared storage as part of a SharePoint implementation. As organizations begin to adopt the cloud computing model, the private cloud utilizing technologies like SharePoint is rapidly becoming the technology of choice for the SMB.

On this webinar we will cover the following:
•    Role of Share Storage in the private cloud
•    The Software needed and how to use it
•    Data protection
•    Disaster Recovery
•    High Availability

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The App-V 4.6 for RDS whitepaper is now available

This whitepaper discusses the benefits, configurations and considerations when planning a Microsoft® Windows Server® Remote Desktop Services solution with Microsoft Application Virtualization (App?V®), and while I could probably write up a big long summary and post it here, probably the best way to let you know what's in it is to show the table of contents:

If you run App-V 4.6 on your Remote Desktop Session Host (RD Session Host) servers then you definitely owe it to yourself to check this one out.  You can download the whitepaper here.

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Microsoft vs. VMware: Who's better at disaster recovery?

Disaster recovery has become table stakes in the world of server
virtualization. Any good virtualization platform these days will find
a way to restart a virtual machine in the event of a hardware failure.
But which vendor excels more than any other at getting critical
applications back online after failures, and making sure the most
important virtual machines are given priority in the restart process?

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Hyper-V Fixed VHD Creation

Creating a large fixed size VHD in Hyper-V can be a lengthy operation.

However Chris, a developer on Hyper-V team, has posted up a utility called VHDTool which can create large fixed VHDs in seconds. The utility is available with source code and can be downloaded here.

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SYSPREP ERROR - "hrResults = 0x8030000b"

During one of Windows 2008 and Windows 7 deployment projects I've seen an error "Could not process or parse the answer file for [specialize] pass. Please restart."

After hours of investigations I managed to find a solution, and now I'd like to let you know what to do. Here are steps:


Continue at my site: www.curuit.com

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2002 Audi TT Limitted Edition

Hey everybody,
This is my favourite car, unfortunately I have to sell it because of my health problem.

So, in case you know somebody who is looking for a nice car :)

http://winnipeg.kijiji.ca/c-cars-vehicles-cars-2002-Audi-TT-Limitted-Edition-W0QQAdIdZ221546372

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Hyper-V: Enable Sleep / Hibernate

I've been using a Windows Server OS as my laptop / desktop for many years by now.
Currently, I am using Windows Server 2008 R2 as my primary laptop. When I added a Hyper-V role I discovered that "Sleep Mode" on my laptop just stopped working.

After some tests and investigations, I've come up with a partial solution to this problem. The trick to use a Sleep Mode on a system where a Hyper-V installed is to have Hyper-V NOT started.
To set a Hyper-V to "Manual Start", I did a script with a following registry setting:

Full story at: CuruIT.com

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