Apply an update to an offline WIM image
Last week after about two years away I had to do some more work on Windows Deployment Services and found myself writing a guide on how to add Windows Updates to an offline WIM file in WDS. It’s really simple so thought I’d share it here.
Using Windows XP with NLA
So it’s been a while since I had to use Windows XP and for security I’ve made sure that all my servers (Windows 2008 and R2, naturally) are "more secure" by only allowing computers that support Network Level Authentication to connect. Unfortunately I recently had to use a machine that was locked to Windows XP, which kind of scuppered me when I needed to do some remote administration in a hurry. Luckily, I remembered that Windows XP does support NLA – you just need to know how to configure it.
Windows 7 Aero Glass under Remote Desktop Virtualization
For the last week or so I’ve been playing around with Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Virtualization component of Windows Server 2008 R2. For those of you that haven’t used or heard of RD-V, it’s Microsoft’s free VDI offering, utilising Remote Desktop to initiate a connection and spin up a dedicated Hyper-V Virtual Machine for the user. Anyway, one thing that really bugged me was that I couldn’t get Aero Glass to work, no matter what I did. Everything I read said it should work, but it didn’t. Why not? Well, the answer was both simple and irritating. Aero Glass remoting doesn’t work under anything other than Windows 7 Enterprise or Ultimate.
This annoyed me immensely – why not include it in Windows 7 Professional?
Hyper-V – Fixing Broken Volume GUIDs
Yesterday I had an interesting problem I had to fix. As you may or may not know, using Hyper-V within Failover Clustering sometimes requires the use of volume GUIDs for storage if you have more LUNs than drive letters available (like we do). What you may not know is that these GUIDs can, under some circumstances, change – completely screwing up Failover Clustering’s ability to move virtual machines between nodes.
Sky Broadband – Username and password
So, I use Sky Broadband at home and it’s always been truly excellent. Great speeds, stable connection, everything you could want from an ISP. Until today, that is, when my Sky provided router died due to ‘a failed firmware upgrade’. Now, I work from home and Sky have remotely bricked my router. Nice of them. Even better, calling them up, it’s against their Terms of Service to use a third party router on their network. The icing on the cake? It’ll take 7-10 days for my replacement to turn up. So, frankly, I said ‘nuts to that’ and managed to find this wonderful site. Now I’m using my own router – with 802.11n networking to boot – rather than Sky’s.
Enable NLB in a Hyper-V Guest
If you work with Exchange 2007 or Terminal Services/Remote Desktop Services in any anger, you’ve probably had to use Network Load Balancing (NLB) to balance services. For example I use it for the Client Access and Hub Transport roles in Exchange 2007, and to balance requests across my Terminal Services (Remote Desktop) Gateway servers. However, when virtualising these services, I found that Hyper-V doesn’t always play nice with NLB.
Installing the IBM RDAC driver for Hyper-V R2 Beta Server
A quick disclaimer: this should work for the entire IBM DS3xxx series, but I’ve only tested with the DS3300. Your Mileage May Vary!
So I’ve decided to have a go with some pre-release software and use Hyper-V R2 server. I work with several clients who rely on Windows Server 2008 Enterprise using Hyper-V in a clustered manner and either Enterprise R2 or Hyper-V R2 sound perfect for them. Cluster Shared Volumes are a brilliant idea and bring Hyper-V much closer to VMware for management ease. Specifically on my SAN I’m using IBM’s DS3300 iSCSI platform so to try this out I went about trying to get the RDAC MPIO drivers installed on the Hyper-V R2 beta.
