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.
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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?
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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In my last post I wrote about how to install Windows Server 2008 R2 into a VHD for dual-booting purposes. Well, recently I broke my laptop and had to rebuild my boot loader. Anyways, adding an existing VHD to the Windows 7 boot loader is a doddle.
First, copy your current boot loader:
bcdedit /copy {current} /d "Boot Description"
This will generate a new boot entry and print out the GUID. You’ll need this! Next, you’ll set the VHD path for the OS to use.
bcdedit /set {GUID from last step} osdevice vhd=[DriveLetter:]\PathToVHD\VHD_File
bcdedit /set {GUID from last step} device vhd=[DriveLetter:]\PathToVHD\VHD_File
That’s it! Reboot your PC and your VHDs should be bootable. Remember though, you can only boot Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2 VHDs like this.
I’ve been using Windows 7 as my primary OS on my laptop (a nice shiny new Dell Studio 17) for a little while now. I’ve found it almost as stable as Vista, definitely faster and some of the new features are very useful – the wireless connection stuff is much better for example. However, the lack of any hypervisor-based virtualization product with it means I have to use Windows Server 2008 for many work-based things.
Now, with both Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, you can boot from a VHD file. Why is this great? Well, my laptop only has one disk partition and I can’t be bothered to resize it (and no, using DISKPART doesn’t work – I have 0B available to shrink). It also means that I can stick in my USB stick with the Windows Server 2008 R2 install files on, open a command prompt (using SHIFT+F10 when the first dialog box pops up) and type:
diskpart
create vdisk file=D:\VHDs\Win2k8R2.vhd type=expandable maximum=32768
select vdisk file=D:\VHDs\Win2k8R2.vhd
attach vdisk
exit
I can then continue the install – it does complain about not being able to boot from this volume, but don’t believe it. Just press next and the whole thing works like a dream.