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.
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.
Well, with Windows Server 2008 actually being released today I thought I’d put down in writing how I configured a server for one of our branch offices here. I decided that for a small office we’d need DHCP, DNS and a domain controller. However, this being a branch office with no IT function within it, this gave me the perfect opportunity to play with the Windows Server 2008 Read-Only Domain Controller (RODC) role within a Windows Server 2008 Core installation.
Microsoft’s forthcoming server platform, Windows Server 2008, is out pretty soon now. So, as I’m going to be deploying this pretty soon after its release, I thought it a good idea to start playing with one of the more interesting parts of Windows Server 2008, the Core installation.