Microsoft has released a DST update for windows mobile based devices.
Follow this link for details and downloads:
Check out this web page:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/dd565807.aspx
You’ll find plenty of useful links about Hyper-V, including :
I’ve summarized several notes about Hyper-V and VMM. It may be useful for you to take it into account when planning or handling Hyper-V platforms.
1. Enabling NLB on a VM
Follow this procedure in case you need to enable NLB on a VM running under Hyper-V 2008. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/953828
Note that when your VM is running under Hyper-V 2008 R2, you will no longer need to specify a certain MAC. You will only need to check the option to “Enable MAC spoofing”.
Follow this link for detailed steps: http://robwhitehouse.com/virtualisation/enable-nlb-in-a-hyper-v-guest/
2. Max CPUs per VM
This Technet article shows the max number of allowed CPUs per VMs : http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc794868(WS.10).aspx
3. Disk alignment
Set the disk alignment on two levels:
i. 2008 R2 allows you to mount a VHD to the host (without booting it to a VM). This allows you to create / change / align partitions from the host itself, before creating the VM.
ii. Aligning the VHD is only relevant for fixed virtual disks. Alignment of Incremental or dynamic disks won’t last, due to the nature of the file.
4. IDE / SCSI
Your boot disk has to be connected to an IDE controller on the VM (SCSI controller is a synthetic device http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2008.10.hyperv.aspx?pr=blog ). Connect all Other drives to a SCSI controller for better performance.controller.
5. Pass Through Disks
For best application disk performance, use Pass-Through disks. Pass-Through disks will give the VM direct access to a physical drive. For more information on this feature: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc768521(BTS.10).aspx
6. Moving VMs from 2008 to 2008 R2
After moving VMs from a Server 2008 to Server 2008 R2 be sure to install the integration services again.
7. General Host / VM Performance
Follow this link for explanation about measuring basic Memory / CPU / Disk performance: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2008.08.pulse.aspx?pr=blog . Pay special attention to the disk monitoring. It is very likely that you’ve placed several disk intensive VMs on the same LUN.
8. Disconnect ISO files
When working on a Hyper-V cluster, make sure that you disconnect any ISO file from a VM when you’re done using it. Otherwise, when moving or live migrating your VM, it may fail because it wouldn’t find the ISO to connect to on the other node.
9. What’s new in VMM 2008 R2
http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/virtualmachinemanager/en/us/whats-new-r2.aspx
10. Disk size planning
When planning the size of the disk holding the VM’s VHDs, make sure that you have enough free space to save also the VM’s snapshots and entire memory. When Saving / Moving or Live Migrating the VM, the VM’s entire memory content is saved to disk.
The process of mailbox-enabling a user for Exchange 2003-based mailbox was preformed using the Active Directory Users and Computers SnapIn. Using this SnapIn, you could choose to place the mailbox on a DB located on an Exchange 2007 server. That, of course, would be the wrong way to go. The appropriate way of creating a mailbox on Exchange 2007 is to use the Exchange Management Console or the Exchange Management Shell.
Creating an Exchange 2007 mailbox using the mentioned snapIn would leave you with a mailbox that is missing some attributes. These attributes are required for normal operation under Exchange 2007 environment. Your mailbox will appear as “Legacy Mailbox”, rather then “User Mailbox” in the EMC. Usually, “Legacy Mailbox” means that this is a mailbox located on an Exchange 2003 within the same Exchange Organization.
The fix is simple.
Open Exchange Management Shell and run this command on the problematic mailbox:
Set-Mailbox Alias -ApplyMandatoryProperties
Your mailbox’s attributes should have been updated, and the result will be visible a few seconds later within the EMC.
Further details from Microsoft:
You may have experienced an issue with a Remote Desktop connection to a Server 2008 in which you see black/white grid lines on all or on part of the screen.
This may look something like this:
It appears that this issue is linked to this update : http://support.microsoft.com/kb/958470/en-us
Changing the setting of the RD connection (bitrate, colors etc) doesn’t seem to help.
This issue will be resolved when upgrading the client’s RDP version to 6.0 or newer.
When trying to Live Migrate a virtual machine, the process might fail and inform you that your virtual machine is not compatible with the target node.
If you try to Move (instead of Live Migrate) the virtual machine to another node, the process will again fail and you the following event will be logged:
Log Name: System
Source: Microsoft-Windows-FailoverClustering
Event ID: 1205
The Cluster service failed to bring clustered service or application ‘xxxxx’ completely online or offline. One or more resources may be in a failed state. This may impact the availability of the clustered service or application.
This situation is indeed caused, as the error indicated, by different processor capabilities. Check the exact processor version of your Nodes. You can use msinfo32 to get a detailed view. Here’s, for example, the types of CPUs I see:
Node1
Node2
![clip_image001[5]](http://www.dario.co.il/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/clip_image0015.jpg "clip_image001[5]"){kind=small}
What happens is that when the virtual machine starts, the hypervisor exposes certain CPU capabilities to the virtual machine. When Live Migrating or Moving the VM to a different host, the VM isn’t aware of the hardware change, tries to use capabilities that it’s new CPU doesn’t support, and fails to start.
Luckily, the solution is simple. Open the VM’s settings, and under the CPU settings check the option named “Migrate to a physical computer with a different processor version".
Note that the VM has to be off in order for you to check this option.
When checking this option, the hypervisor is only exposing the VM to the features of the processor that are available on all versions of a virtualization-capable processor by the same processor manufacturer. Note that this option doesn’t allow you to migrate between AMD and Intel CPUs. Check this Microsoft Technet article for further details: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd446679(WS.10).aspx
It is important to read between the lines in this case. Although you will be able to migrate without errors, your VM does LOSE PERFORMANCE .
This means that when planning to build a new Hyper-V Cluster, make sure that you get exactly the same CPUs on your physical hosts. Otherwise, you will have to downgrade the CPU capabilities of your VMs.
Hope this is helpful.
Kobi
Check out this new and very handy tool from Sysinternals:
Disk2vhd v1.0
By Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell
Published: October 7, 2009
Introduction
Disk2vhd is a utility that creates VHD (Virtual Hard Disk – Microsoft’s Virtual Machine disk format) versions of physical disks for use in Microsoft Virtual PC or Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines (VMs). The difference between Disk2vhd and other physical-to-virtual tools is that you can run Disk2vhd on a system that’s online. Disk2vhd uses Windows’ Volume Snapshot capability, introduced in Windows XP, to create consistent point-in-time snapshots of the volumes you want to include in a conversion. You can even have Disk2vhd create the VHDs on local volumes, even ones being converted (though performance is better when the VHD is on a disk different than ones being converted).
The Disk2vhd user interface lists the volumes present on the system:
It will create one VHD for each disk on which selected volumes reside. It preserves the partitioning information of the disk, but only copies the data contents for volumes on the disk that are selected. This enables you to capture just system volumes and exclude data volumes, for example.
Note: Virtual PC supports a maximum virtual disk size of 127GB. If you create a VHD from a larger disk it will not be accessible from a Virtual PC VM.
To use VHDs produced by Disk2vhd, create a VM with the desired characteristics and add the VHDs to the VM’s configuration as IDE disks. On first boot, a VM booting a captured copy of Windows will detect the VM’s hardware and automatically install drivers, if present in the image. If the required drivers are not present, install them via the Virtual PC or Hyper-V integration components. You can also attach to VHDs using the Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2 Disk Management or Diskpart utilities.
Note: do not attach to VHDs on the same system on which you created them if you plan on booting from them. If you do so, Windows will assign the VHD a new disk signature to avoid a collision with the signature of the VHD’s source disk. Windows references disks in the boot configuration database (BCD) by disk signature, so when that happens Windows booted in a VM will fail to locate the boot disk.
Disk2vhd runs Windows XP SP2, Windows Server 2003 SP1, and higher, including x64 systems.
Here’s a screenshot of a copy of a Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V system running in a virtual machine on top of the system it was made from:
.jpg "clip_image005")
(click image to zoom)
Download Disk2vhd
(704 KB)
Happy Day at the Microsoft Exchange Team :
It is my distinct pleasure to announce today the global availability of Exchange Server 2010. This has been an amazing journey from conception to launch, and the team has delivered an unprecedented line up of innovations in this release. I am incredibly proud of the team and our product.
The dedication of the Exchange community working side by side with us to deliver Exchange 2010 has been inspiring for me. I want to thank you for your commitment over the past 3 years helping us develop new ideas, make product enhancements and test pre-release bits to ensure our final product is rock solid. I believe Exchange has the most impressive IT Pro and Developer community in the world today. We could not have shipped this product without you!
In return, I hope you realize the full value of everything Exchange 2010 offers. We are all working in a very challenging economic environment today. Being cost conscious has never been more important – but also helping your organizations differentiate themselves and compete effectively is just as critical. I am delighted to see how Exchange 2010 is helping early adopters accomplish these goals. I want to share just a sampling of their stories, so you can see for yourself.
Organizations are cutting costs and simplifying administration with Exchange 2010.
“Performance with large mailboxes greatly exceeds our expectations. With the growing amount of data that needs to be retained, it is not uncommon for us to have 30-gigabyte plus mailboxes, making these performance improvements crucial to our business. I have been using Exchange 2010 and Outlook 2010 for e-mail since June and have been extremely satisfied with the performance and the user experience. It is a robust, very stable platform. And, we found RBAC to be a huge benefit. That is something I have needed for a long time-to have more granular rights for administrators and lower-level IT staff to do targeted tasks.” - Alexander Diaz, CIO, Katten Muchin Rosenman LLP
“The cost savings from switching from fiber channel to SATA disks is about 70 percent. The I/O system of Exchange Server 2010 is really optimized. If you look at Exchange Server 2007, it’s good; but Exchange Server 2010 is really great. You can significantly reduce the disk costs when you run Exchange Server 2010.” – Thomas Keck, CIO, Elabs
“We’re always moving users around. We’ve been doing that with custom scripts in Exchange Server 2003, but we will definitely be using the Online Move Mailbox feature in 2010. Now we can move them without taking the mailbox offline.” - Allan Tagg, SVP, Global Messaging Exec, Bank of America
Organizations are improving everyday productivity and meeting the expectations of a new generation of workers with Exchange 2010.
“Our salespeople need to respond quickly to dealer concerns. With Exchange Server 2010 and voice-to-text conversion, within 20 seconds after a dealer leaves a voice-mail message, our users see an e-mail preview on their cell phone. Our mobile employees might check voice mail anywhere from 5 to 10 times a day, at 5 to 10 minutes a session. By using Office Communications Server 2007 R2 and taking advantage of the voice-mail preview feature in Exchange Server 2010, they can increase their responsiveness while saving more than 15 minutes a day. From a business perspective, that’s an incredibly valuable productivity increase.” - George Hamin, Director of E-Business and Information Systems, Subaru Canada
“Having Conversation View on the new mobile client is really nice. It provides an extremely fast and efficient means of surveying my inbox and taking needed actions on the go.” – Steven Schafer, Director of Collaboration and Network Services, Global Crossing
“By taking advantage of Outlook Web App, employees can start being productive from new locations almost immediately. As soon as they get their workstation and network connectivity, administrators can quickly provide them with access to e-mail and IM at a moment’s notice without having to manage a lot of logistics. That’s tremendous. Just simplifying the process of giving our remote employees access to e-mail and IM with Exchange Server 2010 will increase the productivity of our IT administrators by at least 20 to 30 percent.” - Dan Evans, Manager of Messaging and Collaboration, Morgan Keegan & Company
Organizations of all sizes are better managing risk and the cost of compliance with Exchange 2010.
“With Exchange Server 2010, we can give the auditors permission to pull mail out of mailboxes themselves, rather than having me pull the data and ship it to them in a PST file. Now the nine hours a month I spend on compliance will be cut down to zero. Getting rid of PST files using Exchange Server 2010 solves a whole series of nightmares that I’m sure every Exchange Server administrator has had” - Andrew McNair, Wintel Infrastructure Manager, Cell C
“By using the compliance features in Microsoft Exchange Server 2010, we can save about $400,000 in hardware and software costs. That’s a big savings.” – Joseph Nguyen, Systems Architect at a large U.S. university.
“With Exchange Server 2010, we can set up transport protection rules for things like social security numbers to comply with HIPAA and for voice mails to ensure that they can’t be forwarded outside the company.” – Thomas Dechmann, Senior Principal IT Technologist, Medtronic
I’m also particularly proud of the work the team has done delivering Exchange as a server and a service. This has been an incredible engineering endeavor that no one else in the industry comes close to delivering. Today, we’ve successfully scaled Exchange 2010 to more than 15 million Outlook Live accounts around the world and, moving forward, to millions more with Exchange Online. Our promise to deliver a seamless Exchange experience on premises with the server, in the cloud as a service or a combination of the two truly gives customers choice and peace of mind.
You can see more customer results from the case studies published today, read about the launch in press coverage, hear from MBD President Stephen Elop in his TechEd Europe keynote launching Exchange 2010 and this evening at the Exchange Connections conference in Las Vegas in my keynote.
I know many of you are already underway with your Exchange 2010 deployments and many more will be starting today. The Exchange Server 2010 bits are available for download now. As always, keep the feedback coming. Listening to customers and partners is how the team has made Exchange the premier e-mail solution across the globe and that’s the way we intend to keep it.
Thank you!
(Taken from the Microsoft Exchange Team Blog. http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2009/11/09/453096.aspx)
Symptom
Virtual Machine in Hyper-V automatically restarts after shutting down the guest OS.
The Integration components are installed and functioning properly. There are no relevant errors in the event log of the hyper-v.
Cause
The Virtual Machine is defined as a cluster resource.
Control the VM through the Failover Cluster Management console.
Using the Failover Cluster Management console, control the state of the VM resource and define what happens to the VM when taking the resource offline :
Virtual Machine Resource > Properties > Offline Actions :
Turn Off / Save / Shutdown / Shutdown (force)
More Info
At first, I thought it was a bug in hyper-V, and after changing the “Automatic Start Action” in the VM’s settings, the machine didn’t restart automatically after the shutdown. Several minutes later, the machine was started and the automatic restart after shutdown happened again.
A simple solution came from a simple article :
Troubleshooting Hyper-V
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc742454.aspx
Symptoms
Users’ Home Folder maps incorrectly on workstations.
The home folder is mapped to the base share instead of the complete path to the profile.
This only happens on PCs. When logging on to terminal servers the mapping is done correctly.
Example:
Home folder set to: fileServerCompanyDepartmentUserName
The mapping that the user receives : fileServerCompany
Manually mapping the path completes successfully and all files are accessible.
The users are the owners of their folders and all permissions are sufficient for drive mapping.
Cause
Network delays may cause the workstation to try and map the home folder before completely initializing networking during logon.
Resolution
Apply the following setting using GPO :
Computer Configuration / Administrative Templates / System / Logon / Always wait for the network at computer startup and logon
More Information
Description of the Windows XP Professional Fast Logon Optimization feature
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q305293/
Info from the policy’s description
Determines whether Windows XP waits for the network during computer startup and user logon. By default, Windows XP does not wait for the network to be fully initialized at startup and logon. Existing users are logged on using cached credentials, which results in shorter logon times. Group Policy is applied in the background once the network becomes available.
Note that because this is a background refresh, extensions such as Software Installation and Folder Redirection take two logons to apply changes. To be able to operate safely, these extensions require that no users be logged on. Therefore, they must be processed in the foreground before users are actively using the computer. In addition, changes that are made to the user object, such as adding a roaming profile path, home directory, or user object logon script, may take up to two logons to be detected.
If a user with a roaming profile, home directory, or user object logon script logs on to a computer, Windows XP always waits for the network to be initialized before logging the user on.
If a user has never logged on to this computer before, Windows XP always waits for the network to be initialized.
If you enable this setting, logons are performed in the same way as for Windows 2000 clients, in that Windows XP waits for the network to be fully initialized before users are logged on. Group Policy is applied in the foreground, synchronously.
If you disable or do not configure this setting, Windows does not wait for the network to be fully initialized and users are logged on with cached credentials. Group Policy is applied asynchronously in the background.
Note: If you want to guarantee the application of Folder Redirection, Software Installation, or roaming user profile settings in just one logon, enable this setting to ensure that Windows waits for the network to be available before applying policy.
Note: For servers, the startup and logon processing always behaves as if this policy setting is enabled.
Quote from Microsoft’s Official eBook "Configuring Windows Server 2008 Active Directory"
"It is highly recommended that you enable the Always Wait For Network At Startup And Logon policy setting for all Windows XP and Windows Vista clients. Without this setting, by default, Windows XP and Windows Vista clients perform only background refreshes (of GPOs), meaning that a client might start up and a user might log on without receiving the latest policies from the domain."
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