Dario IT Solutions Blog

A bit of an Israeli pride..

Core Configurator 2.0 is now available to download from: http://coreconfig.codeplex.com/

If you are unfamiliar with this tool – it is a graphical tool that allows you to configure a whole bunch of system settings on a Windows Server Core installation:

Core Configuration tasks include:

• Product Licensing
• Networking Features
• DCPromo Tool
• ISCSI Settings
• Server Roles and Features
• User and Group Permissions
• Share Creation and Deletion
• Dynamic Firewall settings
• Display | Screensaver Settings
• Add & Remove Drivers
• Proxy settings
• Windows Updates (Including WSUS)
• Multipath I/O
• Hyper-V including virtual machine thumbnails
• JoinDomain and Computer rename
• Add/remove programs
• Services
• WinRM
• Complete logging of all commands executed

Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV) is a new feature that was introduced in Windows 2008 R2.

If you want to read more about it, how it works, and how you can enable it. There is a lot of material out there that you can refer to:

• Windows 2008 R2 NLB & Failover Clustering
• http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd759255.aspx
• http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd630633(WS.10).aspx
• http://blogs.msdn.com/clustering/archive/2009/03/02/9453288.aspx
• http://blogs.msdn.com/clustering/archive/2009/02/19/9433146.aspx

Well, after you’ve setup your cluster, enabled CSV, and added clustered disks to CSV, it is now time to copy your VHD files to those CSV disk. The big question is, which cluster node should you perform this operation on?

We’ll, to make a long story short – Copy it to the node that owns the CSV disk!

The reason this is important is that if you are running the copy on the coordinator node (the node which owns the CSV volume of interest), the writes are all local writes. If you are running the copy on any other node, the writes are actually redirected over the network (because they are extending writes to the file) and not done directly to the volume.

Hope this will save you some much needed time

Hi guys,

It was very nice meeting you all yesterday at the re-birth of the Infrastructure & Management User Group.

Below is the presentation for the main subject we talked about – “Windows 2008 R2 Overview”.

We will continue next month, on December 17th with the subject “Active Directory improvements in Windows 2008 R2”.

In the meantime, share your thoughts and interesting finds at the group site – http://www.linkedin.com/groupRegistration?gid=2389097

Have a great weekend and take care!

I know its a bit late, but here is the presentation I gave on November 3rd at the Microsoft convention – Let’s Talk Business-Tech that was held at Tel Aviv.

During the presentation, my co-presenter Ronen Gabay and myself talked about the new features of Failover Clustering in Windows 2008 R2.

We talked about Geo-Clusters, PowerShell 2.0 extensive support, Cluster Shared Volumes and mainly about how simple it is to create and manage complex cluster (everyone can do it! believe me! ).

We finished the presentation with a nice demo of RDS 7.0 media enhancement when we showed a 1080P HD movie (Terminators 2 Trailer) over RDP 7.0 while doing a Live Migration of the RDS Session Host virtual server that we RDPed into.. very nice!

What do you think, will we start seeing more clusters from now on? or something is still missing?

I’ll love to get your input.

I wanted to thank the large number of attendees at our open house yesterday. It was a real pleasure for us to spend a morning with you, talk a little about technology but more importantly to laugh and exchange views! the mood was up and we really enjoyed it

I would also like to thank the talented Kobi Akiva, Asaf Nakash & Udi Leutashi for their presentations, the feedback they got from the audience was simply great.

One last thank to Gur Proper, Microsoft Israel’s Windows Server Marketing Manager for organizing this whole event!

And lastly, due to the fact the event registration closed within 2 days and a lot of people were not able to attend, we will held another Open House on October 29th. we will be happy to see any of you that couldn’t attend yesterday.

Hi guys,

We’ve uploaded all the presentations that will be delivered at the Windows 2008 R2 Open House held on September 23th 2009 at Microsoft Israel.

These sessions will focus on the most existing Windows 2008 R2 features and new capabilities.

Feel free to contact any of us to get more details. Contact information of all presenters is located in the presentations below.

Microsoft announced that the process for Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2 has reaced the RTM milestone.

check out these videos:

1. Steven Sinofsky, President of the Windows Division, discusses more about RTM of Windows 7 including a short video of the RTM sign-off process.

2. inside peek from Microsoft annual sales kick-off event in Atlanta. Steven Sinofsky joined Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on stage to announce the RTM of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. There’s even a clip of Steve Ballmer signing the gold RTM DVDs.

Read more on the windows 2008 team blog: http://blogs.technet.com/windowsserver/archive/2009/07/22/windows-server-2008-r2-rtm.aspx

Read more on the windows 7 blog:

http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/windows7/archive/2009/07/22/windows-7-has-been-released-to-manufacturing.aspx

Exchange 2007 is supported on Windows 2008 SP2. This will be also true for the upcoming Exchange 2007 SP2, when it releases.

Hardware ecosystem support and enhancements

• SP2 adds support for the 64-bit central processing unit (CPU) from VIA Technologies, which adds the ID and vendor strings for the new VIA 64-bit CPU.
• SP2 integrates the Windows Vista Feature Pack for Wireless, which contains support for Bluetooth v2.1 and Windows Connect Now (WCN) Wi-Fi Configuration. Bluetooth v2.1 is the most recent specification for Bluetooth wireless technology.
• SP2 improves performance for Wi-Fi connections after resuming from sleep mode.
• SP2 includes updates to the RSS feeds sidebar for improved performance and responsiveness.
• SP2 includes ability to record data to Blu-Ray Disc media.

Operating system experience updates

• SP2 includes Windows Search 4.0, which builds on Microsoft’s search technology with improved indexing and search relevance. It also helps find and preview documents, e-mail (including signed e-mail messages), music files, photos, and other items on the computer. The search engine in Windows Search 4.0 is a Microsoft Windows® service that is also used by programs such as Microsoft Office Outlook® 2007 and Microsoft Office OneNote® 2007. Autotuning Diagnostics in SP2 now interprets current network conditions when implementing Windows scaling. This feature includes full netsh support.
• SP2 improves Windows Media Center (WMC) in the area of content protection for TV.
• SP2 removes the limit of 10 half open outbound TCP connections. By default, SP2 has no limit on the number of half open outbound TCP connections.

Enterprise improvements

• SP2 provides the Hyper-V virtualization environment as a fully integrated feature of Windows Server 2008, including one free instance with Windows Server 2008 Standard, four free instances with Windows Server 2008 Enterprise and an unlimited number of free instances with Windows Server 2008 Datacenter.
• SP2 increases the authentication options for WebDAV redirector, enabling Microsoft Office users greater flexibility when authenticating custom applications using the WebDAV redirector.
• SP2 provides an improved power management (both on the server and the desktop), which includes the ability to manage these settings via Group Policy.
• SP2 improves backwards compatibility for Terminal Server license keys. Windows Server 2008 changed the licensing key from 512 bytes to 2,048 bytes which caused clients using older Terminal Server versions to fail. SP2 allows legacy license keys on Citrix applications to work with Windows Server 2008 Terminal Server.

Setup and deployment improvements

The SP2 standalone installer:

• Provides a single installer for both Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008.
• Includes the ability to detect an incompatible driver and either block service pack installation or warn users of any potential loss of functionality.
• Provides better error handling and descriptive error messages where possible.
• Improves manageability through logging in the system event log.
• Provides a secure install experience.
• Includes the ability to service the installer post release.

SP2 also includes a Service Pack Clean-up tool (Compcln.exe) which helps recover the hard disk space by permanently deleting previous versions of files (RTM and SP1) that are being serviced by SP2. The Service Pack Clean up tool can also be run offline while creating slipstream images to reduce the size of the image.

SP2 Download is available here:

x86

x64

Thanks to Tonino Bruno for this info.

Hi guys,

A couple of important facts we learn from our DPM 2007 SP1 implementations:

if you are pushing an agent to a remote Windows 2008 machine that has its FW enabled, add the following path to the firewall outbound rules – “C:\Windows\Microsoft Data Protection Manager\DPM\Agents\AC\2.0.5820.0\dpmac.exe” so that the service that installs the DPM agent can communicate with the DPM server.

When configuring VSS backup for Virtual Machines running on Hyper-V, please install the following updates:

1. An update is available for Windows Server 2008-based computers to address issues with backing up and restoring Hyper-V virtual machines
2. Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V VSS writer is not used during a backup job because of corrupted or invalid virtual machine configuration files

Good luck!

Windows 2008 R2 will feature some major DFS improvements, following is an explanation of them:

1. Support for Windows Failover Clusters

In Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Failover clusters can be configured to be part of a replication group. Windows Failover clustering technology enables administrators to configure services and applications to be highly available.

Busy hub servers located in the datacenter that replicate with many branch office servers are perfect candidates for clustered DFS Replication. These servers are critical to the replication infrastructure and administrators expect high availability from these servers. A failure (hardware/software) on such crucial servers has the potential to bring all replication activity to a standstill.

2. Read-only Replicated Folders

Often, customers use the DFS Replication service to publish data from a central server out to many branch office servers. A typical characteristic of this data is that it is created/modified at one location (typically the hub/datacenter server) and changes aren’t expected to occur on any of the other member servers. Usually, administrators configure strict ACLs for the replicated data to ensure that changes aren’t made by end-users in branch offices.

Configuring and maintaining strict ACLs to block accidental modifications or recovering data that has been accidentally deleted entail high administrative overheads. A new feature in Windows Server 2008 R2 called ‘Read-only replicated folders’, offers an easy to manage solution to this problem.

In essence, on a read-only replica:

• Local modifications are blocked by the DFS Replication service. Changes to files/folders including creation, deletion, modification of attributes/permissions etc. are not possible. Semantically, the read-only replicated folder mimics a read-only share.

• Changes from members hosting read-write copies are replicated in. The DFS Replication service replicates in changes from other replication partners that host read-write enabled copies of the replicated folder. This ensures that the data remains up to date on the read-only replica.

3. SYSVOL on Read-only Domain Controllers

Windows Server 2008 introduced support in the DFS Replication service for Read-only Domain Controllers (RODC).

Building on this implementation, in Windows Server 2008 R2 the concept of read-only replicated folders has been extended to the SYSVOL replicated folder. This means that on read-only domain controllers running Windows Server 2008 R2 and using the DFS Replication service to synchronize the SYSVOL share, the SYSVOL share is configured as a read-only replicated folder. Therefore, there is a change in the end-user experience for the SYSVOL share exposed by a Windows Server 2008 R2 domain controller.

On Windows Server 2008 based RODC: Changes can be made to the contents of the SYSVOL share on RODCs. However, the DFS Replication service monitors these changes and then asynchronously overwrites these changes with updates from a writable domain controller. Therefore, any changes made on a Windows Server 2008 RODC will be visible for a short duration, until they are reverted by the DFS Replication service.

On Windows Server 2008 R2 based RODC: Changes cannot be made to the contents of the SYSVOL share on RODCs. Any attempts to make such modifications will encounter an ACCESS DENIED error. Therefore, the SYSVOL share on such RODCs looks like a read-only share.

4. Diagnostics Improvements

Windows Server 2008 R2 also features a set of powerful enhancements to the diagnostics capabilities of the DFS Replication service. These are in the form of new command line options to the dfsrdiag.exe command line diagnostics tool.

Dfsrdiag.exe ReplState : This command line switch provides an insight into the current working state of the DFS Replication service. This command initiates a snapshot of the internal state of the service and thereby gathers a list of the updates that are currently being processed (downloaded from or served out to replication partners) by the service.

Using this command line switch, an administrator can retrieve a snapshot of the status of replication activity across all connections on a given DFS Replication member server.

Dfsrdiag.exe IdRecord: The DFS Replication service maintains a record for each file and folder in the replicated folder in its database. These are known as ID records. This command line switch can be used to display the ID record information maintained by the DFS Replication service corresponding to a particular file/folder in its database. The ID record also contains information such as version vectors of the file/folder, timestamps etc.

Using this command line switch, an administrator can dump the ID record corresponding to a file/folder on each individual replication member server. In order to check whether a particular update has replicated to the member servers in the replication group, the version information in the ID records on these members can be compared.

Dfsrdiag.exe FileHash: This command line switch computes and displays the file hash generated by the DFS Replication service for a particular file. The file hash can be used to compare two files and determine whether they are similar.

For instance, while pre-seeding the contents of a newly added replicated folder, it is often required to verify whether the file being pre-seeded is identical (attributes, timestamps, ACLs etc.) to that on the authoritative copy being used as the source for pre-seeding. By comparing the file hash generated by this command line option for two files, it is possible to verify if the files are identical. If the data being pre-seeded is identical to that contained on the source server, the DFS Replication service will complete initial sync much faster. This is because it does not need to download the file data and merely downloads metadata.