More than 50,000 views

Wow, what can I say? The YouTube videos that I have created how now surpassed a total of 50,000 views since I uploaded the first video. For those that have watched the videos, I thank you, for those who have provided feedback and comments, I also thank you but I would especially like to thank all those people who have chosen to actually subscribe to my channel (which you can find at http://www.youtube.com/saturnalliance). The next target that I would like to achieve with the videos is 100 subscribers. The current count is about 85 and rising.

Once again to anyone who has taken the time to view the videos I thank you very much. Roll on 100,000 views!

Post virtualization thoughts

I think that I have achieved my goal of reducing the number of machines on which my network runs. There is plenty of good about this:

less power consumption therefore a greener planet.
less hardware to maintain.
an ability to tune the RAM for each virtual to exactly what I want. Thus, if the web server is using 203MB then I can set up a virtual machine with say 233MB of RAM and use the remaining ( you’d normally have to put 256MB physically into a machine so I can scrimp 23MB for another virtual machine) somewhere else.
I get better utilization out of my hardware (ie things like the processor are now running at 50-60% instead of 5-6%).
I can ‘freeze’ each virtual PC rather than having to completely shut down the machine If I need to do maintenance.
I can copy/backup a virtual machine by simply copying files. Sure they are big files but now if I want to migrate to faster hardware I do a simply copy and then fire up the virtual PC on the bigger, better, faster machine – upgrade done.
I can quickly isolate a virtual PC from the network by removing the mapping of the virtual network card from the physical network card. This is great for maintenance tasks that may affect the network.

There are obviously some bad things as well:

Disk performance is slower since all machines share a single physical disk which gets thrashed more.
If I get a corrupt virtual PC image then I lose the whole virtual PC.
I have a single piece of hardware that can still fail and if it does ALL my virtual machines are out of action.
Virtual technology doesn’t give as good performance as physical machines.
Converting physical machines to virtual machines does take some fiddling.
Working with virtual PC files requires much greater transfer times since the files are GB’s in size. A simply cut and paste can take 10 minutes.

Some other comments I’d make on the process I took:

Sure I could have used Windows Virtual Server but Virtual PC is quicker and doesn’t require IIS. Also the virtual PC images are more easily moved. Not being an expert in Virtual Server I’m sure eventually that the virtual PC images will end up in Virtual server, my thinking is that if machines are already virtual PC’s then they are going to be easier to move to virtual server should I choose.
VMware conversion is something that needs more research, I have done it very successfully with workstation images using Shadowprotect but servers appear to be a different kettle of fish.
Virtual PC’s don’t like non-Windows environments. Shadowprotect boots in virtual PC but man is the network transfer slow.
If you are migrating a production environment spend the time and do it properly, don’t try and do it off the top of your head. You’ll make mistakes and the conversion process will take twice as long. Sit down and define the steps you can take and what the roll back is.

In conclusion, I have no doubt that virtualization is the way of the future, it has too many advantages to ignore. Virtualization can work in an SMB environment but there are still some considerations to take into account (eg speed). Now that everything is converted I’ll keep posting what I find as I’m sure I’m bound to uncover some more interesting lessons.

The transformation is almost complete – Part 3

This is the final part in the saga of my intention to migrate all my network equipment (servers and workstations) into virtual machines on a single piece of hardware.
In our last episode you may remember that I had ended up doing a swing migration of my SBS 2003 server onto a new machines. After a few hiccups I had it all working. Now the final task was to migrate the stand alone ISA 2004 server I use as a firewall device.
ISA 2004
Ok, so this machine does nothing except host ISA 2004 as a firewall and web proxy. It only has a small disk and very few apps installed. My concern was because it has two network cards that there might be issues (and I was right).
So, the first attempt was again to do a Storagecraft image of the original machine and then simply do a restore to a new clean Microsoft Virtual PC (no more attempts to migrate to Vmware, two strikes were enough to convince me that I needed to do more research to understand the process). After imaging the server I restore into a Virtual PC and Windows booted but I started having all kinds of issues with ISA 2004. My guess is that this stemmed from changing both network cards in the machine simultaneously. Now I could have sat down and tried to resolve things but since this was a firewall machine and I’d never be completely sure whether I had fixed everything, I decided that it would be better (and quicker) to rebuild a new machine from scratch. Besides, there wasn’t much software to install and once I had ISA 2004 running I “should” be able to simply import the rules from the old ISA box straight into the new box (in theory).
After installing Windows Server and then ISA 2004 I exported the firewall rules from the old server and attempted to import them into the new server. On attempting this I was greeted with the following :

Hmmm, not good, catastrophic failure eh? Thinking, thinking, thinking. Bing! Ah ha, the new ISA 2004 server doesn’t have ISA 2004 Service Pack 3 installed. Installed that and now the import works! Yeah.
Problem was that ISA still wasn’t working correctly. When I looked at the rules I saw that they still referred to the old listener, so I changed that, still no go. I cleaned up the rules, removing what I didn’t need. Still no go. I checked the configuration and network cards. Still wouldn’t work. When all else fails try a reboot. Guess what? It worked after that. So even if you make changes to ISA 2004 you may still need to reboot for them to take effect.
Ahhhhh, finally done. All the machines are now virtualized and I can dispose of all the old hardware. It had taken a long while and there were plenty more bumps in the road that I expected but I had managed to do what I had set out to achieve.
In my next post I’ll summarize what I found along the way with some more thinking about the whole virtualization concept as I think it has particular relevance in the SMB market. For the record I’ve gone from 6 different pieces of hardware into a single piece. If that doesn’t cut my electricity bill I don’t know what will!

The transformation is almost complete – Part 2

This is the second part of my story of attempting to migrate all my machines (servers and workstations) into virtual machines actually housed on one physical piece of hardware (you know to stop global warming and save the whales man).

If you can remember our last episode I had managed to finally migrate my web server into Microsoft Virtual PC using Shadowprotect, that wasn’t exactly the way that I’d planned to do it but at least it was done and I had removed one piece of hardware from my network. Next on the agenda was my SBS server.

SBS Server

So having failed with my initial attempt to convert to a virtual machines using Storagecraft and VMware I decided to try again, since this time I didn’t have dynamic disks on my SBS server. So I imaged the SBS server and attempted to convert it in Vmware. Unfortunately, once again the conversion failed with some obscure error. Damm, not again. Ok, abandon the VMware option, roll on Virtual PC. So I started to do a Storagecraft hardware independent restore of my SBS image to a clean Virtual PC. Problem was it was excruciatingly slow, too slow for me. So scratch that idea since I had a lot of data on my SBS box.

At this point I was beginning to question the whole migration process, it was worse than having teeth pulled. Time to take a deep breath and have a think about this for a while. After some peppermint tea and a nice lie down I deiced that perhaps the best method was to migrate my SBS 2003 installation to SBS 2003 R2. Sorry not migrate but S.W.I.N.G. using Jeff Middleton’s method. That would keep the active directory but I’d get a nice new cleanly upgraded server. Yeah baby, let’s do it.

So Jeff’s method is basically to introduce a temporary domain controller into your existing domain and replicate the existing active directory to that machine. You then detach it from the production network and build a new network around this copied active directory. There are a few critical steps with Jeff’s migration, firstly like turning off the Windows 2003 firewall (forgot about that the first time since it re-enables itself on a reboot – bugger) and secondly to ensure that during the migration you make the domain control a global catalogue server (forgot that the second time – again, bugger). Both of these oversights meant that I had to go back and do the swing migration again (why am I so stupid? I should have really concentrated on what I was doing rather than just doing it off the cuff, which you always pay the price for!).

Finally, I had a good copy of my active directory and I installed SBS 2003 R2 onto the virtual machine. Typically you know the swing migration has had a problem during replication if the Exchange Server component of SBS won’t install. At last, a clean SBS box. I copied over the data that I wanted and the Exchange mail stores (which took a little while) but the great thing is that with the swing migration the Exchange databases simply load. After a little more fiddling (adding customized ISA 2004 rules, installing anti-virus and tweaking Exchange to keep the spammers out) I was done – phew.

Once again, one of the biggest advantage of virtual machines is the ability to switch the network cards in and out of the real network. In this way I could work on my migrated SBS server with it clashing the existing production server. When I was ready I simply shut down the production SBS server and brought the virtual SBS server up in its place (with the virtual network cards actually connect to the real network). Another big advantage of virtual machines is the ability to adjust the amount of memory that each server uses. So after a while I actually adjusted the RAM used by both migrated servers down to give me the ability to host more virtual PC’s on this one piece of hardware.

Other benefits of ‘swinging’ on to a new SBS server? Bye, bye CRM 1.2. Yeah!! Why? Because it wouldn’t uninstall. The ability to create a bigger boot partition (to handle those upcoming Windows Server 2003 service packs – really had to scramble to get SP2 on my machine). The opportunity to remove all the other crap that I had accumulated on my server over the years from testing this and that. Now I have a simple but extremely functional SBS server.

Two servers down, maybe this will work after all! Tune in to the next episode to get the the low down on my migration of a stand alone ISA 2004 box.

The transformation is almost complete – Part 1

Over the Christmas / New Year period I planned to undertake the biggest change to my network structure so far. I decided that I wanted to reduce the total amount of hardware in my shop by using virtualization technology. This basically meant migrating 5 physical machines (4 servers and 1 workstation) onto a single piece of hardware. As they say we have the technology to build it but here is my story of the experience.

Prior

Ok, so the first thing I needed was decent machine to host all these virtual machines on and one with plenty of RAM. So I started with a name brand server, RAID 5 with 4GB of RAM. I install Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Server to allow access to RAM above 4GB (which I don’t have initially but I do want to be able to scale up to more virtual machines should I want to). After installing Windows, applying updates and installing the suppliers monitoring software I was ready to do my first my migration.

Now, the plan was to make this as simple as possible and from what I could tell the easiest way was to use Storagecraft Shadowprotect to take an image of the whole server and then simply convert this image into a VMware machine, which it does support. So, in theory, image, convert, run, nothing could be simpler eh? Here’s what actually happened next.

Stage 1 – Web Server

After imaging the server using Shadowprotect I attempted to convert the image into VMware. Half way through the process I received an error about a disk driver (scsiport.sys) but I chose to continue thinking that I could deal with this afterwards. Problem was a little further down the conversion process the whole thing crapped out. Bugger, what’s the issue? A little bit of investigation pointed to the fact that I had (stupidly) converted the basic disks to dynamic disks on the original server. Why the hell did I do that all those years ago? Now sure, I could “unconvert” them but I already had an image so I thought I’d try option two. You know onwards and upwards (to infinity and beyond is the catch cry isn’t it?).

Option two was to do a hardware independent restore using Storagecraft. So I booted the Storagecraft CD in a clean VMware machine and had issues. Damm. Not being a real Vmware expert I decided it was time for option three – Microsoft Virtual PC 2007, as my failures were beginning to REALLY PISS ME OFF. Storagecraft booted fine in Virtual PC and I did a TCP/IP mapping to my saved server image and commenced the restore. Lesson 1 – Storagecraft restores to Virtual PC are slow! But they do work.

So with the image restored to a new Virtual PC I rebooted the Virtual PC expecting everything to work just fine – WRONG. For starters, for some reason, all the drives were outta whack (ie C: was D: and D: was C: and so on). so the system booted but I couldn’t even run Computer Manager in Administrative tools to restore the correct drives letters (the server had a C: which held Windows and D: that held everything else). Damm. After some more fiddling around with the boot record I got C: drive in the right place, after which I could run Computer Manager and get D: correctly assigned.

Finally, the web server was back in operation with no major errors in the logs. (Ahhh, That’s better). So I now shut down the actual web server and bring the new virtual web server on line and it works! One of the really good things about virtual technology is that you can redirect the network cards to actual or virtual network cards. Thus, I could work on the web server with the same IP address as the original one but with the virtual network card not actually connected to the real network. When I was ready, all I did was shutdown the real server and change the virtual PC’s network card to connect to the actual physical network card so it can now be seen on the network.

As I basked in glow of the first “successful” migration I mulled over the challenge of the next migration, my SBS server. Surely, that won’t take as long as now I know what to look for and this server DOESN”T have dynamic disks!

As they say boys and girls, be sure to stay tuned to the next episode to see what actually happened.

You’re watching

We’re happy to announce a couple of milestones for our YouTube videos. Firstly, our total views has now exceed 40,000! Wow, that means that 40,000 people have looked at what we have placed online. Secondly, our most popular video, about getting started with Microsoft Virtual PC, has now been viewed over 6,000 times. Remarkable.

If you have watched our videos then we thank you for taking the time to view our content. As always we encourage people to send us feedback (good and bad) on our offerings. Regular viewers will be happy to know that we have recently purchased Camtasia Studio Version 5 and all our new videos will be using this fantastic product. At the moment we are just working through the product tutorials so we understand how to get the most from the product. With all the new features of Camtasia we hope to make what we present much slicker and more professional.

A recent comment on one of the videos raised an interesting point. We were asked why we solicit for donations in our recent videos. The answer is that these videos are not generally done as part of our normal business, they are done we get a few spare moments. Unfortunately, these days we have to put priority on work that provides us with revenue that pays the bills. If we were to get some revenue from these videos (no matter how small) then we could spend more time developing more videos, improving the number and content of what we provide. So if you like what you see and want to see more then we would appreciate a donation via http://donation.saturnalliance.com.au and help us. It doesn’t have to be much, even a few bucks does help.

We also have be toying with the idea of sponsorship on our videos, again to raise some capital to improve our offerings. If you know a business that may be interested in sponsoring one of our productions please contact me (Robert Crane – director@ciaops.com).

The bottom line is that the videos we do will continue to be produced and placed online for free but they will continue to be done as they have been, in an ad hoc manner, when we have time. However, to everyone who has taken the time to view our videos, provide comments, ratings and feedback we thank you very much and hope that you’ll keep watching.

‘Twas the night before Christmas

Well, not quite, but soon boys and girls. Here’s a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to everyone out there and especially all those who read my blog (hi Mom). Seriously though, if you do read this blog on a regular or even semi-regular basis I’d like to hear from you when you get a chance. It doesn’t have to be anything flash, just a simple “Hi” would suffice. If you do want to go into more detail about the good, the bad and the ugly of what I create, not only here but generally (online videos, documents, etc), then I’d love to hear your feedback. You never know if what you are doing is helping people so feedback (good and bad) is appreciated. So send your abuse to director@ciaops.com and if there is more good than bad feedback then I suppose I’ll keep posting.

Over the holidays I’ll hopefully be making some changes to Supportweb to improve its performance and reliability but news on that after I have successfully completed what I am planning to do (so I don’t end up with egg on my face when it doesn’t work). You’ll now also notice that I’ve added a feed from Goodreads on the blog page to show you the books in my library to give you a better idea of where I accumulate all this useless information from. I like the idea behind the site and how it harnesses the power of the Internet to build a community. If you read a lot of books then I recommend you take a look and link up with my profile so I can see what people who read this blog read.

Again, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all, have a safe holiday and keep tuned for more updates.

Thanks
Robert Crane
director@ciaops.com

It’s all about the information

As anyone who has read the E-Myth by Michael Gerber will tell you the value of any business is not what the owner believes it to be worth but what someone else would pay for it. In this respect it is important that as much of the information about a business and how it does business is documented in a meaningful way.

I believe that is where a tool like Sharepoint can really assist since it is not only flexible and easy to use but it is also free. Read my recent thinking on the matter in the following document, which can also be found in the Supportweb Document Libraries.