Tag: Windows

Restoring Exchange 2003 video

In celebration of reaching 50,000 views of the YouTube videos I have created and uploaded a new video (number 39) that shows the basics of Exchange 2003 restoration. Firstly, you’ll see how to create a ‘dial-tone’ Exchange database, which is basically an empty mail database that allows Exchange to run and allows users to get on with sending and receiving emails. The video also covers how to a complete restoration of Exchange server.

You can view the video by clicking here or going to the Videos – Links section of the Supportweb web site.

When you watch the video you’ll probably notice more zooming and panning shots. I think that I now understand how to do all this now but probably need some more time to get it smooth but overall it should be a little easier to follow exactly what I’m showing. The new version of Camtasia certainly has some great features and hopefully I’ll soon be able to implement the complete range to bring you a more professional output. I have also “optimised” this video for 320×200 which apparently is what displays best in YouTube. I’ll  have to go back and do some comparisons to know for sure.

Another interesting issue is that it is becoming harder and harder to get the videos into the the YouTube restriction of only 10 minutes. I am finding that I have to cut more and more out (which is easy with Camtasia admittedly) but if the result seems a little choppy that is why. However, hopefully I think the overall quality is improving but as always I’m open to feedback on how to improve what I create.

So sit back and enjoy video 39.

One virtualization too many

Being so chuffed at converting all my physical machines to virtual machines I decided that maybe it was time to look at Virtual Server 2005 R2 as an option.

The good thing about Virtual Server 2005 is that it can use Virtual PC images directly which saves any messy conversions. The bad things are one – it has to go onto a Windows Server box (Virtual PC can go on Windows XP or Server) and it also needs IIS for its management console. It certainly does provide some additional flexibility but to my way of thinking makes things more complicated that I really wanted but hey I’ll give it a go.

So I copied the existing virtual PC hard disk across from the original XP host machine, configured a new virtual PC in Virtual Server 2005 and bang the image was up and running. Wow, that was easy I thought. Maybe Virtual Server is the way to go? Everything seemed to be going along swimmingly until I began to notice a number of unexpected reboots of the newly created virtual PC. Then I started to get errors about disk corruptions and messages saying the virtual PC hard disk was locked and therefore the virtual PC wouldn’t start.

Hmmm…what is the problem here? Thinking, thinking. Ah ha, noticed that most of the issues seemed to happen at the top of the hour. This was also was the time that our Shadowprotect was running creating image backups of our host machine hard disk. So it appears that Virtual Server 2005 machines don’t like imaging software like Shadowprotect. My guess would be that this is because the virtual PC hosted by Virtual Server 2005 has no idea that an image is being taken and doesn’t invoke Volume Shadow Copy. Thus the virtual server hard disk (apart from being HUGE) doesn’t get ‘frozen’ by VSS and thus issues arise. Just my guess mind you.

So in the end I shut down the Virtual Server 2005 image, copied the virtual PC hard disk back to the original XP machine, fired up Virtual PC on the original XP Machine and then launched the original virtual PC (with the updated virtual hard disk – no other changes made). Guess what? It just powered up without any issues! Clearly another benefit of using Microsoft virtual technology (ie virtual hard disk inter-changeability).

So in my experience it appears that if you have Shadowprotect (or any other imaging disk software for that matter I suspect) and you are running virtual machines (again my guess is you’ll see this whether you use Virtual PC, Virtual Server or VMWare) then you are going to have problems, that may lead to all sorts of virtual PC reboots and possible disk corruption. As I said I am not exactly sure of the specific cause but I am in the process of speaking to Storagecraft (the makers of Shadowprotect) about the issues.

You have been warned.

I found another 512MB in my HP server

Every time I install a HP with SBS I always install 4GB of RAM. Why? Well, simply put this is the limit of SBS 2003 (since it run Windows Server 2003 Standard edition) and memory is so cheap these days. In some systems (SBS Standard) sure it is probably an overkill but you never know, so 4GB it is. Problem is with HP servers you never get access to the whole 4GB of RAM. Usually about 512MB goes missing.

Missing where you ask? Well, I understood that it has to do with the motherboard and memory reserved for PCX controllers (and what not) that is never really used anyway so it just get wasted. I always accepted that as fact since I generally didn’t have much time to muck about on clients systems. However, after recently virtualizing all my server onto a single HP server with exactly 4GB of RAM I decided that I wanted to know where that lost memory actually went to, since the more RAM I have on my server the more RAM I can give my virtual machines.

So after doing some poking around I found the following link that talks about the missing memory. Now, it appears to access the memory above 4GB of RAM in Windows systems that support it (ie Windows Server Enterprise and Datacenter) you need to add the /PAE switch to the boot.ini. What does the /PAE switch do? Well, here’s a link from Microsoft that explains the function of the /PAE option.

So, because my HP server is running Windows 2003 Enterprise and has exactly 4GB of RAM I decided I had nothing to lose by giving it a go. Guess what? After the reboot I now had exactly 4GB of RAM! That’s at least 512MB more than what I had prior to adding the /PAE switch.

Hmmm…upon reading the HP link a little closer and doing some more poking about it appears that the /PAE option maybe valid on HP systems with exactly 4GB of RAM even if they are running Windows 2003 Server Standard (ie SBS 2003). Now, not having a 4GB SBS 2003 HP server to test this on I need to find a (non-production) system that I can test this on to see if it does in fact give back the 512MB consumed on SBS 2003 systems with 4GB of RAM installed.

So, if you have a HP server running SBS 2003 with exactly 4GB of RAM it may be worthwhile adding the /PAE switch to the boot.ini to see if you recover the “lost” 512MB of RAM. It shouldn’t work on SBS 2003 but it may do because it has something to do with HP machines specifically. Like I said, I haven’t actually tried this on a HP system running SBS but it certainly worked on a HP server running Windows Enterprise Server.

If someone out there wants to test the /PAE switch and let me know if it does recover the RAM I’d be grateful but in the meantime I’ll just have to bide my time until we get a new SBS order so I can test it for myself.

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.