Recently we’ve been considering a hardware refresh for our developer/consultant/architect laptop build (on Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard with Hyper-V). After a fair amount of deliberation we decided to pilot a new model but stumbled massively at the first hurdle: when we enabled the Hyper-V role on a new Dell Latitude E6410 we got a blue screen. Further testing revealed that the graphics driver was at fault and the SVGA driver worked fine. However, the SVGA driver only has single monitor support. Back to the drawing board.
July 30th, 2010
Optimising the SharePoint 2010 IW Demo VM Part 2
Continuing on from Part 1, in this post I’ll discuss the Microsoft 2010 Information Worker Demo Exchange VM, the SahrePoint VM’s event logs and potential future improvements to the environment.
Exchange Server Reconfiguration
Tidying up the Exchange server is a much more straight-forward process. In fact, all of the changes that I made are network orientated per the network changes from the first post, so if you are not adding a second NIC or a second fixed IP address on the original internal NIC, these steps aren’t necessary.
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July 29th, 2010
Optimising the SharePoint 2010 IW Demo VM Part 1
Around the time that Microsoft released the public beta of SharePoint 2010 they also released a demonstration virtual machine, known as the 2010 Information Worker Virtual Machine, which was updated to RTM in mid-June. This is a fantastic resource for demonstrating SharePoint 2010. The content and demonstration scenarios (including walk-throughs) represent a huge investment from Microsoft and it would be foolish not to at least evaluate these assets. Personally, I think it’s silly to reinvent this wheel.
Now the public beta trial is expiring and people are moving to the RTM build. It appears to be much improved, in that more of the product works in this version and a few niggles have been fixed now. However, it’s widely acknowledged that the resource requirements for this virtual machine are gargantuan due to the breadth of what it offers.
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July 6th, 2010
Dynamic Memory for Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1
I’ve just finished watching Virtual PC Guy’s TechEd video on the forthcoming Dynamic Memory update for Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1. The beta release of the service pack is due in July. The video is fairly lengthy, at around 80 minutes, but is well worth a watch if you’re interested and find the time. If not, here’s a round-up: read more »
May 28th, 2010
Recovering from Hyper-V Virtual Machine corruption
I was recently working with a Hyper-V VM that had a large branch of snapshots that I wanted to clean up, in order to conserve disk space. This was a SharePoint 2010 development VM which I’d configured specifically for a project, so I didn’t need all of the earlier snapshots. The environment has two VMs (one domain controller, everything else on the other), so I deleted all of the snapshots that I needed to get rid of on the first VM, one-by-one. From previous experience I knew that I could delete multiple snapshots before the initial merge operation completed. Hyper-V creates a queue of the merge operations that need to complete before the virtual machine can be restarted again. I left myself with only the latest snapshot and moved on to the second virtual machine to do the same. At this point I got a little too clever and started deleting the second snapshot before the first snapshot deletion was queued. It usually only takes a few seconds to complete but I jumped the gun and Hyper-V Manager threw two errors (4096 and 16410) regarding Virtual Machine file access when I tried to delete the second snapshot.
April 21st, 2010
Publishing a network-isolated virtual machine with RemoteApp
To understand the development environment design choices that this article pertains to, it may be worth glancing at the design section of my SharePoint development series before diving in, if you haven’t already followed those posts.
Cloning isolated VMs vs. scripted installation
One of the challenges we’ve always faced with SharePoint development has been the tension between cloning actually identical environments versus automating the deployment across distinct environments (or worse, repeating the installation manually). In the first case we save time by eliminating reconfiguration and this ensures a consistent experience for each user. This is particularly beneficial for software development. These benefits can also be obtained by scripting installation/configuration/deployment but there’s a considerable overhead associated with developing and testing those scripts. As SharePoint 2010 is still quite new and we’ve been working on projects for some time now, we didn’t have the luxury of waiting for those refinements and we needed to take advantage of these efficiencies as we had done with SharePoint 2007 projects.
Consultancy and Design, Networking, SharePoint, Virtualisation | 
2 Comments »
March 29th, 2010
SharePoint 2010 (not) in a Workgroup
With SharePoint 2010 RTM looming, I’ve stumbled across an architectural change that may surprise some people – namely, that SharePoint 2010 no longer supports multiple server farms without a domain infrastructure. In SharePoint 2007 it was possible to create SharePoint farms in a Workgroup, so long as all of the user accounts for the services and application pool identities were named the same and had the same password. You could even manage users with an Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services (AD LDS) or Active Directory Application Mode (ADAM) LDAP directory (albeit with some fairly limiting restrictions). However, it was possible to use these farms for testing or when an Active Directory infrastructure was undesirable (as some people see it in a DMZ). Now, it is still possible to do a Simple installation on a single server without full domain services, but it is no longer supported on multiple servers, and the Simple installation comes with its own planning considerations, to which I’ll return in a bit. First, there’s another wrinkle regarding the single server Complete installation.
Consultancy and Design, SharePoint, Virtualisation, Windows | 11 Comments »
March 12th, 2010
MAC duplication issues with captured VMs and WDS
I’ve previously reported problems with MAC duplication on Hyper-V host external network connections on Windows Server 2008 R2, which I’ve never fully resolved, although we have been successfully working around the issue as detailed in the first link above.
A couple of weeks ago I was working simultaneously on my Windows Server 2008 R2 laptop with Hyper-V (the same laptop build that’s been previously mentioned) and a Windows 7 x64 build that I was using for testing, when I noticed severe but intermittent network problems on both machines. After a fair amount of head scratching, I noticed that the two laptops had duplicated MAC addresses. Blatantly that shouldn’t happen, as the whole point of a MAC address is to provide uniqueness. The most perplexing issue was that the addresses conflicted across two different operating systems. However, it happened. Both wired adapters on the two machines had the MAC address 00-21-9B-DC-8E-0B. I uninstalled the wired adapter on the Windows 7 machine and scanned for new hardware. When the device reinstalled the problem went away. read more »
Hardware, IT Management, Networking, Virtualisation, Windows | No Comments »
December 1st, 2009
Building a SharePoint 2007/2010 development environment – Part VI: Issues and Results
In the first five parts of this series I covered the project objectives and the system design, then turned my attention to the Hyper-V host image build, automated deployment and the guest virtual machine build. In this post I review some of the questions and issues we’ve encountered after a few months of working this way and some overall reflections on the approach. read more »
Client applications, Consultancy and Design, Networking, Performance, SharePoint, Virtualisation, Windows | 1 Comment »
November 27th, 2009
Building a SharePoint 2007/2010 development environment – Part V: Guest Build
In the first four parts of this series I covered the project objectives and the system design, then turned my attention to the Hyper-V host image build and automated deployment. In this post I describe a SharePoint 2007 virtual machine build.
Where’s the SharePoint 2010 build?
In short, we’re working on it. I’ve produced a new SharePoint 2010 beta virtual machine for this environment but we’re not yet ready to publish build guidance. Stay tuned. Additionally… read more »
Consultancy and Design, SharePoint, Virtualisation, Windows | No Comments »