July 30th, 2010
by Tristan Watkins
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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Performance, SharePoint, Virtualisation | 
2 Comments »
July 29th, 2010
by Tristan Watkins
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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Performance, SharePoint, Virtualisation | 3 Comments »
April 21st, 2010
by Tristan Watkins
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.
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Consultancy and Design, Networking, SharePoint, Virtualisation | 2 Comments »
March 12th, 2010
by Tristan Watkins
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 »
September 22nd, 2009
by Tristan Watkins
While I’ve been ripping off Virtual PC Guy I may as well stay at it. He has a great tip in his geeking out with WDS post suggesting that custom installation images can be built up in a virtual machine and captured from virtual rather than capturing the physical build. This allows for ongoing maintenance of the build without worrying about capturing the same image multiple times by taking a snapshot before SysPrep. It’s a great suggestion.
I’d actually geared myself up for this approach with the release of Windows Server 2008 R2 RTM, since Windows Deployment Services supports deployment of VHDs now, but I deflated myself a bit when I realised this was only a means of deploying for native boot from VHD rather than deploying a VHD to hardware as though it was a captured WIM. When I figured this out I went back to capturing physical images, and blindly overlooked this option. Nice one!
Virtualisation, Windows | No Comments »
March 14th, 2009
by Tristan Watkins
Or… why it’s important to disable Host Time Synchronisation on a domain controller.
A few months ago I reminded myself of a major gotcha when planning a virtual infrastructure. Assume that you run more than one domain in more than one forest and that trusts are in place to authenticate users across those forests. This could be a development/test/staging environment, or as will no doubt be more common in the coming years, it could be a virtualised infrastructure. read more »
Authentication, Virtualisation | No Comments »
