May 18th, 2011
by Tristan Watkins
A while back, I posted an article on building a SharePoint development environment in Hyper-V, which included a part on automating deployment of the host machine. Although we’ve now moved to VMware Workstation, we still use this approach for automating deployment of our standard Windows 7 builds, and this commentary is generally relevant to any Windows Deployment Services (WDS) deployment.
When I learned WDS and the Windows Automated Installation Kit (which were both quite new in Windows Server 2008 R2 at the time), I contented myself with getting ~90% of the way to a fully-automated build, as the additional effort to get from 90 to 100% (mostly re: drivers) wouldn’t have paid enough immediate dividends and we needed to start capitalising on some of the other wins of our new environment. As is often the case, we never got back to that remaining 10%, but it’s become more of an issue in recent months, as we’ve added a few Dell Latitude E6410 and Lenovo W520 laptops – both of which had network drivers that the Windows 7/Windows Server 2008 R2 boot images didn’t recognise. Unfortunately the TechNet guidance on adding drivers to boot images is unclear (to me anyway), so I’m contributing this quick post to attempt to clarify the problem that we had and the simple step-by-step solution.
Hardware, IT Management, Networking, Windows | 
25 Comments »
August 19th, 2010
by Tristan Watkins
For some time now, IT professionals have been modifying DCOM activation rights in order to keep their System event logs clean. In SharePoint 2010, that fix became slightly trickier, as permissions to modify the DCOM permissions had to be granted through the registry for the IIS WAM REG admin service and oSearch14 DCOM applications. Having made these fixes, I’ve noticed a new breed of DCOM 10016 error.
The machine-default permission settings do not grant Local Activation permission for the COM Server application with CLSID
{000C101C-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}
and APPID
{000C101C-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}
to the user <FARM ACCOUNT> SID (S-1-5-21-xxxxxxx….) from address LocalHost (Using LRPC). This security permission can be modified using the Component Services administrative tool.
The CLSID for this COM Server Application is MSIServer, used to activate the Windows Installer Service. You can find this by navigating to HKCR\AppId and examining the details there:
read more »
Security, SharePoint, Windows | 15 Comments »
August 5th, 2010
by Tristan Watkins
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.
read more »
Performance, Virtualisation, Windows | 5 Comments »
July 6th, 2010
by Tristan Watkins
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 »
Virtualisation, Windows | 1 Comment »
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.
read more »
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 »
December 1st, 2009
by Tristan Watkins
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
by Tristan Watkins
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 »
November 25th, 2009
by Tristan Watkins
The answer, obviously enough, is that it can if it has Silverlight installed. Read on if you’re interested in how the web part will behave in its absence.
read more »
Client applications, SharePoint, Virtualisation, Windows | 6 Comments »
November 17th, 2009
by Tristan Watkins
The Microsoft virtualisation team are certainly taking community engagement and transparency seriously these days. I’m happy to report that Ben Armstrong (Virtual PC Guy) has posted
the definitive summary of Hyper-V high-end graphics performance issues. He was the first person to discover the issue and has produced most of the guidance on it since. Key things to note:
- It’s not an issue on processors with SLAT, but these are only just hitting the market in laptops in the near future
- It’s not an issue with the SVGA driver
- I’ve asked if the SVGA driver might ever offer multi-monitor support. He’s looking in to it. This might be a great compromise until processors with SLAT become ubiquitous
- This same problem occurs in all native Hypervisors
- Virtual PC and VMWare Workstation do not have the same problem but they are Type 2 hypervisors and do not offer the same performance as Hyper-V
So… there’s still no conclusive solution but it’s good to have the full context of the problem. For more background on why this matters for SharePoint see my previous post on the matter.
Performance, SharePoint, Virtualisation | 1 Comment »
