Archive for the ‘Windows 2008’ Category
May 12, 2008
I’ve been really busy the last couple of weeks and I’ve had to trim down my incoming RSS feeds, as there was too much noise and I was missing important things like the following;
- Scott Lowe’s summary of sessions from VMWare’s partner Exchange, some useful information on Site Recovery Manger
- The new VMWare Certified Design Expert (VCDX) certification - next step up from VCP, will have to have a look into it now I’ve finally managed to re-schedule my cancelled QA course - official VM announcement here.
- Official Microsoft Clustering Support with ESX 3.5 Update 1 here
- Some workarounds for deploying Windows Server 2008 with virtual center here - would have been nice if support was in an official update from VMWare soon; it’s not like it’s been beta’ing for a while is it (errr!)
Posted in Blogging, ESX, QA-IQ, Training, VMWare, Virtual Center 2.5, Virtualization, Windows, Windows 2008, Work | No Comments »
April 17, 2008
The followign screens show a working configuration from the RDP 3.80 PXE Configuration Manager
Have had lots of problems with this deploying Windows OS’es and VMWare ESX 3.5 onto an HP c7000 Blade chassis, still not resolved all the problems, but this definitely works for deploying Windows!
The documentation reads like you should always use the Linux PE configuration and it handles switching between WinPE/LinuxPE depending on which OS job you drop on a target. in my experience this doesn’t work and you need to manually change the PXE configuration to default to LinuxPE or WinPE depending on the OS you want to target.
And
Still a work in progress as I have a c7000 to which I want to deploy a mix of Windows and ESX/Redhat OS’es….
I did get a previous installation to install ESX 3.5 by hacking the default ESX 3.02 job, but its since been re-installed and I can’t do it now
RDP 6.90 seems to list Windows 2008 and ESX 3.5 in the quickspecs, but I’ll be damned if I can find where to download it, going to have to call HP methinks!
As I’ve posted before installing via iLo is just a non-starter if you really do want a flexible and fast deployment configuration - so it has to be RDP.
More later…
Posted in BL460c, ESX, HP, HP Blade, Rapid Deployment Pack, Reference, Unattended, VMWare, WAIK, Windows, Windows 2008, Windows PE, Work, blade, c7000 | No Comments »
March 19, 2008
I’m at the Windows 2008 Launch event in the Birmingham, UK today. It has just been exclusively announced that the Hyper V Release Candidate is available for download from 5pm (UK time) Today, 19th March.
Go download and try it out… full RTM is still promised 180 days from the Feb RTM release of Windows 2008 which I blogged about here
Posted in Announcement, Hyper V, Microsoft, Windows 2008 | No Comments »
February 20, 2008
Along the same lines as the handy Exchange 2007 reference posters I blogged about a while ago; there are now similar offerings for Windows Server 2008.
These are quite handy, and I’m all for visual aids 
Download them here.
Thanks to Brett for the handy linkage
Posted in Handy, Windows, Windows 2008 | No Comments »
February 18, 2008
Post here on the terminal services team blog, about why they’ve changed this switch to /ADMIN in Windows 2008/Vista SP1/XPSP3.
This is the first I’ve heard of it, not a huge issue but I can see a potential problem where the /console switch is ignored, again not huge but a bit of an annoyance just to change a bit of syntax?
if you have device CAL’s and normally use the /console switch to remotely administer a machine to my understanding that doesn’t allocate a device CAL to your admin machine (or whatever machine you are admin’ing from at the time)
What if you use this method to administer terminal servers, doesn’t this silently ignoring just eat one of your device CALs (permanatly if you do it often enough from a machine)?
The article says:
The /console switch is silently ignored. You will be connected to a session to remotely administer the server.
The /console switch is silently ignored. You will be connected to a standard Remote Desktop session that requires a Terminal Services client access license (TS CAL).
Posted in Terminal Services, Vista SP1, Windows, Windows 2008 | No Comments »
February 5, 2008
Must be the day for it! I’m looking forward to Server 2008 and have a couple of projects lined up to try and take advantage of the new terminal services functionality.
Hyper-V will follow within 180 days… MS have a long way to go to win ground from VMWare but will have the usual single-vendor support argument so it’s going to be an interesting 18 months.
Posted in Microsoft, Terminal Services, Windows, Windows 2008 | No Comments »
February 1, 2008
I thought I’d post some performance graphs from my cheap HP D530 ESX server using the Virtual Centre console (which incidentally, is good for getting this info quickly and simply).
Screenshot of the UI for querying performance stats.
View of currently running VMs - a mix of Windows 2003/2008 VMs
Current Overall ESX Host statistics (with a clone from template going on)
As I noted elsewhere on my blog it has 4Gb RAM and a single 2.8GHz HT CPU - and with this VM load it gives an average CPU load of 25-30%. Almost all of these VM’s are idling but all respond in good time to network access/TS etc- not bad at all for a desktop PC!
CPU usage for the last 24 hours
The big spike around 22:00 was when I cloned up a whole load more VM’s - seems to have upset the stats so need to try and have a look at that..
It’s also interesting to note that I added 4 Windows 2003 VM’s last night but that hasn’t actually increased the overall CPU average - ESX must be quite efficient at time-slicing all those idle VMs.
I had 3-4 “deploy from template..” operations going on at the same time and it really bogged down the performance of the VM’s (usable, but only just..) but it is just a single SATA disk drive so I can live with that.
Deploying 1 VM at a time had little or no impact - slight CPU spike to ~50% as you’ll see to the far right of the chart as I kicked off another one just now.
When i get time I’m going to drop some jobs into the VM’s that will tax the virtual CPUs a bit more and compare results - maybe some Folding@Home activity Mmmmm that would definitley tax it.
Posted in Home Network, Microsoft, Performance Stats, Run ESX on a cheap Desktop PC, VMWare, Virtual Center 2.5, Windows, Windows 2008 | 3 Comments »
January 31, 2008
All running well, we had a power cut the other day but the PC didn’t automatically power back on when power was restored; I wonder if there is a BIOS setting for that - PC’s always used to have something along those lines.
Bit of manual intervention to switch it on and it was back and running.. no ill effects and all the VM’s started up normally.
I’m hammering it a bit now and have some Windows Server 2008 RC1 templates setup as I need to try out the new Terminal Services functionality so I’m hoping to build a small 2008 TS farm under ESX - no customization wizard available yet for 2008 
Maybe will see how Windows built in NLB works under ESX Mmmm.
So, will see what performance is like when I have a lot more going on..
Posted in Home Network, Microsoft, Terminal Services, VMWare, Windows 2008, Work | No Comments »
