Chris's Blog - Just weedin around Microsoft

Failure during Windows Server 2008 System State Backup & System Writer Missing

2009-11-19T02:35:20Z

For some of those new to DPM 2007, you might find yourself in a situation where a Windows Server 2008 (and R2) is failing during backups consistently. The consistency part is the ironic is that it is always failing and might lead you to review a bit more what is going on. This problem, as outlined in this post , is often related to missing the Windows Backup feature on Windows Server 2008. However, there are cases where some servers will fail unless you reset permissions for the System Writer. This...(read more)

Deploying Windows 7 in the Enterprise – A Blueprint for Success

2009-11-15T23:28:58Z

digg_url = "http://blogs.technet.com/chrad/archive/2009/11/15/deploying-windows-7-in-the-enterprise-a-blueprint-for-success.aspx";digg_title = "Deploying Windows 7 in the Enterprise – A Blueprint for Success";digg_bgcolor = "#FFFFFF";digg_skin = "normal"; digg_url = undefined;digg_title = undefined;digg_bgcolor = undefined;digg_skin = undefined; It’s taken nearly a year and four developers, 2 QA, and 3 PMs to build the solution to deploy Windows 7 at Microsoft & other customers. Code-named...(read more)

Unable to Extend System Volume & DPM Backup Failure: Change the System State backup location

2009-11-15T06:44:51Z

I recently had a couple of servers where they had rather small system partitions, one was Windows 2003 while the other was Windows 2008 RTM and DPM continued to fail with replica is inconsistent errors. The DPM documentation and event errors were referencing the replica and volume partition size(s) and all checked out with plenty of space according to the current data size. Fix #1: Expand the available space for the system partition As a test, I thought about checking the actual...(read more)

Data Protection Manager 2007: Replica is inconsistent on Windows Server 2008

2009-11-11T02:41:40Z

I recently took some time to learn more about Microsoft’s System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 since it was again a product in my division that I knew very little about. Beyond that, I had quite a bit of incentive to get our engineering lab which is handled by me as a “side job” besides my Lead PM role for MPSD Engineering. We recently had a Hyper-V Failover Cluster slight meltdown that was single-handedly caused by my mistake. The good thing is that I’ve since recovered with less than a day’s...(read more)

Adding IIS Host Headers in DNS using Netdom utliity

2009-11-10T06:47:06Z

digg_url = "http://blogs.technet.com/chrad/archive/2009/11/09/adding-iis-host-headers-in-dns-using-netdom-utliity.aspx";digg_title = "Adding IIS Host Headers in DNS using Netdom utliity";digg_bgcolor = "#FFFFFF";digg_skin = "normal"; digg_url = undefined;digg_title = undefined;digg_bgcolor = undefined;digg_skin = undefined; An age old question for IIS administrators is how to effectively manage small, medium, or even large Web servers with a minimal set of IP addresses. The network team often...(read more)

Failover Cluster Snafu – Forcibly removing Failover Cluster Feature after Cluster Failure

2009-11-03T03:34:28Z

digg_url = "http://blogs.technet.com/chrad/archive/2009/11/02/failover-cluster-snafu-forcibly-removing-failover-cluster-feature-after-cluster-failure.aspx";digg_title = "Failover Cluster Snafu – Forcibly removing Failover Cluster Feature after Cluster Failure";digg_bgcolor = "#FFFFFF";digg_skin = "normal"; digg_url = undefined;digg_title = undefined;digg_bgcolor = undefined;digg_skin = undefined; My secondary job is to maintain our engineering lab (part of the mantra of “Do More with Less”) as we...(read more)

Differencing Disks & Merging: 80070005 Error … Just one persons Lesson Learned!

2009-10-03T01:53:36Z

digg_url = "http://blogs.technet.com/chrad/archive/2009/10/02/differencing-disks-merging-80070005-error-just-one-persons-lesson-learned.aspx";digg_title = "Differencing Disks & Merging: 80070005 Error … Just one persons Lesson Learned!";digg_bgcolor = "#FFFFFF";digg_skin = "normal"; digg_url = undefined;digg_title = undefined;digg_bgcolor = undefined;digg_skin = undefined; Recently, I had a rather simple demo for an audience that required me to have multiple systems running simultaneously and at...(read more)

[Info] – SCVMM R2 Documentation Live on the Web

2009-09-14T03:51:00Z

As you can tell, I’m pretty active in following one of my favorite HOT products released by my division here at Microsoft – System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM). VMM 2008 R2 was recently released and with it comes some exciting new capabilities not exposed in the first 2 releases of VMM (2007 RTM & 2008 RTM). It was recently announced internally at Microsoft that the VMM documentation team has made available via TechNet the documentation to go along with VMM 2008 R2. For those of us who...(read more)

Virtualization Tip: Migrating to SAN’s “after the fact” with SCVMM using R2’s Migrate Storage

2009-09-08T05:30:00Z

In today’s post, I thought I would share some insight into how to effectively migrate to Storage Area Network’s (SAN) after you’ve already got an SCVMM environment up and running. You found yourself with several Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V hosts and you were moving along with very little issues; though, you recently have noticed that downtime is unavoidable if you don’t have your backend storage running on SANs. You will get overwhelmed when researching the issue and I just thought I would...(read more)

Real World Example of Troubleshooting R2 Live Migration using CSV’s

2009-09-06T20:30:00Z

As I’ve mentioned several times, we run our engineering lab on much of the latest & greatest. There are many who would argue that this is a luxury (one afforded to those who work at a Software company such as Microsoft) and I wouldn’t have a solid argument against their argument. However, it doesn’t change the fact that often we are so cutting edge that when “issues” arise we don’t get a solid response internally without development debugging. There is a challenge to often getting...(read more)

Dynamic Provisioning for ConfigMgr hits the Shelf – TechNet Magazine Sept 2009

2009-08-30T18:54:00Z

digg_url = "http://blogs.technet.com/chrad/archive/2009/08/30/dynamic-provisioning-for-configmgr-hits-the-shelf-technet-magazine-sept-2009.aspx";digg_title = "Dynamic Provisioning for ConfigMgr hits the Shelf – TechNet Magazine Sept 2009";digg_bgcolor = "#FFFFFF";digg_skin = "normal"; digg_url = undefined;digg_title = undefined;digg_bgcolor = undefined;digg_skin = undefined; I promised early on to not use “marketing” as a ploy in my blog and trust me this is painful to write. However, if it...(read more)

Fighting Hyper-V Physical Host Time Drift – Utilizing NTP to Synchronize Clocks

2009-08-28T22:29:44Z

My team at Microsoft has an engineering lab, one of which, I’ve spent a lot of time designing and building that provides our team some robustness. We run our own “mini” lab for our engineering purposes that runs very much like a large number of enterprises. By this, I mean we have our own self-hosted domain, DNS, DHCP, and application services such as ConfigMgr 2007, PKI, IIS, and SQL. This lab started off running Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V physical hosts (Dell PE2950) that were...(read more)

Dynamic Provisioning with VMM: Proxy, Windows Updates, and Scripts

2009-07-13T22:23:00Z

In our environment, there are two things that are critical to success of an environment that is dynamically built from scratch – Updates & Internet connectivity. This might seem odd since most would believe that we would utilize WSUS & the Software Update Points in Configuration Manager to do our patching and truth be known we do. However, non-compliant servers with specific hot-fixes are not allowed to come on the network and to avoid big delays we do not push the ConfigMgr clients to our...(read more)

Configuring Servers for deployment as a Configuration Manager Distribution Point (DP)

2009-07-12T08:45:49Z

In order to go from nothing to a finished, completed installation of a System Center Configuration Manager (ConfigMgr) client services role such as a Distribution Point (DP) requires that an administrator configures the future DP server automatically. This includes a few key details that, often are missed, I will outline in today’s post. Granting Central\Primary Site Server Administrator Privileges Before you can even get started, the first step is to ensure that your server’s Primary Site...(read more)

Building a “Sample” SCOM Management Pack for Dynamically Building Virtual Machines based on Performance of physical or virtual machines

2009-07-10T23:59:00Z

In today’s post, I will focus on how I worked with our System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) team to build the actual infrastructure and setup alerting for our infrastructure to ensure that if our Configuration Manager Distribution Points (DPs) are getting a high number of connections, we will spin up additional virtual machines to help with the load. For the most part, there are some requirements that should be in place for this post to be useful: Virtual Machine Manager 2008 should be present...(read more)