Virtualization

Expanding SQL Server 2005 to support MOSS 2007

John Watson — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 22:05:07 GMT

After setting up my Dell PowerEdge 2900 with Windows Server 2008 x64 and Hyper-V, I began the steps of creating virtual environments for things I work on. I already had a virtual SQL Server 2005 which was underutilized - 768 MB allocated RAM and one processor for my various development projects.

I wanted to set up Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) as a "mostly" single server install with the exception that I wanted to use the existing SQL Server 2005 installation instead of the embedded SQL Express Edition. To prepare for this, I added a second named instance to the SQL machine so that all MOSS traffic would be isolated and separately configurable.

The steps I took were to use Hyper-V manager to add a second processor and bump the allocated RAM up to 1 GB. After rebooting the VM, I went into Add/Remove Programs, selected the existing "Microsoft SQL Server 2005" entry and clicked "Change". On the "Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Maintenance" dialog, click the blue hyperlink above the list box for "To install a new component, click here". Browse for the install media and work your way through to the SQL database engine and choose it to add another one. Give this one a name (e.g. SQLMOSS) and continue through. When finished, be sure to use the Surface Area Configuration Tool to enable remote TCP/IP connections.

In my case, I decided to partition out the virtual as follows:

1/2 the memory (512 MB) maximum allocated to the SQLMOSS instance
1/2 of remainder (256 MB) for the development/play default instance
other 1/2 of remainder left for the OS (Windows 2003 R2)

Here's a screen-shot of task manager running inside the Hyper-V remote console window:

Note that this was taken after configuration but before installing MOSS 2007.

The beauty of this virtualized approach is that I can add (or remove) processors and RAM depending on usage patterns and bottlenecks.

Dell PowerEdge Upgrade To Windows Server 2008

John Watson — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 23:19:01 GMT

I learned a few things the hard way and thought I'd pass them along in case it helps someone else. I bought a PowerEdge 2900 last winter planning on consolidating my five machines onto a single virtualized server. The PE 2900 has a pair of quad Xeons, supports up to 48 GB of RAM and 10 SCSI/SATA drives. Plenty of room for growth to support Windows Server 2008 and Hyper-V.

Doing my homework, I downloaded and burned the System Management Tools v. 5.5.0, A00 (5.4+ needed for Windows Server 2008 support) to have ready. I also upgraded my firmware to 2.4.3, rebooted, enabled Virtualization Technology in the BIOS and rebooted again.

I first tried running the upgrade from within Windows Server 2003 R2 SP1 x64 but kept finding that it was disabled. Since the PE was just a host for virtuals, I decided to try the System Build and Update Utility approach. Note that using this tool will reformat the boot partition and prepare it for the new OS. After choosing Windows Server 2008 Standard x64, SBUU prepared the installation and rebooted.

At this point you have to provide your own Windows installation DVD so I popped in my MAPS (Microsoft Action Pack Subscription) disc and good ol' Dell told me it wasn't valid. I didn't save the link but I found one post in the Dell support forums stating that their utility wouldn't recognize non-Retail discs. I "confirmed" this by trying an MSDN version that I downloaded with the same result. It would've been heIpful if Dell splashed this information all over the utility and documentation so customers would know! I then downloaded a trial edition ISO, burned it and tried it next...bingo!

Hope this helps!!

Vista Beta 2 not a good host for Virtual PC??

John Watson — Mon, 19 Jun 2006 22:36:00 GMT

I posted here how easy it was to get Virtual PC running on Vista. I figured it was a great way to tryout Vista (my office/email/messaging desktop) while still being productive with VMs containing specific development environments. However, after about a week of use, I've decided I'm better off booting into XP to run VMs. I've been experiencing “lockups” of up to 1 minute or more which make effective work impossible. For example, clicking down through directories on the C:\ drive and suddenly Explorer hangs for a while. Sometimes, I'll see the network activity icon going, other times not. If anybody has tips to share, please do!!

My host machine is a Dell Inspiron 6000 760 M (2.0 Ghz) with 2.0 Gb of RAM. The VMs are running from a USB 2.0 attached 5600 RPM drive - I know, 7200 would be better. The images are all VPC 2004 SP1 with up-to-date VM additions updated. The kicker is the same image runs well when I boot into XP and run them there. Given everything identical except the host OS I can only “blame” Vista Beta 2 as the culprit.

Great non-destructive partitioning utility - and it's free!

John Watson — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 21:01:00 GMT

After testing Vista Beta 2 running inside Virtual PC and then on an older machine, I decided the next step was to take the plunge and setup my main laptop for dual boot. At this point, it “hovered” on my mental to-do list until I saw this article on Lifehacker. What really caught my eye was Gina's mention of a comment posted regarding GParted - an open source partition manager. After reading the article here I headed over to the project workspace and downloaded it. Bottom line - it works as advertised and is a great addition to the toolchest. The ISO is only about 30 Megs and contains a bootable version of Linux. After paying for Partition Magic v3, v4, v5, v6, and v7...I'm done shelling out money for upgrades!

Virtual PC running on Vista host

John Watson — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 16:20:00 GMT

I looked for an answer but few people seem to have posted about this one so I figured I would in case others asked. After trying Vista *inside* a virtual machine, I next wondered if I could install Virtual PC onto a Vista host. After all, running Vista “right on the metal” of a real machine is much sexier than inside an emulated VM :). After a false start of trying to launch the MSI I found a suggestion somewhere that you had to run the Setup.exe stub which worked great. So...when trying older installers, use the Setup and it seems to work well. BTW, Virtual PC 2004 SP1 works well under Vista so migrating over is much easier. You *ARE* using VMs for development, testing, etc. right??? Doing so makes the physical machine irrelevant and recovery from hardware failures much faster.

Windows for Workgroups 3.11 Screen Shots

John Watson — Wed, 31 Aug 2005 22:31:00 GMT

I've uploaded to Flickr various screen shots from my MS-DOS / Windows for Workgroups under Virtual PC experiment. You can reminisce if you'd like...

www.flickr.com

JWatsonNH's Windows for Workgroups 3.11 photoset

Windows for Workgroups 3.11 under Virtual PC

John Watson — Tue, 30 Aug 2005 12:06:00 GMT

Although I've never met them personally, I blame Dave Burke and Ben Armstrong for my little jaunt down memory lane this past weekend. It all started when I was cleaning out the basement...I came to a box on one of the shelves that was still sealed up from when we moved in five years ago. Since this box had come from the garage at the old house, it must have really been "useless" stuff. When I opened it, I found two boxed sets of Lotus 1-2-3: 2.0 and 2.01 (still sealed in shrink wrap!) as well as WordStar 6.0. Doing mindless work like sorting and hauling old stuff off to the dump is a great time to let your mind wander. I remembered Dave's post here as well as Ben's here, here, and here. That was my undoing and before I knew it I was rumaging in the attic for some old DOS boot disks. I managed to get DOS 6.22 and Windows for Workgroups 3.11 up and running (screen shots below). But that wasn't enough - it's as though I couldn't stop myself. I spent a few hours over the course of two days and managed to install:

Turbo Pascal 6.0 for DOS
Microsoft Access 1.1 and Access Distribution Kit
Microsoft's Excel 3.0 and Word 2.0a
Microsoft Visual Basic 3.0
Microsoft Visual C++ 1.52
TrueGrid Pro 2.1c
Dan Appleman's Visual Basic Programmer's Guide to the Windows 16 bit API
Desaware's Spyworks-VB, StorageTools, and Version Stamper
Borland Object Pascal 7.0

Some things I left off installing:

After Dark for Windows
Norton Utilities 6, 7 and 8
Norton Desktop for Windows 1.0, 2.1and 3.0
Paradox 3.5, 4.5 and 1.0 for Windows
Quattro Pro 5 for Windows
Turbo Pascal for Windows 1.5
WordPerfect 5.1
WordStar 6.0

What I found amazing was how "little" everything was. After working with virtual machines for various betas with 512+ meg of memory and 5+ Gb virtual disk sizes it was incredible to see a "whopping" 32 meg of RAM for a machine. I recalled that DOS had an upper limit of 2 Gb for disk size and, since I wanted to see how much I could install, I chose a "safe" 1.5 Gb fixed disk size. I had truly forgotten how little space things took (relatively speaking). Even after choosing "full installations" for everything above, I had barely topped 400 meg of disk space!

Of everything I tried installing Windows gave me the most trouble. I tried going to WfW 3.11 directly but the machine kept hanging at the detect networking stage even after I had disabled the network adapters in VPC - perhaps I was too impatient? I finally installed Win 3.1 from floppies. I then set about trying to tweak it as Ben described here and here. Soundblaster was cute - remember the little "ding" when you did something you shouldn't? I found that the S3/Trio card and the EMM386 settings were difficult. I could get most stuff loaded into high memory using Ben's settings and the suggested replacements for the mouse and MSCDEX - DOS ran just fine. However, after switching Win 3.1 over to the S3/Trio adapter I kept getting GPFs as soon as Program Manager would begin painting the groups and icons. I tried eliminating some of the include regions in EMM386 but Win 3.1 complained of low resources so I finally gave up and switched back to VGA mode. On a whim, I went back and tried upgrading from Windows 3.1 to Windows for WfW 3.11 and managed to get that to work. After that, Ben's instructions for networking and IE 5.01 worked like a charm.

Another thing that suprised me a bit was how much software was on 5 1/4" floppies. I had to pull out my old 386 SX 20 Mhz (woo-hoo) since it was the only machine I had with a 5 1/4" drive. Turbo Pascal 6.0 as well as some utilities were the only things I bothered to copy to 3 1/2" so I could load them into the virtual machine. Even then, I had to hunt around and find the removable floppy drive for my "old" laptop (Inspiron 8200) so I could read the 3 1/2" disks since my new laptop doesn't even come with a floppy drive!

What comes next? I think I'll shrink the fixed disk down to 650 Meg and burn it to a CD.

Beware Virtual PC Differencing Disks!

John Watson — Mon, 09 May 2005 16:45:00 GMT

Ah, now that I have your attention, please let me elaborate :)

I just read a post by Russ Nemhauser, Virtual PC - Beyond the Basics, and it reminded me of some caveats I had picked up in my trials. I too thought differencing disks were the way to go and in fact set up several “base” installs to test it out. One of my early reasonings was simply because each .vhd image had about 1 - 2 gigs of duplicate information - that is, a base OS plus tools and assorted service packs. I figured I could free up 10 gigs or so with a single base image.

The reality is that the differencing drives quickly grew to 3 - 4 gigs in size themselves! Considering things like the paging file, event logs, IIS logs, temp directories, etc. it made sense why this was. However, in the long run I ended up using just as much disk space if not more as if I stuck with individual images. Plus it meant I had to remember to always cart along the base image or the differencing image was useless. Yes, I know about the new compacting tool but it's waaayyy to hard to do all this for each image to free up space - just check out these posts by John Howard and Rob Eberhardt.

In the end I stuck with having a single baseline image of an OS which I copy and rename to start a new image. I followed Megan's tips on sysprepping virtual machines with the baseline beforehand. This does mean that a new service pack might have to be rolled out to multiple virtual machine images but I would have to do that anyway with differencing drives since the base drive cannot be touched ever again or the differences become invalidated and meaningless.

Changing a VPC Computer Name with BizTalk

John Watson — Wed, 27 Apr 2005 17:56:00 GMT

Alan Smith asked about the steps to take to change a VPC computer name when distributing the same preloaded VPC image to multiple developers...”We have network problems if two or more images with the same computer name are started with network access (to SourceSafe). So I attempted to change the computer name in an image.”

While the BizTalk reload steps are painful, Megan Davis put together notes on sysprepping the VPC image before distributing so that it will do a “mini-install” when first starting up similar to how OEMs do it before shipping. Thus you can allow the computer name to be changed when starting up the image for the first time!