VirtualPro

I am currently in the process of deploying a number of new Windows 2008 virtual machines and came across an interesting little issue.  Every time I reboot the server the default gateway blanks itself, meaning I cannot connect to it via RDP as it is in a remote data centre.  Thank goodness for vCenter console access, if this was a physical server it would be a real pain in the you know what.

So how do you fix it? well simply open a command prompt and type the following

netsh int ip reset c:\resetlog.txt

This is basically a reset of the TCP/IP components and as a result all IP information for your network connections will be wiped back to the default dynamic DHCP setting. So now you need to re-enter the static IP information for the server and restart it. It’s worthwhile doing a couple of reboots just so you can be sure that the problem has actually disappeared.

Further information can be found in Microsoft KB article 299357

General, Microsoft windows 2008

Having put in the first of a number of new vSphere ESX 4 Update 1 hosts a colleague today set about building our new Windows 2008 R2 64 bit vCenter server.  He later informed me that he was not able to boot the Windows 2008 virtual machine using the PVSCSI adapter (Paravirtualised SCSI) 

I was absolutely positive I had read that this was now supported in Update 1. As it turns out it is, however its not quite as straight forward as just adding the PVSCSI adapter and installing windows.  In fact windows will not recognise the boot disk as it has no native driver for the VMware PVSCSI adapter.

There are a couple of ways to get round this,  the first involves creating your VM with a normal SCSI adapter that Windows 2008  does support and then installing Windows.  Once the installation is complete add a second virtual disk with a second controller set up as PVSCSI and then install VMware tools.  VMware tools will deploy the driver required for the PVSCSI adapter,  once installed you can safely reconfigure the original SCSI controller to be PVSCSI and remove the secondary controller and virtual disk.  Now when you reboot your machine you won’t be met with a blue screen of death, instead you will have a fully working Windows 2008 server using all the benefits of the PVSCSI adapter.

For full step by step instructions to complete the above process I recommend using Alan Renouf’s article. For those who prefer to use powershell scripting to make their changes, check out this fantastic script from LucD’s website which will do it all for you.

The above method is one way to get the PVSCSI adapter working on the boot drive but to be honest it’s a bit of a hassle to be doing this every time you deploy a Windows 2008 VM.  So I had a look to see what was involved in obtaining the driver files for loading prior to installation.

First you need to extract the driver files from your vCenter server. You can find the relevant driver files located in the following directory.

C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Tools\Drivers\pvscsi\

Take the 3 files contained within and make a floppy image, I used UltraISO for this particular task but something like WinImage works just as well. Now you need to boot your VM and once the windows installation files have loaded attach your floppy image.

As you can see in the screenshot below the Windows VM does not pick up the attached virtual disk due to the lack of native driver support.

Once you’ve pointed windows to the floppy image it picks up the VMware PVSCSI controller driver contained upon it.  Click next to apply the driver.

Once the system has applied the driver you can see the virtual disk for your installation.

For those who are looking to add this driver or any other VMware tool driver into a Windows 2008 Pre-Installation environment,  this VMware KB article on how to do it could be handy.

VMware, vSphere Boot Disk, ESX 4, PVSCSI, PVSCSI adapter, VSphere, windows 2008

I read an interesting blog post on Mike De Petrillo’s blog entitled Microsoft Lies to their customers again.  The article details a discussion with a customer regarding licensing on virtual platforms such as ESX and Hyper-V. 

Customer: I would love to use VMware but the cost savings in Windows licenses from Microsoft with Hyper-V makes it a deal I can’t pass up.

Me: What do you mean by that? Licenses cost you the same for Windows no matter what virtualization solution you’re using.

Customer: That’s not what my Microsoft rep told me. They said I could get unlimited virtual machines with Datacenter Edition of Windows only if I used Hyper-V.

Me: Ah. I see. You know, they’re lying to you, right?

Customer: No. They never lie to me. Where’s the proof.

Now I’ve done a lot of work with company reps from all sorts of companies in the past.  The thing to remember is these guys are sales guys pure and simple,  they are interested in getting your business for their company, bottom line.  If you say “I need to consolidate my server pool and keep the cost down”,  the Microsoft Rep is obviously going to tell you that Microsoft Hyper-V is going to be the best and cheapest way to achieve this.  Fair enough that’s his opinion,  but as an IT Professional it is your job to see through the smoke and mirrors and substantiate any claims made.  I take everything I hear with a pinch of salt (even from VMware) and I will always try to validate any claim made, either through existing customer reference sites, product forums or blog sites. 

I’m still reeling from the fact that Mike is seeing this across a number of customers,  how hard can it be to do a little research.  I did a very quick google search on “licensing for virtualization“ and the top result was the press release relating to Microsoft’s change of licensing to incorporate virtualisation.  The second result was the Microsoft page that details licensing for specific products such as Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008.

Within that page is a link to the white paper I used to clarify the correct approach to be taken by my current employer.  The first paragraph answers the question this guy in New York should have been asking, don’t you think?

 The purpose of this white paper is to give an overview of Microsoft® licensing models for the server operating system and server applications under virtual environments. It can help you understand how to use Microsoft server products with virtualization technologies, such as Microsoft Hyper-V™ technology, Microsoft® Virtual Server 2005 R2, or third-party virtualization solutions provided by VMWare and Parallels.

ESX, ESXi, Microsoft, VMware esx, hyper-v, licensing, VMware, windows 2008

I attended a Microsoft roadshow the other day at Microsoft’s new offices in Edinburgh, absolutely stunning views I’m sure you will agree.

So the roadshow was advertised as being presented by James O’Neil but for some reason he wasn’t there and we got Andy Malone who is an MCT and MVP based in Scotland. The event was based around “what’s new in Windows Server 2008″ and covered a number of subjects, including Active Directory, Server Core and of course virtualisation. One of the areas that caught my eye at James O’Neil’s last roadshow in Edinburgh was the new terminal services role in Windows Server 2008.  Now the company I work for use Citrix and I worked on implementing a brand new Xenapp 4.5 farm last year,  I’ve since sat my Citrix Certified Administrator exam and think I know a thing or two about presentation virtualisation. So I was very keen to hear the Terminal Services presentation again to see if I missed anything the last time,  because last time I was convinced that this was a valid alternative to Citrix XenApp.

Microsoft have provided Terminal Services as part of windows for many years, capabilities have always been basic, with Citrix adding a lot of the nice features that made TS attractive to enterprise companies. However in Windows 2008 I think Microsoft have done a lot of work on TS which makes it less entry level and a lot more enterprise friendly everytime I see it. Some of the key features are detailed below.

RemoteApp - This is the equivalent of published applications on Citrix,  applications are delivered seamlessly onto a users desktop through the RDP client but run on the terminal server.  The icons for running RemoteApps can be delivered as an .rdp file or can be packaged up into an MSI for delivery to the desktop via group policy or the deployment tool of your choice.

Terminal Services Web Access - Now this is a very similar service to the Citrix Web Interface whereby users can access TS RemoteApps and connect to the terminal server desktop from a web browser front end.  Users can visit a Web site (either from the Internet or from an intranet) to access a list of available RemoteApp programs. When they start a RemoteApp program, a Terminal Services session is started on the Windows Server® 2008-based terminal server that hosts the RemoteApp program.  The one thing that distinguishes it from Citrix is that the Web Access portal is not customisable and that all users see all RemoteApps, although permissions are applied to control the execution of RemoteApps.

Terminal Services Gateway - utilises RDP over HTTPS to establish a point to point RDP connection allowing access to the resources of a terminal server without the need for a VPN.  That’s not to say that you should not have some other form of security in place such as ISA Server but it does allow you to operate across port 443 which is generally open on most corporate firewalls.  This makes the TS Gateway very easy to deploy without large amounts of change to firewall rule sets, the same cannot be said of Citrix Secure Gateway.

Terminal Services Session Broker - This is a new role wich is designed to provide load balancing when multiple terminal servers are grouped together in a farm.  Before Windows 2008 TS load balancing across terminal servers was not very intuative,  this new role brings it into line with the functionality we see in Citrix farms.

One thing that wasn’t covered in any of the demonstrations I’ve seen is printing,  now coming from a Citrix background I know what a pain printing can be in a TS environemnt.  There is a good reason that it makes up about 30% of the CCA examination and that’s because there’s lots to think about in it’s configuration.

Terminal Services Printing - Windows Server 2008 comes with the Terminal Services Easy Print driver,  allowing users to print from their RemoteApp or TS Desktop to a printer on their local client device.  Where it differs from Citrix is that when you log on to a TS session the server will attempt to install the Easy Print driver first and if for some reason it can’t it will then use a matching native driver.  if this step then fails and it can’t find a native driver then the printer will not be availble in the TS session. Citrix will usually search for the native driver first (unless told otherwise via policy) before reverting to the Citrix Universal Print Driver or as a last resort, not allowing the printer in the TS session at all.  This is an interesting approach from Microsoft as it means that they do not have to add in additional management features to control driver exclusion lists or driver mapping functionality,  thus making it easier than Citrix in the printing arena.  I’d be interested to see how the easy print driver performs when you put a slow link or transatlantic WAN connection in the way.

All in all the Windows 2008 Terminal Server offering is very impressive,  especially considering it is free straight out of the box.  It looks to be a worthy advisory to Citrix for small to medium businesses looking to centralise applications without the usual associated costs.  Where it may struggle to gain a foothold is in the enterprise market where all to often they require the extra features that a Citrix solution provides.  It’s an interesting move by Microsoft who have a close partnership with Citrix,  it’s almost like they didn’t want to take it any further for fear of upsetting them.  Maybe in the next incarnation of Windows Server?!

Microsoft Citrix, Presentation virtualisation, Terminal Servers, windows 2008

I booked myself the MCTS exam 70-652 for Windows 2008 virtualisation configuration and have been looking around for some decent training material.  There’s some good stuff on Microsoft’s website which is free and can be found here. Some other e-learning that’s not to expensive but nothing beats actually using the software and playing with it to understand what’s going on.

So I built myself a Windows Hyper-V Server (The bare metal version) and then went looking for the Management Console add-in.  Now you think it would be quite easy to find,  I followed the link in the getting started guide for it and it lead me back to downloading Hyper-V Server.  After about 10 minutes of searching and a number of broken links from various Microsoft blogs I eventually found what I was looking for.  You can download it from the link below,  I hope that saved someone else 10 minutes of their life.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/952627

Hyper-V, Microsoft hyper-v, hyper-v server 2008, management tools, windows 2008