Just the other day I was complaining about Windows Home Sever not being available to MSDN subscribers. Well, I suppose someone must have heard my call, because now it is available.
So now how about putting NT Server 4 back up for people like me that need to test out legacy applications from time to time!
So it’s no secret that since being laid-off, I’ve hit the certification trail again. 8 exams in 5 weeks to be exact. The fact is, certification is supposed to be a confirmation of someone’s skill set. That is what I believed when I got my original MCSE in January of 1999. But over the years, the popularity of “brain-dumps” saturated the market with what most refer to as “The Paper MCSE”, the guy that has his certification, but has no real experience in the market. I think in the US, most employers do a good job at screening out paper MCSE’s. But overseas, in particular India, they seem to hire paper MCSE’s in hoards.
This was visibly noticable at my last job where a lot of our work went to Best Shore teams that were barely capable of patching boxes. They were not skilled enough to serve on-call rotations, or participate in critical implementations. Yet they held the same titles as the rest of us.
So what has changed? Microsoft has! Or at least they are trying to. Many of the new Windows 2008 Server exams I’ve taken had questions that seemed much more real world than exams of the past. This was clearly evident to me as I lined up my exams in order of score from least to greatest. It truly mirrored the experience. Exchange 2007 is new to me. It is something I am self studying. I have a lab environment setup, I’ve seen it implemented live, I’ve read a few books, but I’ve never been an actual Exchange Administrator. And to that end, it was the exam I scored the ‘worst’ on.
So what else have they done? Well, the 70-620 exam is littered with simulations. Or I should say; Emulations. More on that later. So now you click on the a simulation button and are forced to actually perform actions. Setup user accounts, configure applications, etc… Usually several tasks; and some involving multiple PC’s, in which you have to switch back and forth. There is one problem with this though. The simulations are setup so that you can only click on items actually related to the simulation. If you try and click on a unrelated area, it will inform you that “This function is not available or required to perform the necessary objectives.” or something like that. So what happens is that if you click enough, you’ll eventually find what you are looking for. Imagine being in a room with 100 doors, 99 of which are locked. So basically it’ll take you some time, but eventually you’ll find the unlocked door.
But here is what is coming. True lab based simulation testing. Now while you are sitting at your test cubicle, you will be connected to a live server in Redmond. You may be given a list of several exam objectives, and it’s completely up to you as to how you achieve them. So if you are more comfortable using the command line, that’s there. If you are more comfortable using the GUI, well that’s there to. Decide that you don’t feel like configuring Active Directory? Well then play a few quick rounds of Minesweeper instead. :-)
The point is, these new performance based objectives will finally weed out the people who actually know what they are doing, and will actually simulate real world problem solving skills. From what I’ve heard, even the help system is included!! So going back to my Exchange exam, the questions that gave me the most trouble were the Powershell commands, since I hadn’t really used them, when presented with 4 multiple choice options, I was left to guessing. Now had I been on a live server, 1st of all I could have used the GUI. But even if I had been forced to use Powershell, I could have used the knowledge I do have about Powershell to help complete the commands. If you type “Get-” and begin pressing Tab, Powershell with cycle through the available commands.
So here are the Key Benefits to lab-based testing
We aren’t there yet, but it’s coming.
Curses!
OpenFiler was originally introduced to me by Greg Shields (ps, that article is a good read) as part of his training series on VMWare ESX Server, where he demonstrates the VMotion Technology using an OpenFiler IP SAN. This is what originally gravitated me towards using OpenFiler in my own lab.
Well, I got all of my resources online and ready to go. I added the Failover feature to each node of the cluster. I started by creating a new cluster using just a single node. And then when I tried to add the 2nd node, the cluster validation wizard was showing failed checks related to the shared storage. I should have taken a screen shot of the exact text. But the point is, while searching for what might be the cause of the problem, where should I find the answer? Why Greg Shields of course. This time in the form of an entry on his Blog entitled “No, OpenFiler Does Not Work with Windows Server 2008 Clustering“.
Apparently there are a few solutions out there that will work, however they are either not free, or are only provided by Microsoft OEM providers in the form of a specialized version of Windows Server called, “Windows Unified Data Storage Server 2003″.
The cause of the problem is that Windows Server 2008 clustering requires support of persistent reservations. I’d have to say that I’m a fan of persistent reservations, they can prevent some nasty data corruptions that can occur in a shared storage environment, but dang… I wish I could disable the requirement for my testing. :(
First, if you haven’t already read completely through my last post, the rest of this post won’t make a whole lot of sense. In summary, I had complained about the performance I was getting using iSCSI on my network.
I noticed this on the Openfiler administration page today.
Notice the highlighted drop packets on the eth1.
I bonded the two NICs together, and configured them for load balancing, but apparently eth1 is having some problems. This is probably due to the NICs not being identical. I’ve gone ahead and removed eth1 from the bond. Hopefully when I configure the SQL Cluster today, I’ll have better things to say about the iSCSI through-put.
I wasn’t very happy with the quality of my last video. I had fun making it, just didn’t like the way Youtube compressed it.
I’m experimenting with trying to host my own videos locally and we’ll see how this turns out. Hopefully the screen text will be much sharper.
The big picture is that I’m wanting to play with the failover and nlb capabilities of Windows Server 2008. I currently have my Hyper-V box online, as well as a domain controller for the march.local domain. I also have a 2nd physical box that I dumped every spare IDE drive I could find lying around into, and installed an opersoure iSCSI Target called OpenFiler. This is really my first time playing with iSCSI or a linux based SMB file server, so it’s been a unique learning experience.
I had already installed Openfiler, and after a little tinkering, I got kerberos authentication working and joined the box to the domain. At that point I brought up my 3rd Windows 2008 server and got an itch to play with Windows Deployment Services. It was the one thing I didn’t experiment with live while studying for the Windows 2008 Server exams. As I was walking through the wizard it prompted me for a place to store all of my images, and rather than creating another .VHD file to store them on a 2nd drive locally, I opted to go for the iSCSI option.
So here is a quick video on setting up iSCSI.
So since setting up iSCSI, I’ve got WDS working. I was able to use a boot.wim to PXE boot a Virtual machine with an attached Legacy adapter and install Windows 2008. After I got the new OS up and running, configured and patched. I was able to then create a capture image on the WDS server, run SYSPREP on the base OS, and PXE boot the capture image to create a new Install image to be used for future deployments. With that said, I will not be deploying using the image I just created.
It was a painfully slow process pulling the image from the iSCSI storage. No doubt because I have 3 Virtual machines all attached to the same physical network adapter, which is also being used to direct the iSCSI traffic. *UPDATE HERE* I may try putting Netmon on the Parent OS and see if I can monitor the network traffic and see exactly how bad the bottle neck is. It also may have something to do with the legacy network adapter booting at fast ethernet speeds, and not properly negotiating it’s duplex settings, since the physical network is all gigabit. I’m not completely clear on how a Virtual Switch would handle that. Getting the network properly segmented is definitely on my to-do list. I have 4 physical adapters in the box, so if I had another switch, or even a layer 2 switch, I would be able to properly subnet my network out.
So, for the future builds, it’s much easier to just run SYSPREP with the shutdown command, and then copy and rename the .VHD file 5 more times. 
Oh, and one last note on Windows Deployment Services. I had my server set to only accept known clients, which means you have to pre-stage the machines in Active Directory. The directions to do this are:
Yeah, ummmmm, no next button here......
I just got back from the Live Microsoft Skills Week event in Irving, TX. As expected, the event was geared at selling training, and introducing people to the new certification designations Microsoft has come up with.
I didn’t really learn anything new, although I did get some more information about the Microsoft Certified Masters program. This is something I may be interested in the future, that is, if I can find $18-$20 THOUSAND DOLLARS lying around to pay for it.
I guess my main motivation for attending was to try and win some free swag! I knew they were going to be giving away a free class, and that is what I was most interested in. I’ve been wanting to get my VCP (VMWare Certified Professional) certification. Honestly, I don’t need the training from an educational stand point. I need the training because VMWare has said that in order to become a VCP, you not only have to pass the test, you HAVE to have taken their official curriculum as well. Essentially making the cost of the certification around $3,175. Words can’t describe how much that annoys me.
So today the topic came up about how many website you can run on a single NIC card with out using host headers. My thought was “as many as you want!”. But it was implied that there was a limit as to the number of addresses that could be assigned to a single NIC. So, when I got home, I decided to test it out. Now, I have a little spoiler here that is revealed towards the end of the video. The conversation we were having at the time was related to NT4, and my test below was done on Windows 2003, IIS6.
But, that’s ok. It gave me something to focus in on for awhile and I had fun doing it. I was just getting ready to blow this box away since I had already used it for some other testing and the Eval license is like 7 days from requiring activation.
I got an email asking about the validity of certain hosts.
Namely whether or not 10.10.1.255 and 10.10.2.0 where valid IP addresses. When dealing with a Class C range, you won’t see hosts with the last octet of .0 or .255, because those are the network and broadcast addresses. However, when dealing with class B or class A addresses, these addresses become completely valid.
You only drop the 1st and last host of any network range. In the above example, the Network is 10.10.0.0 and the broadcast address is 10.10.255.255, so all IP addresses in between are completely valid to use. It feels very odd typing in an address of 10.10.2.0, but I assure you, it’s a valid address, as is 10.10.1.255.
Hope that clears things up.
Ponder this.
Windows Home Server is currently not offered to MSDN Subscribers, but Windows for Workgroups 3.11 is? Just because MS is currently offering a 40% discount on exams, and home networks and automation is kind of a pet project of mine, I was considering taking the MCTS: Connected Home Integrator exam. But unfortunately, I do not have a copy of Windows Home Server to ensure that I have the skills necessary to meet the exam objectives.
What a jip!
*UPDATE*
Someone heard my call and it is now available here.
A new version of my resume is now online. I just got back from passing exam 70-501 Microsoft Certrified Technology Specialist: Windows Server 2003 Hosted Environments, Configuring, and Managing. I really enjoyed the test. The questions covered a wide variety of topics from not only IIS, but also to include Database servers. Since the two really go hand in hand, it makes a lot of sense. Other topics include Network Load Balancing, and both Database and Content Server failover. Again, completly makes sense. The only questions I found to be out of scope (in my opinion, it’s listed right on the exam objectives as valid topics) were the questions about automated server deployment services, and SharePoint.
Well, the new RAM is posting errors. Haven’t had a chance to fully diagnose the problem. It’s possible that it’s one of the slots on the motherboard. I’m going to pull out the RAM that I know is good, and only insert the new RAM and re-run Memtest to see what the results are.
For the record, please never buy OCZ RAM, no matter how good of a deal it seems. When you look at the reviews on the right hand side, at first glance it appears to be favorable. But if you dig down into the reviews, you will find a ton of unhappy customers. :(
