If you are like me, you were both excited and surprised to see Windows Storage Server 2008 available for download from the MSDN Subscriber Site.

And if you are like me, you rushed to install it only to find that upon logon, unlike other Windows 2008 Server installations, Storage Server never asks you to create an Administrator password.

So you are stuck at a login prompt with no idea on how to login.

Well, I’ve done the scouring for you and the default password is “wSS2008!”

Hopefully that helps someone out!

*UPDATE*
Ok, glad to see I’m not the only one with this problem.  I see in my stats page that I got six hits from Google with in the first 15 minutes of this post for people searching for the Storage Server default password.

Windows Storage Server

So, today is the day that the Windows 7 was released to the public.  If you haven’t already, I highly recommend giving it a shot!

I recently signed up for the Windows 7 Beta Exam, 71-680, which pretty much forced my hand to install Windows 7.  In fact, I went as far as to completely abandon my normal day to day machine, and make Windows 7 my primary workstation.

So far, I’m liking what I’m seeing!  I was able to download the MSDN version on April 30th, so I’ve only had a few days to evaluate the product.  But the buzz phrase everyone seems to be using is “Vista Done Right”, and I tend to agree.  I have to warn you, the task bar will come as a major shock.  And when I was building a Windows 2008 R2 Server lab, one of the first things I did was get rid of the new taskbar, and make it work like older version of Windows.  However, since I’m going to be taking the Windows 7 exam, I’m really approaching Windows 7 as a full blown end user, and enabling and evaluating all of the features with an open mind, but also with the goal of being exam ready.

The OS feels very snappy and polished, and like I mentioned above, the new taskbar is really growing on me.  Expect a video demonstration as soon as I can get around to it.  (Disclaimer:  I’m in the process of completely re-landscaping my house, building a new storage server, re-purposing my old machine as a Hyper-V box, studying for the beta exam, and the CCNA exam, plus I have to get my network completely up and running before Verizon shows up this Saturday to install FIOS)

Here is the design of the new network for the house, which will use several Cisco Switches and routers. And this is just functional portion of the network. I'll be adding a router with a serial WAN link to another router will act as my "lab" portion of the network. :)

CCNA, Cisco, Hyper-V, MSDN, Video, Windows 7

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.

You can find the news here.

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!

MSDN

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.  :(

blog, Cluster, iSCSI, Microsoft, Openfiler, SAN, training, vmware

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.

Cluster, iSCSI, Openfiler

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:

To prestage client computers

Yeah, ummmmm, no next button here......

Hyper-V, iSCSI, NLB, Openfiler, Video, wds, Windows Deployment Services

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.

IIS, Video, Websites

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.

MCTS, MSDN

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.  :(

Memtest, RAM

I have been using an Intel Smithfield 2.66 Dual-Core machine for just over 2 years to run most of my home lab tests. It’s actually been a very good box, and I’ve built it up and blown it away on many occasions using it for everything from a Domain Controller to a Mediacenter box. But during the last big storm the power went out, and the power surge must have fried the motherboard.

Now it would have been pretty easy to diagnose the problem, and maybe it would be something simple and easy to fix, but this really presented itself as the perfect opportunity (excuse) to build a new system! I had just recently been through a Microsoft Hyper-V class, which only gave me a small taste, and I was dying to play with it some more!  Well, one of the requirements for running Hyper-V, is a processor that supports hardware virtualization assistance. Something my old processor didn’t support.

So I ordered the following system:

• Gigabyte GA-EP45 — motherboard
• Intel Kentsfield Core 2 Quad 2.4GHz — processor
• 8 gigs of SDRAM

The whole thing was pieced together for under $500, so not bad at all. However, I had problems from day one getting the operating system to install. Constant blue screens no matter what I tried. I was pretty frustrated by the end of the evening, but eventually I tracked the problem down to a single bad stick of memory. The memory I ordered came in 2 packages, each with 2 sticks of RAM, so while I only needed to return 1 stick, I was forced to RMA 2.  

The ’server’ has been running great the past month with only 4 gigs of RAM. However, as you can imagine, you can only run so many Virtual Machines with 4 gigs of RAM.  Especially considering Microsoft’s Hyper visor requires a full blown parent operating system to run parallel to the multiple guest operating systems. I could basically get 4 guest operating systems up simultaneously, which really wasn’t too bad. Just not good enough to be able to run a NLB IIS cluster along side of a SQL fail over cluster, which requires a minimum of 5 boxes when you add in the domain controller. Which brings me to my point…. The new RAM arrived! Going to go install it now, cross my finger, and run Memtest and hope for the best.

Cluster, Hardware, Hyper-V, IIS, Intel, Memtest, Microsoft, NLB, RAM