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

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

Well, I think I got the basics worked out. My resume is now uploaded, and as you can see, there are download links provided in the most popular formats.

In addition, I provided a web version as well.  I think I spent the majority of my time today trying to get Microsoft Word to gracefully export from the .docx format to at least presentable HTML.   It’s certainly not as neat as I’d like it to look, but for the time being, it’s quick.  Sure, I could take about 20 to 30 minutes and clean up the HTML manually and make it look exactly like I want it to.  But I probably make at least 2 -3 changes to my resume each week.  Sometimes it’s just minor tweaks, but other times it’s adding a new certfication to my credentials.  And if I’m going to be making regular revisions, I need a quick and easy way to export my resume into several formats, including HTML.  So I guess that will be my 1st project!

In addition to providing recruiters and hiring managers an easy place to find my latest resume, I will also be using this website as a technical Blog.   I guess you could say that I’m one of those people that takes his work home with him.  I love to tinker in technology, and I have quite an impressive setup that I use at home to evaluate software, or simply train myself on new technologies.  My current pet project is setting up an iSCSI SAN using Openfiler.  I have a mid-sized dual core system with 6 hard drives currently setup.  The NIC is connected to an private router which then feeds into a private virtual port on my Hyper-V server.   The iSCSI targets are then being presented to multiple hosts to setup fail over scenario’s in Windows 2008.  I would like to evaluate the high availability of Exchange 2007, File Services, and SQL 2008.   After that I add the SQL cluster, I’ll add a seperate IIS NLB cluster sperated by an ISA 2006 server.

So if that didn’t bore you to death, you can subcribe to my RSS feed and check back for updates as I finish getting everything setup.

blog, Cluster, Exchange, HTML, Hyper-V, IIS, ISA, iSCSI, Microsoft, NLB, resume, SAN, SQL Server, Websites, Word