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If you installed Microsoft Data Protection Manager 2007 SP1 on Windows Server 2008 RTM you receive Error ID 3013 if you select Reporting from DPM Management console.

DPM could not connect to SQL Server Reporting Services server because of IIS connectivity issues.

On the computer on which the DPM database was created, restart the World Wide Web Publishing Service. On the Administrative Tools menu, select Services. Right-click World Wide Web Publishing Service, and then click Start.

ID: 3013

Problem resides in Reporting Services virtual directory in Internet Information Services (IIS) named ReportServer$MS$DPM2007$.

Workaround is simple:

• Run Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager, expand Web Sites, expand Default Web Site, and then click the virtual directory for the report server.
• Under Features View, double-click Handler Mappings.
• Under Actions, click Edit Feature Permissions.
• Click to select the Scripts check box, and then click OK.

As we know from previous post Service Pack 1 for Exchange Server 2007 brings support for IPv6 but only in combination with Windows Server 2008 and IPv4.

But there were some known issues with IPv6. For example:

• Outlook Anywhere connectivity issue (DSProxy ::1:6004) - KB950138

Issue mentioned above was most annoying since you received login screen multiple times and was still unable to connect. This issue was already fixed and update is included in Update Rollup 4 for Exchange Server 2007 SP1. Update Rollup 5 for Exchange Server 2007 SP1 is the latest version at the moment and I recommend you strongly to apply it.

IPv6 recommendation

There is only one simple rule. Disable IPv6 if you do not need it!

Disabling IPv6

• Uncheck Internet Protocol Version 6 (TCP/IPv6) on network card.
  
• The above step is not enough! Remove or comment out the line ::1     localhost in HOSTS file.
  
  
• Disable IPv6 in registry.
  
  HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip6\Parameters
  DWORD: DisabledComponents
  Value: 0xFFFFFFFF
  
  

That's it. :)

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

I  wish you all Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! Here are some free e-books for cold days... :)

• Understanding IPv6, Second Edition
• Writing Secure Code for Windows Vista
• Understanding Microsoft Virtualization Solutions (from the Desktop to the DataCenter)
• Collection 6333: Exploring Microsoft Virtualization Technologies (MS e-Learning)

I guess many of you have already heard phrase "Windows Server 2008 & Exchange Server 2007 SP1: Better Together"? :) In general this is true but there are some gotchas!

Benefits

• Support for multi-subnet failover clusters
• Better performance of file copy operations (SMBv2)
• Reduced downtime for hardware maintenance (Hot add, remove, replace of core hardware components)
• Reduced downtime for fixing NTFS issues (Self-Healing NTFS)
• Greater scalability of TCP/IP connections (Client Access Server especially; Next Generation TCP/IP Stack)
• Integrated Exchange Server 2007 prerequisites (PowerShell,...)
• IPv6 support (only in combination with Windows Server 2008 and IPv4)

Installing Exchange Server 2007 prerequisites

The easiest way to install all prerequisites on windows Server 2008 is with ServerManagerCmd command line utility.

Exchange Management Tools

ServerManagerCmd -i PowerShell

If you want to manage all internal server roles including CAS role you must also install following IIS components. Note that this also applies if you have stand alone HUB Transport server and you want to manage CAS server from it.

ServerManagerCmd -i Web-Metabase
ServerManagerCmd -i Web-Lgcy-Mgmt-Console

Hub Transport Server

ServerManagerCmd -i PowerShell

Edge Transport Server

ServerManagerCmd -i PowerShell
ServerManagerCmd -i ADLDS (AD LDS - Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services; previously known as ADAM - Active Directory Application Mode)

Mailbox Server

ServerManagerCmd -i PowerShell
ServerManagerCmd -i Web-Server
ServerManagerCmd -i Web-ISAPI-Ext
ServerManagerCmd -i Web-Metabase
ServerManagerCmd -i Web-Lgcy-Mgmt-Console
ServerManagerCmd -i Web-Basic-Auth
ServerManagerCmd -i Web-Windows-Auth
ServerManagerCmd -i Failover-Clustering (if Mailbox Server will be clustered)

Client Access Server

You don't need a separate command for every component. Instead you can write every component you need separated with space.

ServerManagerCmd -i PowerShell Web-Server Web-ISAPI-Ext Web-Metabase Web-Lgcy-Mgmt-Console Web-Basic-Auth Web-Digest-Auth Web-Windows-Auth Web-Dyn-Compression RPC-over-HTTP-proxy

Unified Messaging

ServerManagerCmd -i PowerShell
ServerManagerCmd -i Desktop-Experience (audio/video codecs required by UM)

Exchange Server 2007 SP1 Update Rollup 5

Update Rollup 5 resolves some important issues in combination Windows 2008/Exchange 2007.

Here are some of more important updates:

• Exchange 2007 CAS cannot copy the OAB from the OAB share on Windows Server 2008-based Exchange 2007 CCR clusters (KB954197)
• The OAB generation is unsuccessful and Event IDs 9328 and 9373 are logged in the Application log in a Windows Server 2008-based Exchange 2007 Single-Copy cluster environment (KB957978)
• Exchange Server 2007 Update Rollup 3 does not update the Outlook Web Access Logon.aspx file after you modify the file (KB956582)

Complete list of included updates: Description of Update Rollup 5 for Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1 (KB953467).

The Christmas Wish!

At the moment there is no build in exchange-aware backup solution in Windows Server 2008. We are still waiting for VSS-based plug-in for Windows Server Backup! Ultimate (and cheap) backup solution at the moment is of course Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager!

Gift!

Well... it's not from me but anyway... :) Here is a free copy of Windows PowerShell Workbook: Server Administration!

Did you try to backup Hyper-V Virtual Machines with Windows Server backup and received Event ID 521 error on Hyper-V host?

Backup started at '7.10.2008 23:21:14' failed as Volume Shadow copy operation failed for backup volumes with following error code '2155348129'. Please rerun backup once issue is resolved.

 Event ID 12302 error on guest computer?

Volume Shadow Copy Service error: An internal inconsistency was detected in trying to contact shadow copy service writers.  Please check to see that the Event Service and Volume Shadow Copy Service are operating properly.

Result of running vssadmin list writers command is empty?

Event ID 10102 error appears in Microsoft-Windows-Hyper-V-VMMS/Admin Event Log?

Failed to create the backup of virtual machine 'GUEST01'. (Virtual machine ID 0FBA408B-B269-4169-9278-EC650FEEBB1B)

Solution resides in the registry ;).

Fix VSS Event ID 12302 on Hyper-v guests

In order to get rid off Event ID 12302 on Virtual Machines you need to follow the following procedure:

• Backup registry key:
  HKLM\Software\Microsoft\EventSystem\{26c409cc-ae86-11d1-b616-00805fc79216}\Subscriptions
  
  
  
• Delete registry key Subscriptions.
• Restart Virtual Machine (key will be regenerated after restart).
• Verify that vssadmin list writers command returns valid list of writers.
  
  

 Enable Hyper-V VSS Writer with Windows Server Backup

In order to enable VSS backups of Hyper-V Virtual Machines, you need to add the following registry keys and String Value to enable Hyper-V VSS Writer with Windows Server Backup on Hyper-V host.

Key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\
WindowsServerBackup\Application Support\{66841CD4-6DED-4F4B-8F17-FD23F8DDC3DE}

String Value:

Name: Application Identifier
Type: REG_SZ
Value: Hyper-V

Also check that Hotfix KB956697 (Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V VSS writer is not used during a backup job because of corrupted or invalid virtual machine configuration files.) is installed!

Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008

I also have great news for all Hyper-V lovers. Microsoft released Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008! The best thing about it is that it's FREE! Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 is a stripped version of Windows Server 2008 Core and contains only Windows Hypervisor, Windows Server driver model and virtualization components.

Microsoft® Hyper-V™ Server 2008 is a stand-alone product that provides a simplified, reliable, cost-effective and optimized virtualization solution enabling organizations to improve server utilization and reduce costs. It allows organizations to consolidate workloads onto a single physical server and is a good solution for organizations who want a basic and simplified virtualization solution for consolidating servers as well as for development and test environments. Low utilization infrastructure workloads, departmental applications and simple branch office workloads are also candidates to virtualize using Hyper-V Server 2008.

Links:

• Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 Home Page
• Download Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 (English)

This guide describes important tuning parameters and settings that can result in improved performance for the Windows Server 2008 operating system. Each setting and its potential effect are described to help you make an informed judgment about its relevance to your system, workload, and performance goals.

This information applies for the Windows Server 2008 operating system.

What's New:

• Added "Power Guidelines" under Server Hardware section and added "Performance Tuning for Virtualization Servers" section.

Included in this paper:

• Performance Tuning for Server Hardware
• Performance Tuning for Networking Subsystem
• Performance Tuning for Storage Subsystem
• Performance Tuning for Web Servers
• Performance Tuning for File Servers
• Performance Tuning for Active Directory Servers
• Performance Tuning for Terminal Server
• Performance Tuning for Terminal Server Gateway
• Performance Tuning for Virtualization Servers
• Performance Tuning for File Server Workload (NetBench)
• Performance Tuning for Network Workload (NTttcp)
• Performance Tuning for Terminal Server Knowledge Worker Workload
• Performance Tuning for SAP Sales and Distribution Two-Tier Workload

Download: Performance Tuning Guidelines for Windows Server 2008 White Paper

Nick MacKechnie posted a great post about Hyper-V maximum supported configurations.

Topics:

• Operating System Requirements
• Hardware Requirements
• Virtual Machine Architecture Support
• Memory
• Processors
• Networking
• Physical Storage
• Virtual Hard Disks
• Virtual Storage Controllers
• Virtual Storage
• Virtual CD/DVD
• Virtual Serial (COM) Ports
• Virtual Floppy Drive
• Number of Virtual Machines

There is one little trick you need to remember if you are migrating VHDs with Vista/Server 2008 that was previously created on Virtual PC or Virtual Server 2005.

Enable Detect HAL!

How to Enable Detect HAL?

1. Start the virtual machine and Run Msconfig.exe.
   
   
   
2. In the System Configuration dialog box, click the Boot tab, and then click Advanced Options.
3. In the BOOT Advanced Options dialog box, click to select the Detect HAL check box, and then click OK.
   
    
   
4. Click Yes to restart the virtual machine.
5. Clear the Detect HAL check box after reboot (it takes longer to boot).

Source: KB 954282 - The VMBus device does not load on a virtual machine that is running on a Windows Server 2008-based computer that has Hyper-V installed

Hyper-V RTM version is available for download. It came a little bit ahead of original (180 days) schedule.

• KB 950050 - Description of the update for the release version of the Hyper-V technology for Windows Server 2008
• Hyper-V Release Notes

Shows you how to make a virtual machine highly available. You will do this by creating a simple two-node cluster and a virtual machine, and then failing over the virtual machine from one node to the other.

Source: Step-by-Step Guide for Testing Hyper-V and Failover Clustering

Interesting post about Hyper-V and virtualizing MSDN and TechNet web sites at Microsoft.

Hi—I am Rob Emanuel from the Microsoft.com Operations team.  For those of you who may not know what we do, our group designs, deploys, manages and sustains highly available, highly scalable Web and SQL systems for Microsoft for some of the largest corporate web sites in the world (www.microsoft.com, Microsoft Update, Download Center, MSDN and TechNet).  Along with our team’s TechCenter, we maintain a blog on how we adopt our own products and share some of our real world experiences. 

For the last several months we have had the opportunity to focus on virtualizing both the MSDN and TechNet websites with Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V as a start to our overall virtualization adoption strategy. This was a group effort across our entire Operations Team including individuals from the Technical Architecture group I am part of, the System Engineers who run the sites, the data center hosting team which handles our infrastructure changes and the very supportive product group which is responsible for MSDN and TechNet.  Today we are very pleased to be able to share how Hyper-V was deployed for those two sites and our lessons learned through that process.  We have written an article on the TechCenter which goes through how we approached virtualizing MSDN and TechNet and hopefully conveys how successful we found Hyper-V to be as a web platform.

The article covers the reasons and characteristics which made MSDN the first site we looked to move onto Hyper-V.   It provides an overview of how both Hyper-V Beta and Hyper-V RC0 were deployed as well as the general architecture used for the deployment.   Possibly the most surprising finding was that Hyper-V was far more stable than we had expected for a beta version deployment.  There was in fact no difference we found in stability or availability between Hyper-V and a physical deployment!  We were also not able to identify any bugs for the Hyper-V team during our deployment under either full production load or even stress load.

...

Source: MSDN and TechNet Powered by Hyper-V