baeke.info

Microsoft: Windows Server 2008 RODC Compatibility Pack

rastix — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 17:02:14 +0200

From Jorge's Quest For Knowledge I learned that there is a compatibility pack for Windows Server 2003 and XP clients that are deployed in conjunction with Read-Only Domain Controllers (RODCs). Because an RODC is read-only, several functions might not work as expected and those are described in KB article 944043.

Server Core: CoreConfigurator Updated

rastix — Tue, 20 May 2008 23:16:04 +0200

CoreConfigurator is a great tool to easily configure Windows Server Core using a simple GUI. The CoreConfigurator tool has now been updated with a couple of new functions:

Windows Update configuration
Windows Server Backup performance setting: full or incremental backups

Download the new version here.

IE7 on Vista Troubles

rastix — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 00:55:47 +0200

After redirecting the Favorites folder on Vista to a different location I could not save a link in my favorites. It turns out you have to run the following command:

icacls "path_to_new_favorites_folder" /setintegritylevel (OI)(CI)low

This has something to do with IE in protected mode and the integrity levels that were introduced in Vista.

I also found out that I could not print a web page. To solve that I had to create a directory called low under my temp folder and also set the integritylevel with the icacls command.

Want some extra features for Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services?

rastix — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 23:40:19 +0200

Check out PowerTerm WebConnect for WS08 if you want some extra features for Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services for free:

Ability to publish multiple applications from multiple terminal servers in one step.
Ability to publish applications to specific users and groups.
A web interface with single sign-on that only shows your published applications (and not all of them like in Windows Server 2008)

Note that WebConnect is not completely free. When you download the installation package you actually install the full version. After 30 days, only the free features remain with some limitations. More information about these limitations can be found here.

Quickies

rastix — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 21:56:55 +0100

Microsoft released the Microsoft Remote Server Administration Tools for Windows Vista with SP1. Download the correct version for your operating system: x86 | x64
They also released an update to enable remote management of Hyper-V RC0: x86 | x64
If you did not take a look at Hyper-V yet, now is a good time. The release candidate works a lot better than the beta. I installed it on a quad core box with 8GB of RAM and it is quite fast. And with support for Vista SP1 and Windows XP SP3 it is much more useful especially as a test environment.
You don't like to configure Windows Server 2008 Server Core using the command line? Then this is something for you: CoreConfigurator.
If you want to setup your own ESX 3.5 (or 3i) server, take a look at the ASUS P5BV-SAS motherboard. It comes with an LSI Logic 1068 RAID controller, built-in VGA and supported network cards (2x 1Gb). I plugged in a quad core Intel CPU, 8GB of RAM and 4 500GB SATA disks. ESX installs perfectly on this box and the performance is quite good!

Want some good articles about Windows Server Core?

rastix — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 15:27:06 +0100

Check out the following blog: The things that are better left unspoken. Lots of good Server Core info about IP configuration, page files, remote desktop and more.

Go check it out already!

Windows Server 2008: Sample sysprep unattend file

rastix — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 14:51:53 +0100

If you are testing Windows Server 2008 in a virtual environment you probably get tired of answering setup prompts after each new template gets deployed. Although you can use sysprep as with Windows Server 2003, the answer file for sysprep has changed quite a bit.

The answer file is now an XML file instead of an INF file. In the past, you could generate the answer file with setupmgr.exe but that cannot be done with Windows Server 2008. Instead, you will need to use Windows System Image Manager to create the XML file. Windows System Image Manager is part of WAIK and can be downloaded here. Although much more powerful, Windows System Image Manager is not as easy to use as setupmgr.exe.

The XML file I generated with Windows System Image Manager is very basic but enough to do the job of automating sysprep. Here it is for x86 and nl-be regional settings:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<unattend xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:unattend">
    <settings pass="specialize">
        <component name="Microsoft-Windows-Shell-Setup" processorArchitecture="x86" publicKeyToken="31bf3856ad364e35" language="neutral" versionScope="nonSxS" xmlns:wcm="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WMIConfig/2002/State" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
            <ComputerName>*</ComputerName>
            <ProductKey>AAAAA-BBBBB-CCCCC-DDDDD-EEEEE</ProductKey>
            <RegisteredOrganization>Org</RegisteredOrganization>
            <RegisteredOwner>Org</RegisteredOwner>
            <ShowWindowsLive>false</ShowWindowsLive>
        </component>
        <component name="Microsoft-Windows-Security-Licensing-SLC-UX" processorArchitecture="x86" publicKeyToken="31bf3856ad364e35" language="neutral" versionScope="nonSxS" xmlns:wcm="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WMIConfig/2002/State" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
            <SkipAutoActivation>true</SkipAutoActivation>
        </component>
    </settings>
    <settings pass="oobeSystem">
        <component name="Microsoft-Windows-International-Core" processorArchitecture="x86" publicKeyToken="31bf3856ad364e35" language="neutral" versionScope="nonSxS" xmlns:wcm="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WMIConfig/2002/State" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
            <InputLocale>nl-be</InputLocale>
            <SystemLocale>nl-be</SystemLocale>
            <UILanguage>en-us</UILanguage>
            <UserLocale>nl-be</UserLocale>
        </component>
        <component name="Microsoft-Windows-Shell-Setup" processorArchitecture="x86" publicKeyToken="31bf3856ad364e35" language="neutral" versionScope="nonSxS" xmlns:wcm="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WMIConfig/2002/State" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
            <OOBE>
                <HideEULAPage>true</HideEULAPage>
                <NetworkLocation>Work</NetworkLocation>
                <ProtectYourPC>1</ProtectYourPC>
                <SkipUserOOBE>true</SkipUserOOBE>
            </OOBE>
            <RegisteredOrganization>Org</RegisteredOrganization>
            <RegisteredOwner>Org</RegisteredOwner>
        </component>
    </settings>
</unattend>

To actually use this XML file, you copy it to your template. I copied mine as sysprep.xml to c:\windows\system32\sysprep. That is the folder on a Windows Server 2008 system where sysprep.exe is located by default. From that location, you execute the following command:

sysprep /generalize /oobe /shutdown /unattend:sysprep.xml

The system will shut down. The next time you start this system (or better a copy of it), it will ask you nothing and install with the settings in the XML file. The computername will be automatically generated.

Update: if you want to use this unattend file on an x64 system, replace x86 with amd64.

Windows Integrity Levels

rastix — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 15:46:48 +0100

Windows Integrity Levels (or WIC) is a system that can label an object with an integrity level. There are six such levels:

Trusted Installer
System
High
Medium
Low
Untrusted

WIC is available on Vista and Windows Server 2008.

Mark Minasi has an interesting article about it and a tool that allows you to work with these levels. The tool, chml, has more options than the built-in icacls.exe command. Check out the article here.

Microsoft: XP SP3 RC and Windows Server 2008 RC1

rastix — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 21:34:45 +0100

Microsoft have released XP SP3 Release Candidate (RC) and Windows Server 2008 RC1. You can download both from MSDN and Technet.

Windows XP SP3 contains mainly bugfixes and a lot of previously released enhancements for XP like MMC 3.0, MSXML 6, BITS 2.5 and WPA2. There are some new features as well:

Network Access Protection (NAP): also available in Vista and enforced using Windows Server 2008 infrastructure such as DHCP and NAP.
Windows Product Activation: it is not necessary to provide a product key during installation of a full, integrated installation of Windows XP SP3.

More information can be found here.

A feature that is not available is SSTP or Secure Socket Tunneling Protocol. Next to PPTP and LT2P/IPSec it is a VPN protocol but all traffic is tunneled through an SSL connection over port 443. Windows Server 2008 RRAS provides the server-side of SSTP tunneling and Vista SP1 contains the SSTP client portion. But XP SP3 does not seem to contain this feature yet.

Windows Server 2008 RC1 has one big new feature called Group Policy Preferences. Kurt Roggen has already blogged about it here and his blogpost clearly shows what the feature can do. Other info can be found on the Windows Server Division Weblog.

IT Forum 2007: First Day

rastix — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 19:44:56 +0100

I am at IT Forum Barcelona this week where today's sessions have just finished. It started with the keynote by Bob Kelly where a couple of things were announced and talked about. Of course, virtualization is still a big thing and an announcement was made that Windows Server Virtualization will be called Hyper-V. The role will be named like that but it will also be a separate product "Hyper-V Server". Not many details right now though.

Microsoft is really trying to focus on different levels of virtualization and they are repeating it in all sessions about it. The focus is on 4 levels of virtualization:

Server Virtualization (Virtual Server and Hyper-V)
Application Virtualization (SoftGrid or now to be called Microsoft Application Virtualization with the 4.5 beta)
Presentation Virtualization (TS, TS RemoteApp, TS Gateway)
Desktop Virtualization (Virtual PC; to solve app-to-os issues)

But the big thing according to Microsoft is of course managing the virtualized environment with their System Center products. During the keynote, but also during another session (Virtualization 360), System Center Virtual Machine Manager was demoed. They already have a build where the Hyper-V name is used and they also had a couple of ESX 3i servers in the Hosts pane. According to Microsoft, somewhere next year, you will be able to manage your VMware servers as you do with VirtualCenter, including live migrations and so on.

Microsoft needs to focus on the bigger picture because they are still behind when it comes to server virtualization. We have Windows Server Virtualization running in our labs and it really is not that great yet. So focussing on management issues and other virtualization technologies is what keeps them going for now.

Some other things that were shown during the keynote were SQL Sever 2008 and SCCM (System Center Configuration Manager 2007). A new November CTP of SQL 2008 will be available with almost all features. Some of the nicer features are the resource governor, policy-based management (can be tied into SCOM 2007) and a revamped report designer tool.

The SSCM demo mainly focussed on server deployment with add-on tools from Dell to change things like BIOS settings with just a few clicks.

The last part of the keynote showed another great enterprise technology, Windows Home Server ;-). It looks ok but really targetted to the average consumer that wants a home server with some backup capabilities.

Windows Essential Business Server

rastix — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 18:02:02 +0100

Previously code-named "Centro", Windows Essential Business Server is a new integrated multiserver solution designed for midsize businesses. The product is based on Windows Server 2008 and it combines software for management, messaging and security.

The products that are in the solution are Windows Server 2008 with Active Directory Domain Services, Microsoft System Center Essentials, Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, Microsoft Forefront Security for Exchange Server and Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration Server (ISA). Those are just for the Standard edition. The Premium edition also includes Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Standard Edition.

Like Small Business Server, the product should be cheaper than buying the separate licenses and administration should be a lot simpler from one unified console. Especially the addition of System Center Essentials is interesting because it allows the administrator to more effectively manage the infrastructure. For more info about System Center Essentials go here. Also check out this intro video here.

You can find the Microsoft PressPass announcement here. You can also see the product in action at IT-Forum in Barcelona next week. I am going to IT Forum so I definitely will have a look.

DHCP: Callout DLL for MAC address filtering

rastix — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 15:30:01 +0200

If you want to filter out DHCP requests to DHCP Server based on MAC addresses, check out the Microsoft Windows DHCP Team Blog. Interesting add-on that should work on Windows Server 2003 and 2008.

Windows Server 2008: Failover Clustering with iSCSI

rastix — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 20:17:38 +0200

Creating a failover cluster with iSCSI disks is quite simple but there is one thing you need to be sure of: support for persistent reservations by your iSCSI target. I tried to create a failover cluster with iSCSI disks served off an OpenFiler target but that did not work.

But how do you know it will not work? Well, the good thing is that Windows Server 2008 has a Cluster Validation tool that will tell you if your configuration is supported. Click the images below to see parts of the validation tool.

Select the servers to verify:

You can select the tests to run:

The validation tool is part of the Failover Cluster Management console that will be available to you when you install the Failover Clustering feature.

After it became clear that OpenFiler was not going to work, I switched to RocketDivision's StarWind iSCSI Target for Microsoft Windows. I downloaded the 30 days trial because the free version does not support clusters. The iSCSI target works fine with Microsoft's iSCSI Initiator in Windows Server 2008 and it supports everything that is needed to create a failover cluster.

As the iSCSI target server, I used my laptop that runs Vista. I only needed small iSCSI disks so I created file-backed iSCSI disks with the mkimage.exe tool (part of StarWind). You create a disk file with the following command:

mkimage -sparse c:\image.img 1G

After you create the disk file, you need to "publish" it so you can connect to them using iSCSI. You do this by editing the starwind.cfg file (in c:\program files\rocket division software\starwind). In the <devices> section, add the following:

<device name="ImageFile0" file="c:\image.img" asyncmode="yes" clustered="yes"/>

After you save the file, stop and start the StarWind service.

Now you can present the disk to your Windows Server 2008 servers:

Open Control Panel.
Double click the iSCSI Initator icon and answer the questions that come (to start the service etc...).
In iSCSI Initator properties:

In the Discovery tab, add the target portal (in my case, that is my Vista laptop).
In the Targets tab, click Refresh. You should see the iSCSI targets offered by StarWind. Click each target and click the Log on... button. Make sure you set the option to automatically restore the connection when the computer starts.

Close iSCSI Initiator properties (click OK).
In Disk Management (diskmgmt.msc) you should see an extra disk (not initialized yet)

To continue, make sure that the Failover Clustering feature is installed on each node. From Server Manager, select Features and then click Add Features. Select the Failover Clustering feature.

After installing the Failover Clustering feature, you can start Failover Cluster Management from Start / Administrative Tools. You can now create the cluster and add services and applications.

Watch out: if you do not initialize the disk, the cluster will be created as a Node Majority cluster and not as a Node and Disk Majority cluster. To create a Node and DIsk majority cluster, on one node, initialize and format the iSCSI disk as NTFS.

The screenshot below shows the management console (with some services configured). Click the image to enlarge.

I am not showing how to create the cluster because they really made this child's play. It was not that difficult before, but now it is even simpler.

Now you have a quick and easy way to create a Windows Server 2008 cluster for testing and evaluation of the features. Have fun!

Windows Server 2008: SSTP

rastix — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 18:48:24 +0200

SSTP or Secure Socket Tunneling Protocol is a new type of VPN connection that uses port 443. SSTP is part of Windows Server 2008 RRAS (Routing and Remote Access). On the client side, you need Vista SP1.

The setup is very simple. Just setup RRAS on Windows Server 2008 and follow the wizard. When you setup the VPN, ports will be created for PPTP, L2TP and SSTP:

The RRAS wizard does not help you with the required certificate. It does not matter how you get the certificate (online CA, public CA, ...) but you need to make sure you store the certificate in the Computer store (Personal):

On the client side, make sure that the computer (not the user) recognizes the SSTP certificate. If you used your own CA, make sure that the CA certificate is in the Trusted Roots store of the computer. Then make a new VPN connection and select SSTP in the Networking tab:

That's it. You can now establish a VPN connection using only port 443 and forget about those typical NAT problems with IPSec VPNs or PPTP passthough issues.

Windows Server 2008: Terminal Services and Desktop Experience

rastix — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 14:45:15 +0200

If you would like to publish applications with Windows Server 2008 and you would like to have the Windows Vista look and feel, take a look below.

You can get access to a published application from an .rdp file or from an .msi but in this case, I made the application available using TS Web Access:

When the user goes to the TS Web Access page and clicks the icon, a few dialogs will pop up because you have to authenticate. After that, Paint should appear in a seamless window like below:

This is fine but I would like the Vista look and feel because my client runs Vista. This is very simple to accomplish:

On the Terminal Server, set the Themes service to automatic and start it.
Force the Aero theme with a Group Policy: the setting is in User Configuration / Administrative Templates / Control Panel / Display / Desktop Themes and the setting is called: Load a specific visual style file or force Windows Classic. Then set the path to the theme file. It is %windir%\resources\Themes\aero\aero.msstyles.

When a user starts the Paint application from TS Web Access he/she will now get:

At first, I thought I had to install the Desktop Experience feature of Windows Server 2008 but that feature just adds client programs such as Windows Calendar, Mail, Photo Gallery etc...

As an additional tip: if you are trying this yourself and you use Windows Server 2008 RC0 or higher, make sure that you use Vista SP1 beta or Windows Server 2008 as the client for TS Web Access. For more info see this.

Windows Server 2008: Granular password policies revisited

rastix — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 15:15:08 +0200

In a previous article, I already talked about the granular password policies of Windows Server 2008. At that time they were a bit difficult to create because you needed to do it the hard way with adsiedit or ldp. It has gotten a lot simpler now with the Quest PowerShell cmdlets for Active Directory. It is a collection of cmdlets for querying Active Directory and creating new objects such as users and groups. On top of that, there are cmdlets for creating password settings objects (PSOs) to implement the granular password policies.

Active Directory Explorer v1.0

rastix — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 15:15:05 +0200

On the Sysinternals page over at Microsoft, there's a new tool called Active Directory Explorer. You could describe it as ADSIEDIT on steroids. An interesting feature is the ability to save snapshots of Active Directory and compare them. A similar snapshot feature will also be part of Windows Server 2008. A nice overview of the Windows Server 2008 snapshot feature can be found here.

Get Active Directory Explorer v1.0 .

Running 32-bit ASP.NET on x64

rastix — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 10:22:14 +0200

As part of a business intelligence project, a web service was created on a 32-bit development machine that had to be installed on an x64 system. Installing the web service with IIS running in 64-bit mode and ASP.NET 64-bit worked but the web service threw an error when the .asmx was requested.

To get something like this to work, you have an option: force IIS6 on x64 to run in 32-bit mode. I am not saying that this is the way to go but only that it is possible. ;-)

The steps you have to perform:

Make the worker process (w3wp.exe) run in 32-bit:
cscript adsutil.vbs set w3svc/AppPools/Enable32bitAppOnWin64 1
(adsutil is in c:\inetpub\adminscripts)
Install ASP.NET on IIS with the 32-bit version of aspnet_regiis.exe from C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727. Use the -i switch. You need to remove the 64-bit version before proceeding.

More info on aspnet_regiis.exe.

Windows Server 2008: Installation on VMware ESX 3.0

rastix — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 13:54:01 +0200

The latest community preview (post beta 3) installs without issues on VMware ESX 3.0. Previously, you needed a driver for the cd-rom but that seems to have been fixed. When you create your virtual machine, be sure to select Windows Vista. This will ensure that the VMware Tools install properly. You need to install the tools because you won't have network connectivity without them.

I also installed Windows Server Core on ESX 3.0. To install the VMware Tools, use the following command:

msiexec.exe /i "<path to VMware Tools.msi>" /qn

The above command worked perfectly for me. It will reboot your server core machine automatically. After the reboot, you can configure your network interface with the netsh.exe command.

Windows Server 2008: June CTP

rastix — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 08:13:59 +0200

The June CTP of Windows Server 2008 is available. This is a post beta 3 release and has a couple of new features. The most noteworthy new feature is the availabilty of the web server role (IIS 7) on a Windows Server 2008 core installation. More info about that here. You should know that not all features of IIS 7 are supported. For example, ASP.NET is not supported so you cannot have something like Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 on a server core installation.

Windows Server 2008: Session Broker Load Balancing

rastix — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 07:59:06 +0200

On brianmadden.com, there's a great article about the new session broker in Windows Server 2008. It is written by Michel Roth and can be found here. It's written really well so you will have a direct understanding of the new features.

Kerberos: tutorial about Apache and Windows 2000/2003 Kerberos authentication

rastix — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 16:42:54 +0200

Just like IIS, Apache can be configured to offer Kerberos authentication to the browser. Unlike IIS, it takes a bit more work to configure it. But this tutorial is great if you want the practical details and gain an understanding about how it works: http://www.grolmsnet.de/kerbtut/.

For an introduction to Kerberos, check out The Moron's Guide to Kerberos.

DPM 2007: Recovering Exchange data

rastix — Sun, 03 Jun 2007 23:17:12 +0200

To recover Exchange data with DPM, you first need to select a recovery point. The Recovery section of the management console contains a handy calendar to select such a recovery point. Every bolded date contains recovery points:

Most of the time, you will need to recover user data on the mailbox level instead of the entire database. You first select a time to go to (usually not Latest) and with a double click on the name of the database, the mailboxes in the database are shown. You can then right click on a user and select Recover... to start the wizard-driven process. The options in the wizard are simple and usually you will recover to an Exchange server database in a recovery storage group:

DPM does not create the recovery storage group for you so you need to create one using PowerShell cmdlets or the Exchange Server 2007 Troubleshooting Assistant. If you use Exchange Server 2003, you just create the recovery storage group with the Exchange System Manager. In the screenshot above, you can see I restore to a database called Mailbox Database in a recovery storage group called RSG. When you reach the end of the wizard and start the recovery, you can switch to the Monitoring section to check the recovery status.

NOTE: don't think that because you restore on the mailbox level that you can get a PST. The DPM restore is always a mailbox database (edb) and log files. You need to use Exchange tools to get a PST if you wish.

When the database is restored, the work in DPM is finished. You now need to use Exchange tools to mount the database in the recovery storage group and recover the mailbox data. A few options are available:

You can use the Troubleshooting Assistant (Exchange 2007) to merge the content of the user's restored mailbox with his current mailbox.
You can use the restore-mailbox cmdlet (Exchange 2007) to copy the user's restored mailbox to a subfolder of another mailbox.
You can use ExMerge 2003 (Exchange 2003) to do the same as restore-mailbox or to export to a pst file.

The restore-mailbox cmdlet works like this:

restore-mailbox -id "Administrator" -RSGDatabase "RSG\Mailbox Database" -RSGMailbox "Geert Baeke" -TargetFolder "geba"

The above command restores the mailbox of Geert Baeke (in the Mailbox Database of RSG) to the live mailbox of Administrator in a subfolder called geba:

Conclusion

It is very easy to recover Exchange 2003/2007 data with DPM 2007. I only touched on recovery of individual mailboxes but there are other possibilities like restoring entire mailbox databases to the original location, to a network folder and so on. The keyword here is flexibility!!! Later posts will show how to recovery data from other workloads like SharePoint and SQL Server.

DPM 2007: Protecting Exchange 2003/2007

rastix — Sun, 03 Jun 2007 16:56:08 +0200

Yesterday, I installed DPM 2007 in our lab environment. Today, it is time to try out the protection features for Exchange 2003 and 2007.

Obviously, I don't have access to a tape library in our virtual environment so I configured DPM with one disk for the storage pool. I created a 30GB disk and added it to the storage pool. That is done in the Management section of the management console (click to enlarge):

When you add a disk, it is wiped clean and cannot be used for anything else. Make sure that you provide an empty disk to DPM. At first, I provided a disk formatted with NTFS thinking that DPM would wipe it. On that disk however, there was no space for protection.

After that, I deployed agents to an Exchange 2003 virtual machine and an Exchange 2007 virtual machine (click to enlarge):

A reboot is required because the agent includes a storage filter driver. The storage filter driver is used to create a bitmap of changed blocks on disk. That information is then used during the creation of express full backups. More about that later.

You don't have to deploy the agent from the console. You can deploy the agent with Group Policy, SMS, script or put it in your unattended server installation.

To protect Exchange (or anything else for that matter), you need to create a protection group. You just click Create Protection Group... in the Protection section of the management console. In the wizard that follows you first select the group members. Depending on the role of the server, you will be able to select what to backup. In the case of Exchange 2003/2007, the screen looks like this (click to enlarge):

Next, you have to select the kind of protection you want (to disk, to tape, to disk/to tape):

Because I protect Exchange servers, an Exchange specific question is asked: "Run Eseutil to check data integrity?". When you do that, eseutil will be run on the DPM server to verify the backups. You need to copy the required binaries to the DPM server if you want to do that.

Next, you need to set short-term objectives:

In this example, I retain backups for 21 days. Every 15 minutes, a synchronization will occur. For Exchange, this results in copying the transaction logs to the DPM server. If you observe the screenshot, you can see that an express full backup is also created every day at 0:00. An express full is a full backup in the sense that you have all the data but it is not a real full because not all data is copied accross every time you take a backup. Instead, only the changes are sent from the source server to DPM. With an express full every day and recovery points (transaction logs) every 15 minutes you have a lot of recovery points to revert to in case something goes wrong.

Based on the number of recovery points, the wizard will propose disk allocation for protection:

You need an initial copy of the protected data. You can let DPM do this for you or you can make a copy yourself and transfer the data using removable media. That last option is useful if you have a slow link. I let DPM make the copy and finished the wizard. In the protection section, you can now see what you are protecting:

After a while, the replica creation will finish and the protection status should be set to OK. In the Monitoring section, you get a nice overview of the jobs past, running and scheduled:

In a next post, I will talk a bit about recovering Exchange data.

Installation of DPM 2007 Beta 2

rastix — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 19:37:07 +0200

Today, I decided to install DPM 2007 beta 2 in our virtual lab environment (VI3) at Xylos. I downloaded the x64 version from http://connect.microsoft.com (over 1,3GB) and deployed a new Windows Server 2003 R2 x64 virtual machine with enough storage to hold backups for the lab servers. The lab servers are running Exchange Server 2003 and 2007, SQL 2005 and SharePoint 2007. There is even a Windows Server 2008 server that I use as a Terminal Services gateway so I can include that server in the backups as well.

Before you start the DPM 2007 installation, install Windows Server 2003 SP2 because it is a prerequisite. During installation, DPM 2007 will automatically install the .NET Framework 2.0. After that, the setup wizard will launch. After the Welcome screen further prerequisites will be checked:

PowerShell is required so I installed it while keeping the setup wizard open. After a click on the Check Again button, the Next button became available to continue. The download comes with the SQL 2005 sources and the setup routine can install a SQL Server 2005 instance for DPM called MS$DPMv2Beta2$. You can also select an existing SQL Server 2005 if you wish.

DPM creates a few accounts and you need to specify the password for these accounts:

The installation can then start by installing IIS 6.0 (best to use Windows Server 2003 x64 sources with SP2 integrated), the single instace store filter, Windows PowerShell (already done), SQL 2005 SP2 and in the end DPM 2007 itself:

The installation of DPM failed when creating the databases. After removing DPM, rebooting and retrying the installation, it worked.

DPM creates two shortcuts on the desktop:

When I started the console, I got a message to restart the computer (a bit weird, why not after installation?). After that, the console worked fine. In a few next blog posts, I will describe a bit how DPM works with several different workloads.

New beta of Windows Live Writer with SharePoint support

rastix — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 15:42:32 +0200

There is a new beta version of Windows Live Writer available. In addition to cosmetic changes Windows Live Writer now supports SharePoint 2007 blogs as well. You can also use Word 2007 for blogging to SharePoint but on my system Word 2007 does not accept an https address. No problem with Windows Live Writer so I am now using it as the primary tool for blogging to SharePoint.

Check it out here.

System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 Beta 2 is live

rastix — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 14:00:15 +0200

Beta 2 is live. The beta download is quite large (over 1GB) and is available in x86 and x64 editions. For an overview and download links, check out this page.

Microsoft: Data Protection Manager 2007 Beta 2

rastix — Mon, 28 May 2007 22:22:51 +0200

Beta 2 of DPM 2007 should be available from May 31st. DPM 2007 supports more Microsoft applications than before including Exchange 2003/2007, SharePoint, Virtual Server 2005 R2 and SQL Server. Of course, as before, DPM can also protect file servers.

What's new in beta 2?

Longhorn file erver support (Windows Server 2008)
Protection for Active Directory and System State
Protection for SharePoint 2003/2007: with options for site and site collection recovery from the full backup
Protection for Windows XP/Vista desktops
Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1: consistent inside and outside the VHD with Windows Server 2003 SP1 guests and new virtual machine additions
Agent installation using SMS, Group Policy, WSUS or pre-installed in the operating system
Media encryption
PowerShell support

The Virtual Server 2005 R2 support is interesting because you can make a consistent backup of a virtual machine of both the virtual machine's disks and the data inside the virtual machine. The NTFS filesystem inside the virtual machine will be consistent, SQL Server databases, Exchange databases etc...

For more information about the upcoming beta 2, you should check out this webcast.

Changes in functionality from Windows Server 2003 with Longhorn

rastix — Tue, 08 May 2007 15:56:58 +0200

This document contains a great overview of new features in Longhorn compared to Windows Server 2003 SP1. By reading it, you will probably find some stuff you did not know yet. For example, I did not know about the AD DS snapshot viewer, a mechanism to take snapshots of the Active Directory database that you can view with ldp.

Check it out!

Point and Print functionality on Vista

rastix — Fri, 04 May 2007 20:08:09 +0200

On the Ask the Performance Team blog there is a good post about point and print functionality of Windows Vista. Get the full details here.