Windows Server Administration

Just a quick one, Microsoft have released a White Paper on Windows Server 2008 R2 & Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 – Hyper-V Live Migration Overview & Architecture.

If you are using Hyper-V or are considering using it then grab this and have a read. Grab it here…..

Another day another Hyper-V expierience. This time a good one !!.

After reading Virtual PC guy’s article on the Import and Export feature of Hyper-V I thought I would give this a go. I needed to move 2 Exchange 2007 Servers, one holding the Mailstore Role and the other the Hub Transport Role, from one Hyper-V Server to another. Let me say if you ever need to do this then this way is a MUST.

First shutdown the current Virtual Machine, Select it in the “Virtual Machines” window, then on the right hand side you will see a link that say export. Click that and you will then need to select an Export Path, in my case C:\export. After you click OK a folder will be created inside that export folder and it will be the same name as the Virtual Machine that you are exporting.
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OK Here we go back in the swing of things and the first server I am going to “Virtualize” is an Exchange 2007 Server that holds the Edge Server Role. After Reading this article it all seemed fairly straight forward. How wrong I was !!! Here is what I did that led me to this unwanted ERROR “The Exchange Server is in an inconsistant state” when I was trying to install the Edge Transport Role on the new Hyper-V Virtual Server.

The first thing that needed to be done was an export of the current server configuration using, as Microsoft calls it, “cloned configuration tasks”. There is a folder located in the install directory of Exchange, generally C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\ called “Scripts”. Inside there are 2 Powershell Scripts that you will need.

They are ExportEdgeConfig.ps1 and ImportEdgeConfig.ps1.

To capture the configuration we need to run the ExportEdgeConfig.ps1 script in the Exchange Management Shell like so:

./ExportEdgeConfig -CloneConfigData:”C:\CloneConfigData.xml”

NOTE: Make Sure you run the Exchange Management Shell as Administrator (right click > Run As Administrator)
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First of all HAPPY NEW YEAR to everyone.

Well the new year is upon us all and for me I got back to the daily grind 5 days ago, Grrr. What awaited me on my return was 96 Desktop Computers to unpack and pack up the old ones ready to return !!! I hate this time of year. We are now heading for a number of 40 degree day here in Melbourne so I will be sweating it out this week. I hope you all had a good break (if you got one!!), I sure enjoyed my couple of weeks that I spent camping in Merimbula. My kids and wife had a great time, it was great to get away from the computer screen for a couple of weeks that is for sure.

I have a couple of new servers arriving in a week or so, so I will be stepping up my migration of Physical Servers to Virtual ones using Hyper-V. I will be letting you know how that goes and how I think the best way of going about this is. I would be interested to know how others have gone about this and their thoughts on Hyper-V.

There will be quite a few posts coming on Virtualization and the like as this is an area that I am moving toward and stacks of people in our industry are certainly looking at. MAKE SURE you pop your Name and Email Address into the ORANGE box on the right so you don’t miss the Windows Server 2008 Administrator Tips Newsletter.