Windows Server Administration

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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Continuing on with my Hyper-V Virtual Machine installations, I moved onto a Windows 2008 Print Server after yesterday I spoke about How To Migrate a Windows 2003 DHCP Server to a Windows 2008 Server. These virtuals are x64 based VM’s and as I found out after adding the Print Services Role to the server and then installing a printer to share and connecting to that printer from a 32bit XP Client the server didn’t have appropriate drivers installed and asked me to locate the driver files.

90% of my printers are HP ones so I went to the HP website and downloaded the most recent driver, it turns out they have a “HP Universal PCL 6″ driver. Now this driver appears to do, as the name suggests, provide the correct drivers to all HP Printers!.

To get the x86 drivers onto the x64 Windows 2008 Server you need to connect to the server from the x86 client and open up the printer and faxes share. THen from the File Menu select Server Properties, then from the Driver Tab add the x86 drivers that you downloaded, and they will then be uploaded to the server.

Another catch here is that both x86 and x64 drivers MUST have the same name. If they have the same name, they will appear automatically in additional drivers for both architectures in your printer’s sharing properties.

Well I got another Hyper-V host up and running today which will house a couple of VM on it, a Domain Controller which will also have DNS and DHCP installed and also a Print Server. I have set it up with 3 Logical Drives consisting of a Mirrored OS, Hardware Raid-10 for the VHD and Hyper-V data and another single drive that will have the Shadow Copies of the Raid-10 Volume on it.

The Install of the Active Directory Domain Services went great and obviously DNS was installed along the way. I also made this one a Global Catalog Server.

How To Migrate Windows 2003 DHCP to Windows 2008 DHCP Server

Next up was migrating the DHCP from the old Windows 2003 Server to this new box, below is how I did this:

First export the DHCP Database from the 2003 Server with the following command:

netsh dhcp server export C:\dhcp.txt all

Then copy that file to the new 2008 Server. Add the DHCP Server Role on the new box via Server Manager. Then with the following command import the dhcp database:

netsh dhcp server import C:\dhcp.txt all

Now when I did this I got this error “Error while importing option “6.” “This option conflicts with the existing option “” An Internal Error Occurred.”.

This was to do with the fact that while adding the DHCP Server Role to the new machine there were entries in the Server Options that were done automatically, once I went in and removed these options “006 DNS Servers” and “015 DNS Domain Name” and then re did the import with the string above everything went fine.

Next up Print Server. Subscribe to my RSS Feed so you can see how I managed this.

By the way there is a great article and script from John Howard that enables you to Configure Hyper-V Remote Management in Seconds.