Anthony's space

So this is my second attempt at testing the active directory schema update from Windows Server 2003 R2 schema to the Windows Server 2008 schema. The last time it did not go so well, I had some errors and they got replicated through the environment. This time I took a different approach to the migration.

The error message from the last attempt was Event ID 1136, and it was for two different attributes ms-FVE-Volume-Guid and ms-FVE-Recovery-Guid. A search on the web found the following solutions.

Testing Steps

Start the test environment and allow it to sync up after been off for a while. Use the following to resolve the event 2042 errors. Once everything was up and running I started the testing.

Compact the active directory database before starting the schema update, this was one of the solutions for the errors I saw the last time I did the upgrade test.

The next thing I did was disable the outbound replication from the domain controller holding the FSMO schema master using the "repadmin /options <SERVERNAME> +DISABLE_OUTBOUND_REPL" command.

Copy the adprep directory from the sources directory on the Windows Server 2008 DVD to the hard drive of the schema master domain controller.

Open a command prompt and start the schema update running the "adprep /forestprep" command from the directory that you copied to the domain controller. The logs for adprep are kept under the Windows directory, in my case it was in c:\windows\debug\adprep\logs.

Checking the directory services event log I was seeing the Event ID 1136 error again and it was occurring every 5 minutes. I checked the directory services event log on the other domain controllers and the domain controllers were not seeing the error messages.

Compact the active directory database again and see if this resolves the Event ID 1136 errors, it did not. Check the attribute that is causing the error (in this case it was ms-FVE-Volume-Guid) and using ADSI Edit change the searchFlags entry of the attribute to 0 and reboot the server.

After the reboot the error on ms-FVE-Volume-Guid attribute had stopped but an error had started for the ms-FVE-Recovery-Guid attribute. Once again I modified the searchFlags attribute to 0 and rebooted the server.

Enable the outbound replication using "repadmin /options <SERVERNAME> -DISABLE_OUTBOUND_REPL". Keep an eye on the directory services log, it was not showing the error after about an hour. Check all other domain controllers for errors.

Conclusion

I was able to resolve the errors that I had the last time I did a run through of the schema update.

The big saving this time was the disabling the outbound replication, in the environment I was able to get things right on the schema master before the changes get replicated to all the other domain controllers. In the production environment if things go badly once the replication is disabled there will be a safety net in place to allow the seizure of the schema master to another domain controller and re-installation of the domain controller without effecting the health of you forest schema.

There was another solution to the errors that I did not get a chance to do, it forces a schema cache update and that potentially could resolve the issue without having to use ADSI Edit to change the SearchFlag fields. I will do this run through again just to cover another method before performing the schema update in the live environment.

I have been a little quiet on the blog front for the last while, I now have an internal blog now as well and it is hard trying to do both blogs. Anyway today I did the "MCITP Windows Server 2008, Enterprise Administrator" the last of the Windows Server 2008 exams that I was planning on doing. It is the Windows Server 2008 equivalent of the MCSE. I passed and I am glad to have all the 2008 exams behind me now.

I might do the Virtualization exam down the road and some of the Systems Center exams when they are released but for the moment I am taking a break for a while.

Matthijs ten Seldam the man behind the VMRCPlus tool (the latest version is 1.8.0) is working on a Virtual Server to Hyper-V tool. He has not released it yet but it could be useful if you have loads of machines to migrate and won't to risk making a mistake in a configuration setting when migrating to Hyper-V.

Keep an eye out, it should be available soon enough.

At work I have a Virtual Server environment of over 20 machines across several host systems, with the RTM of Hyper-V I am looking at moving parts of the environment over to Hyper-V.  Not all my host systems are Hyper-V capable, so not all my virtual machines are going to be moved off Virtual Server.

On Hyper-V booting from SCSI is no longer supported (see point 10 and the links below), this could be a problem as some of my virtual machines were SCSI based (this was one of the recommendations for better performance on Virtual Server). I wanted to test what would happen when I moved from Virtual Server to Hyper-V.

Test 1 - No additions

I removed the virtual machine additions before moving the machine to the Hyper-V host. In order to add the machine the moved machine into Hyper-V, I had to recreate the machine the settings for the machine. This was no big deal. Configure the system from using a SCSI hard disk for booting to an IDE hard disk boot disk.

Start the machine. The machine starts with the error "At least one service or driver failed during system startup. Use Event Viewer to examine the event log for details."

After logging in the "Found New hardware Wizard" pops, install the Hyper-V integrations by inserting the Integrations ISO (CTRL - I). You are warned that the HAL needs to be updated and then the system reboots.

After the reboot, the integrations install resumes and then once the integrations are installed another reboot takes place after the installation is complete.

After that the machine was up and running on Hyper-V.

Test 2 - With additions

This time I left the VM Additions (13.813) in place. I copied the VHD over to the Hyper-V host and recreated the machine. So I started the machine and got the boot error below.

I logged into the system and started to install the integrations

So into Add/Remove programs and removed the Virtual Server VM Additions, reboot the system

After removing the VM Additions the rest of the installation continues the same as the Test 1 scenario above.

Conclusion

So my overall experience of migrating a machine was pretty easy. The only problem that I had was when I left the "Found new hardware" wizard open, the integrations just sat there with the message "Waiting for previous device installation to complete..." and once I cancelled the "Found new hardware" wizard the Integrations installed no problem.

Links

John Howard of Microsoft wrote some stuff about moving machines and booting from SCSI

Moving a Virtual Machine from Virtual Server to Windows Server virtualization

Boot from SCSI in Virtual Server vs. Boot from IDE in Windows Server virtualization

Download the Hyper-V RTM from the links in this knowledge base article. There are two files, the 64bit file which has Hyper-V (including the Integations disk) and the Hyper-V Management tools for a Windows 2008 x86 machine.

Download the Hyper-V Management tools for Vista SP1 from this knowledge base article.

The below article from Redmondmag is reporting the RTM of Hyper-V

http://redmondmag.com/news/rss.asp?editorialsid=10004#1

So is El Reg

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/26/hyper_v_microsoft_hypervisor/

I took a look in the download centre and could not find anything but maybe later.

I found this on the MS website, it will be especially useful if you are doing things with Windows Server Core and scripting.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=5FB255FF-72DA-4B08-A504-1B10266CF72A&displaylang=en

I have been playing with the beta of Systems Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 (SCVMM). It was easy to install, it does require Windows Server 2008. There are many options for the installation for the sake of the test installation I choose to use the MSDE database option because I was not going to be managing alot of host systems but you could also use a SQL database instance.

It will support the management of VMWare, Hyper-V and Virtual Server 2005 hosts. I am managing a Hyper-V RC1 cluster and a server running Virtual Server 2005. To manage the cluster all I had to do was "Add Host" and choose the cluster name.  Once the cluster was managed, VMM worked out all the nodes and installed the virtual machine agent on them.

If you are using Systems Center Operations Manager 2007, there is some nice integration with VMM. I did a P2V of a system and it worked quiet well (I will do a seperate post on that).

SCVMM 2008 looks like it has great promise for managing a virtual environment, especially when used with the other Systems Center products.

I have loads more testing to do but it looks good for a beta but it is building a lot on the VMM 2007 product. The URL below is a link to the VMM site at Microsoft

http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/scvmm/default.mspx

and this is a URL for the VMM site on Technet

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-ie/scvmm/default(en-us).aspx

I was having problems logging onto my RedHat virtual machine running on Hyper-V using my AD credentials, after some investigation it turns out that the clock was running fast on the system. The time difference was greater than the slew setting for AD and as a result I could not login to the system.

The Hyper-V Integrations are not available for RedHat Linux yet. If you manually add the following to the kernel config clocksource=acpi_pm  this should resolve the time problems.

Everytime the Kernel is updated you will need to ensure that the clocksource statement is added or else you could run into time problems again. Of course once Microsoft has released the integrations for RedHat Linux this should not be a problem in the future.

Thanks to one of my colleagues on the Linux team for working this out.

I attended the MOC6430 course back in May, I agreed to make a short video review of the course and here it is below. I found the course useful and it gave me some things to think about. It was also great to get to know some of the people I used to see at the Longhorn Academy sessions and understand where they are using or planning to use Windows Server 2008.