The Gigabyte board in VM server 2, it seems, supports 16GB of RAM. So I’ve decided to do a second upgrade on it. Components will be:
This should make that server a pretty beefy one for virtualisation and hopefully make it more stable than it was before.
I have a bad habit of making the boot drives for my virtal machines quite small, usually around 16GB. My Exchange 2010 server is virtualised and has this sort of configuration, a 16-gigabyte C: drive which just the OS, and a D: drive with Exchange and the databases on it. At some point, Windows decided to increase the swapfile to a point where I was uncomforable with the amount of free space on C: drive. No problems I thought, I’ll put it on D: drive. It would refuse to take it and would recreate the swap file on C: as a temporary swap file leading to bad performance.
After a fair amount of hair pulling and bad performance, I found out the issue. As detailed here, you can’t boot a Hyper-V machine from a SCSI Virtual Disk (that is, a virtual hard disk created and attached to the VM’s SCSI controller), not can you create a swapfile on it. This is apparently caused by the nature of the SCSI disk and controller and can be fixed by using an IDE virtual hard disk instead. So now the Exchange server has a 3rd drive, S: drive which is a 32-gigabyte IDE virtual disk that happily stores the swap file. Performance is much improved as a result.
Rogues in World of Warcraft have an ability called Tricks of the Trade. I wanted a way of being able to easily use it on a predetermined character (ie. the tank). The best I could do is the following macro:
#showtooltip Tricks of the Trade /cast [target=Focus] Tricks of the Trade /say Showing %f the |cff71d5ff|Hspell:57934|h[Tricks of the Trade]|h|r
The fun bit is the 3rd line. %f is WoW macro shorthand for “focus name” (just like how %t is for target name) and the horrible mess after that is the in-game ability link for Tricks of the Trade. So party members will see you saying “Showing BobTheTank the [Tricks of the Trade]”. I’ll be making a similar macro for Misdirects at some stage.
I’ve been working on a little project of late that requires a Powershell script to check what roles a server has installed. Under 2008, this is fairly trivial as there is a ServerManager module for Powershell which can simply output which roles are installed. This is fine if you’re wanting to run the check locally, but what if you want to run it remotely? And if your local machine is not running 2008?
I tried to be sneaky and copy across the ServerManager module files but this didn’t work. I posted on the Microsoft powershell forums for help before I found the answer myself – use the invoke-command cmdlet. Below is an example of the code I used:
$strComputer = "someserver" # The server to run the command against
$strCommand = { import-module servermanager ; get-windowsfeature | Where {$_.installed -eq $true} | select displayname,name,installed,featuretype} # import the module, run the command to get the features that are installed
$FeatureList = invoke-command -computername $strComputer -scriptblock $strCommand # invoke-command against our remote server and run command we constructed
$FeatureList can then be manipulated as you see fit. This sort of thing could probably be used for a range of tasks.
VM Server 1 is getting a bit overloaded so I’ve decided to upgrade a 2nd PC to act as a 2nd virtualisation host. Upgrade components will be:
This should make it roughly the same specs as VM server 1 (ie. quad cores, 8GB of RAM).
Update: Turns out at least one stick of the RAM is completely defective (can’t even install the OS when it’s in) and the system occassionally blue screens with the other 3. So now it’s down to just 3 gigs. Also, the RAID array’s performance is being compromised by one of the drives lacking native command queuing.
The “old” PC I have was upgraded to Windows 7 but it just couldn’t cut it. The poor thing was a dual-core Athlon X2 with only 2gigs of RAM and a 3-drive RAID 5 array. I have since found out that the support for the chipset on the board from nVidia is basically non-existant and there is no support for running Windows 7 on that platform. Add to that the woeful performance and I decided to upgrade… Halfway through doing the hardware upgrade I decided to put Windows 2008 R2 on instead and setup the machine as a second virtualisation system, as the primary is now getting overloaded. I’ll be fleshing out the details on the home network page over time.
I had a play around with the Exchange 2010 beta. It looked pretty good although the “killer” feature I wanted to check out, archiving, wasn’t fully functional. I’ve migrated my email from MailEnable to Exchange 2010. So far, I’m liking:
Not liking:
Currently the server is running under Hyper-V and performing reasonably well considering the specs of the VM.