Welcome to the NizMoTek Blog

Brian gives a nice overview of Microsoft Server 2008 licensing. I’ll post it here for quick reference because God knows I need it.
Thanks Brian.
Dealing with Windows Terminal Services licensing issues.

There are multiple license requirements for Windows Terminal Services (TS). These requirements vary depending on how TS is used and what version of Windows it is being used on (This article deals with Windows Server 2008).
Available license types
Five types of licenses are available for Terminal Services in Windows Server 2008:

License	Function
Windows Server License	Every Windows 2008 server requires a Windows Server License. This license allows TS to be used.
Windows Server Client Access License	Any computer connecting to a Windows server requires a Client Access License (CAL). Although the basic CAL does not cover TS use, it is still required for general connectivity to the Terminal Server.
TS Device CAL	In addition to the CAL, computers connecting to TS require an incremental CAL that is specific to Terminal Services. One option is to use a TS Device CAL. This CAL licenses any device to connect to Terminal Services, regardless of how many users actually use that device.
TS User CAL	An alternative to the TS Device CAL is the TS User CAL. This CAL allows one user to connect to Terminal Services from any device.
TS External Connector	The TS External Connector license allows external users to connect to Terminal Services. This is a server-level license, and you will have to license each Terminal Server if you provide external connectivity.
Service Provider License	The Service Provider License is intended for service providers that offer hosted services to their customers.

Typically, the most cost-effective way to license TS is either TS User CALs or TS Device CALs. Alternatively, you can use a combination of TS User and TS Device CALs should the need arise.

On my ASUS U36Jc-B2B laptop, I’ve been trying to copy large files (>3GB) to my (work’s) Western Digital Passport 3.0 750GB USB drive. However, this always resulted in the drive disconnecting and the copy operation failing. I’ve tried numerous driver uninstall and reinstall with the same result, until I found a post linking to this driver.
This is the 3.5.24.0 version. The latest posted version of this driver on ASUS’s website was 3.0.116.3.
Nonetheless, I can now copy files without the drive disconnecting.
I’m not sure the throughput is 100% as I’ve seen the same drive hit upto 92MB/s on my Intel desktop machine.
Hope this helps anyone out there with similar issues.

1. Right-click on Computer, click Manage and then Disk Management in the Computer Management console.
2. Right-click DATA (D:) and click Shrink Volume.
3. Specify the amount of space you want to shrink in Enter the amount of space to shrink in MB and click Shrink.
4. A new free space will appear in Disk 0. Right-click this free area and click New Simple Volume.
5. Follow the New Simple Volume Wizard and click Next, enter the size in Simple volume in MB. If you want to add more than one partition, do not allocate the full size. If you just want to add one partition, click Next.
6. Follow the wizard to assign a drive letter and format the partition to finish.

An interesting white paper of why VMware should be your only consideration in terms of virtualization.
Top 10 Reasons Why VMware vSphere 5 is Years Ahead of the Competition

While trying to debug PowerChute Network Shutdown 3.0 on ESXi5, an improper shutdown of the DFSR server resulted in the following:

Source : DFSR
Catagory : None
Event ID : 2104
Type: Error
Description :
The DFS Replication service failed to recover from an internal database error on volume F:. Replication has been stopped for all replicated folders on this volume.
Additional Information: Error: 9203 (The database is corrupt (-1018)) Volume: DB587759-DC0B-11DC-940D-00304888DB13 Database: F:System Volume InformationDFSR

Steps to resolve:

1. Stop the “DFS Replication” service.
2. On the drive(s) in question, grant yourself full permission to the hidden system “System Volume Information” folder.
3. Navigate to each replication group the server was a member of and delete (or move to be extra careful) each hidden system “DfsrPrivate” folder.
4. Start the “DFS Replication” service.

You may now treat the server as a brand new member for the replication groups. Now all you need to deal with is DFSR’s sloppy initial replication routines (hint: those missing files are in the “DfsrPrivate PreExisting” folder).
http://www.eventidwiki.com/index.php?title=Event_ID_:_2104,_DFSR
However this did not work the folder would not rename under 2008 even with UAC off, this did work for me though

1. Click Start, right click Command prompt and click run as administrator to open a command prompt window, then go to driverletter:System Volume Informationdfsr prompt
2. Type “ren “old folder name” “new folder name””

Use this simple vbscript to allow recovery of DFS Replicated files that have been pushed into the ConflictAndDeleted or PreExisting folders due to misadventure.
You might also find the %systemVolume%windowsdebug folder useful.

We’ve successfully implemented the QNAP TS-439 Pro II at the primary site and have migrated all shared storage data for vSphere5 to it.

As you can see, it is a very polished unit. There are 4 drive bays with keylocks and a front USB port.
[gallery]
 

We finally bit the bullet and procured a Cisco Catalyst 3750g 24 port gigabit layer 3 switch in order to consolidate and upgrade the networking hardware.
After basic configuration of the switch including VLANs and DHCP server, I shut down all VMs and proceeded to move all the wirings over.
Once satisfied I tried to connect to the management network of both hosts with no success. After repeated efforts of cisco speak I finally resorted to the internet (from my Forefront Threat Management server!). The first hit was Scott’s article about ESX Server, NIC Teaming and VLAN Trunking.
My error was not setting the load-balancing algorithm after creating a port channel that was compatible between the two ports. The command in a nutshell:

Cat3750g(config)#int port-channel1
Cat3750g(config-if)#description ESX-01 NIC Team
Cat3750g(config-if)#int gi0/1
Cat3750g(config-if)#channel-group 1 mode on
Cat3750g(config-if)#int gi0/2
Cat3750g(config-if)#channel-group 1 mode on
Cat3750g(config)#show etherchannel load-balance (this revealed “Source MAC Address” instead of “src-dst-ip”)
Cat3750g(config)#port-channel load-balance src-dst-ip (to enable IP-based load balancing)

Ensuring that all the NIC teams on the ESX servers were set to “Route based on IP hash” and I was off to the races.
Thanks to Scott Lowe for the resolution!

After creating the universal distribution group in active directory with the wanted ‘Send As’ address, I could not get outlook to allow me to send the email impersonating the distribution list email address. Running the following in the Exchange Server Powershell did the trick:

Set-DistributionGroup -Identity “<distribution list name>” -GrantSendOnBehalfTo “<primary email mailbox>”

PITA! But I guess they have their reasons. Hopefully the next version will facilitate this option.

I had an error in my Weekly DFSR health reports indicating the following:

DFS Replication does not replicate certain files in the replicated folders listed above because they have temporary attribute set, or they are symbolic links . This problem is affecting at least 2 files in 1 replicated folders (up to 100 occurrences per replicated folder are reported). Event ID: 11004

After a little searching through Google, I found this article which basically said to run the following command in PowerShell which removes the temporary attribute on the indicated files:
Get-childitem D:Data -recurse | ForEach-Object -process {if (($_.attributes -band 0x100) -eq 0x100) {$_.attributes = ($_.attributes -band 0xFEFF)}}
If you don’t want it to work against subdirectories just remove the -recurse parameter.
Thanks Craig!

Since vmware is now moving to ESXi exclusively, thereby dropping the CLI in the ESX version, I decided to jump on the bandwagon. Installing ESXi 4.1U1 on my two HP ML150 G6 hosts was easier said than done however. I don’t know if it’s compatibility, but both hosts would not take the ESXi 4.1U1 installer like how my little one won’t take her bottle!
Here are the steps in chronological order that I followed to eventually get ESXi 4.1U1 installed in my cluster.

1. Download ESXi 4.1U1 image
2. ‘Burn ISO’ to USB via UNetbootin
3. Vmotion all machines off of target host and enter host into maintenance mode.
4. Reboot host and select USB as boot device.
5. ESXi installer proceeds up to before installation and then throws

Installation operation failed!
The installation operation has encountered a fatal error:
Unable to find system image to install.  This is due to the image not being mounted correctly or the CD-ROM not being supported.

6. Retried above steps with many different versions of ISO with same result.
7. Switched SATA setting in BIOS from AHCI to IDE to RAID with same result.
8. Finally found this link that suggested installing ESXi4.0 and upgrading to 4.1U1.
9. Repeated steps 1 & 2 with ESXi4.0 image and sucessfully installed. Used VMWare Update Manager to Upgrade and Patch to latest build.

Phew! What a night!
And I totally forgot to implement jumbo frames!