A Week of Upgrades [1/4]: Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Upgrade

Greg

[sc:windows-category ]I recently spent some time (the better part of a week) upgrading my servers at home, what follows is a 4 part series (one part each day this week) of articles around those upgrades. The first part here is about upgrading my Hyper-V host servers to Windows Server 2012.

Having upgraded my desktops to Windows 8 it is now time to move to Hyper-V 2012 as well so I can manage the VM’s without having to RDP in to the servers.

Currently I have two Hyper-V servers running, each hosts several VM’s which are a mix of Linux and Windows.  I’m running OpenSUSE for Linux and mostly Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard for the Windows boxes.  The Hyper-V hosts themselves are 2008 R2 Enterprise.

With Windows 2012 some of the licensing for virtual machines has changed so I’m installing 2012 Data Center on the Hyper-V hosts.  And before anyone asks, yes I’m installing the GUI as well.  I understand from a logical perspective as to why Microsoft is moving to a GUI less server environment but for small IT shops it just doesn’t make sense.  I can only hope they realize this and continue to offer the GUI on server option in future versions.

I’ve chosen to do an in place upgrade on the Hyper-V hosts because I keep these boxes very clean.  They only thin on them is Hyper-V, all other services I run inside the VM’s.  This didn’t use to be the case when I was running VMware Server, as I had the host servers running the VM’s as well as being Windows Domain Controllers.  However Hyper-V doesn’t allow that so when I moved to the Hyper-V (which turned out to be a good idea as VMware has since stop development on their Server product) I made a conscious effort to keep the host servers as simple as possible.  This actually saved me once about a year ago when the OS drive on one of the host severs failed and I had to re-install, with so little on the physical box it was only a little over an hour before I had it up and running again.

Of course the first thing to do is to backup all the VM’s I’m running.  I really don’t have a good way to do this, between the mix of OS’s and not enough time to find a solution, I just shut down the OS’s and copy the VHD’s to an external disk.

This isn’t the fastest process and it takes a couple hours of manual work to do, but it does make a nice clean break point to go back to if I need to for some reason.

After searching the Net for anything I should look out for only one thing came up, which was to shutdown the VM’s before the upgrade.

Shutdown was easy and then I copied the 2012 install files to the local disk and ran setup.  Setup looks pretty much the same as always and getting through to the upgrade portion was easy enough.  When it checked for any issues three items came up:

  1. Incompatible Anti-virus
  2. Incompatible Intel Pro-Set
  3. Warning about a physical disk attached to a VM

I kind of expected my anti-virus to be incompatible, it looks like the vendor isn’t updating it for 2012 so I simply uninstalled it.  My gut feel is I won’t install another AV product since I’ve only every had false positives from the server side.  I may do some more research though and see if I can find a replacement.

The Intel Pro-Set software didn’t surprise me but did cause the most problems.  Uninstalling it broke the Hyper-V virtual networking.  First I had to go in to device manager and search for new devices (after install Windows only picked up one of the two network cards) and then re-assign the virtual network to the physical card again.  After that I had to re-enter the IP address for the server as that had been lost in one of the changes.

The warning about the physical disk is a little interesting.  My main file servers (one on each Hyper-V host) have direct attached physical 2tb disks to the VM’s.  I did this for two reasons:

  1. A virtual 2tb vhd seems kind of iffy…
  2. I moved the disks from physical servers to VM’s, so simply attaching them to the VM’s meant I didn’t have to copy all the data around.

The upgrade proceeded with a couple of reboots and a final restart, there were no issues and it only took about an hour to complete.  During one of the reboots Windows did stick on the “Getting Ready…” screen for about 10 minutes, but finally did progress.  Overall it was painless, but during the reboots you never knew what was going on, you just had that blank “Windows” screen with the twirling dots.

I’ll admit its a little weird seeing the Start screen when you logon, but other than that the upgrade worked without issue.

The physical disk did have to be reconnected to the VM before I restarted it, but that was simple enough.  All of the other VM’s came up without issue.

Of course I couldn’t just leave well enough alone and decided to do a firmware upgrade to the servers as well, which promptly eat both the networking and disk configuration 🙁

In Windows the network card had changed id’s, which meant the Hyper-V virtual adapter was no longer able to find what it was supposed to use for network access.  Loading up the Virtual Network configuration allowed me to re-assign the correct adapter but as Windows had assigned a DHCP address to the new adapter, Hyper-V wiped out my previous IP config and used DHCP instead.  Simply re-applying the correct IP address solved this problem.

The disk configuration was a little more strange as the physical disk that I had assigned to one of the VM’s had come back online and been assigned a drive letter on the Hyper-V server.  To be used inside a VM a disk must be offline.  Taking the disk offline and assigning it back to the VM solved this as well.

In an unrelated issue (which caused a bit of extra work) that I’ve had with my two servers is around the KVM I’ve been using.  Seemingly randomly on reboot the keyboard/mouse will stop working.  This has been an annoyance for quite a while but never significant enough of an issue for me to track it down.  However to upgrade to 2012 I do need the KVM to work well and it was being very uncooperative.  I decided to rip out the KVM and direct connect the keyboard and after that I still had issues.  This must be BIOS related and I’m hoping the upgrades will resolve it.

The second unrelated issue I had during the upgrade is that the motherboards I’m using have an option for a hardware remote management on them which I’ve installed.  The first server I connected to with IE 10 from my Windows 8 PC and IE simply refused to connect due to the security certificate.  I poked around a bit but didn’t find a resolution so I simply used Firefox instead.  The second server however was not responding on the management IP.  Reconfiguring the IP addresses didn’t work and I finally resorted to re-flashing the BIOS on the management board.  This resolved the issue and the rest of the Server 2012 proceeded without issue.

Now that both Hyper-V servers are updated I’ll be doing the rest of my servers in the following order:

  • Windows Domain Controllers
  • DFS servers
  • MySQL server (on Windows)
  • VPN servers (run OpenVPN appliances)
  • Mail Gateway (currently on OpenSUSE 12.1, but really need an upgrade to 12.2)
  • Exchange Server (both OS to 2012 and Exchange to 2013)

The Exchange upgrade will be the most challenging, I really should setup two new servers and configure them for redundancy but that seems like a lot of work and of course there’s the SSL certs to mess with 😉

Tomorrow I’ll post the domain controller, DFS and SQL upgrade entry, come back then to find out how it went.

 

 

Windows Phone 8 and Random Reboots

Greg Leave a comment

[sc:mobile-category ]I’ve had my HTC 8X for almost 2 weeks now and around the net there has been some buzz about Windows Phone 8 rebooting randomly.

In that time I haven’t seen a reboot on the phone… until today that is.

I was at my desk and checked my phone for any messages, when I hit the power button it suddenly buzzed and rebooted.

It was a little strange but I immediately knew what had happened and it looks like Microsoft will be pushing out an over the air update in December to resolve it.

One reboot every couple of weeks shouldn’t be much of an issue.  I’m more interested to see what the problem actually is, if we ever get told of course.

Windows Phone 8 Media Sync

Greg

[sc:mobile-category ]Ok, time to take off the gloves, let’s talk about the biggest hole with Windows Phone 8… syncing music!

First things first, Windows Phone 7 came with the Zune music client which managed all the syncing to the phone.  Of course there was no other way to do it so everyone had to use Zune.

Windows Phone 8 takes a step forward with the fact you can now use pretty any music client to sync your music to the phone, including just good old File Explorer.

The problem is that while that step forward is good, it comes with a massive leap backwards by dropping the Zune client for two new clients.  One for the traditional Windows desktop and one for the new Windows 8 Apps.  Both of these clients are badly broken.

Lets start with the Windows 8 App, you can move music and photos over to the phone, but you cannot create or manage new playlists in it.  Likewise it only talks to the Windows libraries.  On one PC I have it won’t even talk to the phone at all.  It says to reboot the phone to resolve the problem but it doesn’t.  It has no settings and doesn’t pick up the album covers or existing Zune/Media Player playlists.

The Windows Desktop Client is a beta, when it starts up it has to scan through your entire library of music, pictures and videos.  On my system this takes over 20 minutes and it does it each time you load it.  It can at least understand the Zune/Media Player playlists, but trying to sync them runs all the way through to the end when the playlists get synced and then the whole app crashes.

I eventually resorted to using Windows Media Player to sync across my playlists, which works, but WMP isn’t the best app for this but at least it worked.

I have to admit that I actually LIKE the Zune client, it was slick and provided a much nicer interface than WMP.  I hope Microsoft brings it back in some form, perhaps as a replacement to WMP.

It’s so bad that I’m almost at the point that I’m considering writing my own player/sync client.  That will be a last resort though and I’ll live with it like is for the time being.

Microsoft Surface Pre-Order Update

Greg

[sc:hardware-category ]In a previous post I detailed the ordeal I went through with my pre-order of the Microsoft Surface RT tablet.  At the end of that post I mentioned I was still waiting for my escalation on the $50 promo code and now I can finally relate the rest of the story.

Just as a quick refresher, I pre-order my Surface on Oct 16, 2012 for delivery by the 26.  It didn’t arrive until Oct 30 and Microsoft was dishing out $50 promo codes to those that didn’t receive their orders on the 26th.  I had two problems with the promo code, first it meant I had to purchase something to get it and second it really wasn’t enough.

On the Monday when I was still waiting for the Surface to arrive I had requested an escalation on the promo code and was told I would expect back an answer from their tier 3 group within 72 hours.  I didn’t receive anything and I called in again on the Thursday to follow-up.  Apparently they had sent out an e-mail to me on Wednesday afternoon but it didn’t get to my inbox.

They sent a follow-up e-mail and after a few more days of back and forth on Monday Nov. 5th they offered me a $200 rebate on the purchase.

I probably could have held out for more, but I have to admit the person from tier 3 support was very good and didn’t try to generate false sympathy or any other tricks to get me to cave to the $50 promo code so I decided it satisfied all the issue I had and accepted it.

I have to say that the pre-order experience was terrible and the support after the missed date was worse.  However at the end of the day I did receive the table a few days late but managed to get an almost %40 discount on it so it all worked out.

Will I be buying a pre-order from the Microsoft Store again?  I don’t think so, as there is a new Microsoft store opening soon close to me.

5 Days with the HTC Windows Phone 8X

Greg Leave a comment

[sc:mobile-category ]So now that I’ve had my HTC 8x for a few days, what do I think of it?

Hardware

First off, physically the phone is quite impressive, light and thin and sturdily built it is bar none the best HTC phone I’ve owned.  HTC has come a long way since my old Windows Mobile 6800.  The phone almost feels too light and thin in your hands, compared to by Wp7 HTC HD7 it is a major step forward.

For some reason Bell decided to get the California Blue model in, which to pretty much everyone I’ve shown it too says that it’s purple.  The case material feels a little like rubber and provides a good grip on the phone.  However it does show up scuffs quite easily and after only a couple of days I have a dozen or more black marks on it.  On the purple they are hard to see but I can image that on the yellow or green models they would show up easily.  I think I would recommend the black version as they would be effectively invisible on it.  I’ll be getting an Otterbox for it when they come out and that should take care of the problem.

One other hardware issue (which has been common on all the HTC phone’s I’ve had) is the buttons.  They really suck.  If you don’t hit them just right they don’t register.

After an hour or so of using the phone I noticed that once in a while if I had it laying flat on a table and then picked up the phone it would go to sleep at unexpected times.  I couldn’t get it to replicate the issue consistently and a few days later HTC released an update to their “attentive phone” application which controls features like muting the ringer when the phone is turned over.  I assume the update fixed whatever was being misread and since I’ve installed it the problem has not come back.

A second issue that still exists is that the auto-brightness control seems to be a little sensitive.  It dims or brightens at what seem like random intervals and but isn’t too bad so I’ve left it on for now, I can always turn it off if required.  A holdover from WP7 that I would like to see fixed is the ability to pin the brightness control to the start screen, but alas it still can’t be done in WP8.

Initial Setup and Impressions

Once I had the phone powered up, I added my Microsoft account and it added by Twitter and LinkedIn feeds to my phone, however it didn’t bring over Facebook for some reason and I had to re-add it manually.

My HD7 felt fast, but this phone feels like greased lightning.  Page transitions are even faster and smoother than in WP7.

Another nice change is the vibration feature, it’s toned down quite a bit for the key presses and feels much better than the harsh buzz from the HD7.

The camera is also a big step up from the HD7, HTC had a bad reputations for cameras but recently has made major strides.  The camera in the 8X takes crisp and bright photo’s, a huge step up from the muddied mess of the HD7.

Windows Phone 7 Apps

Something I hadn’t seen noted before in other reviews is how WP7 apps run on WP8.  Due to the aspect ratio change from 800×480 to 1280×720 when the app is scaled up there is a space at the top of the screen.  This can look a little weird if the application doesn’t use the default theme background colour, but isn’t a big deal.

Battery Life

Battery life is about the same as my old HD7, a day of reasonable usage gets me down to about 20% left.  A bigger battery would certainly have helped out but its no worse than my last phone so no complaints here.

Windows Phone 8 Start Screen

The WP8 Start Screen is very similar to WP7, but there are a few items of note:

  • The resizable tiles are nice, having a row of small tiles for various mail folders is convenient and reduces the amount of scrolling I have to do.
  • Being able to resize the calendar and pictures tiles is long overdue!
  • The slightly larger tile size in WP8 seems a little off to me still but I suspect I’ll get use to it soon enough.
  •  Without the “gutter” area on the right there’s no where for the right/left arrow button, which they’ve stuck at the very bottom of the Start Menu, they might as well have just let it off completely.

IE10

Being able to add the tabs button to the main address bar is fantastic and IE10 seems very capable at this point.  The only think I wish they would add is the ability to select an icon instead of a screen grab of the site to the Live Tile when you pin an address to the Start Menu.

Pre-Installed Software

Beyond the HTC software, Bell installed NO additional software.  Not even their self service app.  This kind of surprised me but I think that due to the lateness of getting the hardware out the door they may have skipped this step.  Perhaps in the next batch of phones they will add some.

Windows Phone 8 Specific Apps

There are a couple of WP8 specific apps that have already made it to my must have list, these are:

  • Battery Level for WP8, this gives you a percentage of battery remaining, both as a live tile as well as on the lock screen.  It has a fee little issues (never reaches 100% for example) but it’s free and ad free as well so no complaints.
  • Skype, this is still a preview but it certainly shows where it is going.

Keyboard/Speech Language

When the phone arrived it had two languages installed, English and French, which is quite typical for a Canadian phone.  After a few hours of use I started a new e-mail and suddenly I found all my words being redlined, it turns out that WP8 had decided to flip over to French instead of English for the input language.  I went over to settings and switched back to English and then deleted French.

The next day I was poking around and found that the voice support wasn’t enabled by default and had to download the language file for it.  By default it selected French again and I changed it over to English and downloaded the support file.  When it completed I noticed my keyboard language was changed to French again.  Not only had it switched the language but it had even re-installed French again.

This is weird but it hasn’t happened again so I’ll keep an eye on it and see what happens.

Final Thoughts

The phone is quite nice and WP8, while much the same, has some nice new touches that makes the experience even better than before.  I would not hesitate to recommend the 8X to anyone, which is more than I can say for the previous generation of WP7 devices.

There is one items I haven’t written about here yet, I’m going to make it a separate post, that’s the sync client for Windows Phone 8.  Let’s just say it hasn’t been a smooth transition from WP7 and leave it at that for now.