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I was lucky enough to attend the Microsoft New Efficiency event for Windows Server 2008 R2 on Monday.  It was a limited capacity technical briefing aimed at IT Professionals.  They also had an Exchange 2010 and Windows 7 track at the same time but I chose to attend the Server 2008 R2 track.  It was divided into 4 sections and was hosted by Kevin Saye (kevin.saye@microsoft.com) who is the Pre-sales technical support specialist for Windows Server in this region.  I’ve heard him speak at events before but never had a chance to actually do a QA session with him till now.

So, on to the new stuff in Server 2008 R2 that I found interesting!  This is not a comprehensive list by an means, just the stuff I thought was very useful.  I’ll go over each in detail in the coming days and how it will fit into your enterprise environment.

-Active Directory Administrative Center (ADAC)
-Managed Service accounts
-Active Directory Recycle Bin
-Graphical PowerShell
-Turning off CPU cores to conserve power
-Group policy can now execute Powershell scritpts
-Group policy granularity through item level targeting
-FCI to classify data and take actions on it
-.NET now runs on Server Core installs
-Remote Desktop Services now has multi-monitor support (up to 8 monitors), bi-directional audio (useful for VOIP), and enhanced multimedia support using your local graphics card instead of “screen painting” as it was before.
-DirectAccess with Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 – Extends the network to include remote users instead of just a remote user dialing in via VPN.  Uses the Teredo protocol.  Was able to access the Microsoft intranet site (http://msw) without ever having to dial in and from behind a corporate firewall.  It uses IPsec and it only works with Windows 7 machines which are on the domain. 
-Branch Cache – Caches only the requested data unlike DFS.  Means a lot less space is required unlike DFS which is an exact duplicate.

THE FUTURE
Kevin says expect to see more componentization in MS products.  Expect to moved vhds around on servers like OS, Apps, & Data vhds interchangeably on your VMs.

When you’re applying updates to a large farm, you really need to check the version number of SharePoint running on each server in the farm in order to maintain consistency.  You can do this easily by going to CA > Operations > Servers in Farm.

But what do these version numbers actually mean?  There’s a great Wiki maintained here that can answer this:

http://www.sharepointdevwiki.com/display/SharePointAdministrationWiki/SharePoint+Versions

This page will show you all the past and current version numbers and their associated KB articles.  Very handy when troubleshooting updates or if you want to check the change log between versions.

VMware vSphere PowerCLI is an extremely powerful command line utility you can use to automate every aspect of your ESX environment.  We’re talking every level from VMs, the host OS, storage, networking, licensing, and more!  Basically its a ton of PowerShell cmdlets specifically for ESX that sit on top of Windows PowerShell.

You can download it here if you never played with it before:

http://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/vsphere/automationtools/windows_toolkit?view=overview

They have very good documentation and sample scripts to try out at the link above.  Now the fun part.  What’s the first script you should try out?  My advice is vCheck by Alan Renouf.

PowerCLI vCheck (Daily Report) – http://www.virtu-al.net/2009/11/04/vcheck-daily-report-v3/ – Without a doubt one of my favorite PowerCLI scripts.  Every morning when you arrive to the office, you can have an email report waiting in your Outlook Inbox with the status of your entire ESX environment.  Every aspect of it.  From old snapshots to resource utilization on your clusters, it’s all there.  I first started using it at version 1 but version 2 is even slicker!  If you are an ESX admin, you NEED to be using this script!  The lastest version 3 came out the other day and I haven’t used it in a production environment yet but you can download it at the link above.  Al has gone back to calling it vCheck by the way instead of Daily Report.  I’ll be tweaking V3 at home this weekend hopefully if I have the time and test it out.

You can see more scripts from Alan on his blog:

http://www.virtu-al.net/script-list/

I could list them all here with descriptions but he’s done a good job of keeping everything organized in the link above. Try them out!  Let me know if you have any favorite scripts you use.  I’m always looking for new scripts to make life easier so share please.

DISCLAIMER:  Don’t even think about trying this in a production enterprise environment or you will get laughed out of the building.  Don’t say I didn’t warn you!  This is meant for test labs and small businesses.

With that said, if you’re running ESXi 4.0 at home or at a small business and want image level backups at a pricepoint (i.e. FREE), then this is how you do it.  You used to be able to use products from 3rd parties with ESXi 3.5 such as Veeam Backup that would allow you to do image based backups but once ESXi 4.0 (vSphere) came out, VMware decided they wanted to charge small and medium size business for advanced features.  Previously this was an untapped market for VMware but now they want a piece of the pie.  So they went to these 3rd parties that were offering image level backup solutions for ESXi 3.5 and said not to support it anymore with ESXi 4.0.  Here is a press release from Veeam regarding this here:

http://www.veeam.com/news/veeam-software-offers-new-essentials-bundle-acceleration-kits-for-vmware-vsphere4.html

As a longtime Premier Technology Alliance Partner and supporter of VMware’s product strategy, Veeam Software takes great pride in creating innovative software products that enhance the customer value of VMware ESX, ESXi, and ESXi Free.  One such example is support for the free edition of VMware ESXi in Veeam Backup and Replication.

Recently, VMware requested that Veeam Software discontinue support for ESXi Free in Veeam Backup and Replication in order to comply with VMware’s updated licensing policy.  In light of VMware’s request, and our close technical partnership, Veeam Backup and Replication will no longer support ESXi Free. We will still continue to offer support for ESXi Free to existing Veeam customers who purchased Backup & Replication prior to version 3.1.

For small or branch office environments, Veeam advises its new customers to buy VMware vSphere Essentials and the Veeam Essentials bundle (announced today).  This combination costs exactly the same amount of money as purchasing 6 sockets of Veeam Backup at regular list price for use with free ESXi, but it is actually better, because with Veeam Essentials at its special discounted price, customers also get Veeam Monitor and Veeam Reporter.

So,

1. ESXi 4.0 (still free) = basic features and an entry into virtualization for small companies or test labs
2. vSphere Essentials ($995) = all the above plus advanced features aimed at small business
3. vSphere Essentials Plus ($2,995) = all the above but for more processors plus more features such as VCB

Here’s a nice product matrix that explains all the differences:

http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere/buy/editions_comparison.html

I’m can’t be too mad at VMware about this.  They make a great product and want to tackle a new market.  It’s a smart business move for them.  Especially with MS Hyper-V trying to tackle this same market.  Veeam was very innovative in coming up with a great backup solution but I understand they want to maintain a good relationship with VMware and don’t want to step on their toes.

But for those that miss the old days of setting up a quick and easy DR solution for an ESXi host, how can we get the old functionality we were used to back without having to shell out thousands for VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) or Essentials Plus?  In comes GhettoVCB, an ongoing project on the VMware Community forums:

http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-8760

GhettoVCB is a free alternative for backing up guest images on ESXi 3.5 and ESXi 4.0.  I have to warn you though, it does take some work to get it working properly.  If you don’t want the hassle, I encourage you to buy VCB or Essentials Plus which is definitely worth it and of course comes with support from VMware.  GhettoVCB is a great project and does work but again as I said in the disclaimer at the top of this post, I wouldn’t advise using it in a production environment.  It’s great to play with in a test lab or at a small company though.  If you like playing with things, you will enjoy setting it up.

If you install SQL Server on your C: drive, you might notice after a while a that the ERRORLOG files begin filling it up.  It’s easy to move these off to another drive.  Just go to SQL Server Configuration Manger and under “SQL Server 2005 Services”, right click on “SQL Server” in the right pane and click Properties.  Click on the Advanced Tab and scroll down to the “Startup Paramters section”.

Now be very careful here.  Click the little down arrow and select all the text you see.  Copy and paste it into Notepad so you can edit it easily.  It should look something like this:

-dc:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.1\MSSQL\DATA\master.mdf;-ec:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.1\MSSQL\LOG\ERRORLOG;-lc:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.1\MSSQL\DATA\mastlog.ldf

Edit the path for ERRORLOG to the new drive and folder.  The path must already be created so make sure you create this first.  Now paste your new paramaters back into the properties window and hit OK. Once you make the change, restart the service and immediately all new ERRORLOGs will be written at the new path.  Here is an example of moving the logs off to the E: drive in a folder called “SQL error logs”:

-dC:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.1\MSSQL\DATA\master.mdf;-eE:\SQL error logs\ERRORLOG;-lC:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.1\MSSQL\DATA\mastlog.ldf