June, 2009

DPM 2007 Agent Deployment

I am flying to Orlando in the morning to speak at the TechMentor conference that I mentioned in my blog a few days ago. At the last minute, I decided that I wanted to do a demo in one of my presentations that shows how you can backup Hyper-V with Data Protection Manager 2007. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get the agent to install on my Hyper-V server.

In the past when this has happened, the problem was related to DNS records being incorrect. This time all of my DNS entries were fine though. I spent four hours digging through error logs and searching the Web. I investigated everything from missing patches to missing group memberships to invalid WMI settings.

At around midnight I got frustrated and went for a walk. When I came back I just happened to glance at the clock on the Hyper-V server and noticed that it was out of sync with my domain controllers. As soon as I reset the clock, everything started working. It just goes to show that sometimes the simplest things can cause the biggest problems.

A New Critical Update

It seems that the spammers are getting to be a little bit slicker with their phishing scams. Most of the time phishing messages are pretty easy to spot. Today I got one that was a little bit trickier to figure out. The E-mail message claimed to be from Microsoft Customer Support [ No-Reply at microsoft.com], and had a subject line that read Install Critical Update for Microsoft Outlook.

As a Microsoft geek, I know that Microsoft does not send out updates through E-mail. I was also not aware of any critical updates for Outlook that came out today. Even so, the message looked so authentic that it had me scratching my head.

If you receive such an E-mail message, my advice is to hover your mouse over the download link to reveal the download URL. Read the URL carefully. It is usually designed to look legitimate, but if you read the URL carefully you can tell that it isn’t. For example, the domain portion of the URL linked by this message was http://update.microsoft.com.iijliijl.com. If you only look at the first part of the domain name, it gives the illusion that the link really points to Microsoft update. The full domain string tells the truth though.

Virtualization Training

I want to take a break from my usual blog posts to let everyone know that I will be presenting three sessions on virtualization at the TechMentor conference in Orlando next week. My sessions will focus on Hyper-V and will center around gaining control of virtual machine sprawl, capacity planning, and disaster recovery as it relates to virtualization. You can read the session abstracts as well as get more details on the conference at: http://www.brienposey.com/Speaking.asp 

If you happen to make it to the conference, please stop by and say hello. I really enjoy getting a chance to meet the people who read the stuff that I write.

An Update on Some Recent Posts

I wanted to take the opportunity to update you on a couple of my more recent blog posts.

First, as you may recall, I tried disabling virtual memory on my Data Protection Manager server in an effort to eliminate paging and the problems with inconsistent replicas that paging seems to cause. Since that time, all of the replicas of my protected volumes have remained in a consistent state.  The replicas for my Exchange storage groups became inconsistent after about a day, and my system state replicas became inconsistent about a day or two later.

Although I use multiple methods to back up my network, I didn’t want to leave anything to chance. I ended up replacing the system board in my DPM server tonight, and upgraded from 2 GB of RAM to 4 GB. I will keep you posted on what happens.

The other issue that I wanted to talk about was the problems that I am having with Windows 7 and the wireless NIC that’s built into my lab laptop. After doing some more research, I have discovered that the issue may be hardware related. I found a technical article that said that there is a bug in my laptop’s firmware and that because of the bug, you have to flash the BIOS before you will be able to install Windows Vista SP2. According to the article, the bug was directly related to the wireless NIC.

I went ahead and flashed the BIOS, and for kicks I installed Windows Vista with SP2. Unfortunately, I am now having the same issue with Vista that I was having with Windows 7. One thing that may possibly be causing the problem though is buggy drivers. I’m not positive, but I may have been running the 32-bit version of Vista when everything was working correctly. I was using the 64-bit version of Windows 7, and am currently using the 64-bit version of Vista. Unfortunately, I am going to need the machine for a project that I am working on for the next two months, so it will be August before I will be able to blow Windows off of the machine and test my theory.

Until then, I want to say thank you to Glen at Microsoft for his helpful suggestions.

Windows Experience Index Drama

A few days ago, I wrote a blog post talking about how a recent hardware upgrade had maxed out my machine’s Windows Experience Index. Last night I received a very rude E-mail message in regard to that posting. I wish that I had kept the message, because I would have quoted it directly. Since I don’t have the message anymore, I will try to give you a sentence from the message, hopefully without misquoting the sender:

“Those who are not familiar with hardware might be impressed by your claims, but I seriously doubt your honesty in this matter”

You can imagine why I was a bit irritated by the message. My first reaction was to simply take a screen capture of my Windows Experience Index, and post it for the world to see. When I thought about it though, I began to realize that a screen capture wouldn’t prove anything any way. It’s too easy to manipulate the Windows Experience Index.

If you would like to try it for yourself, open Windows Explorer and go to \Windows\Performance\WinSAT\DataStore. Open the most recent assessment file using Word Pad.  The assessment file is in .XML format, and you can change the scores to anything that you want. If you look at the figure below, you can see that I was able to change the scores to 9.9, even though Vista doesn’t actually use any scores higher than 5.9. Incidentally, this screen capture did not come from the same machine that I performed my recent upgrade on.

OK, so back to the issue of the score that I got after my upgrade. For those of you who may be wondering, I was using fairly high end hardware, but certainly not top notch. It really isn’t that difficult to get a score of 5.9. The hardware that I was using included:

An ASUS M3A78 system board

An AMD Phenom II Black Edition, quad core CPU

4 GB of RAM

A NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 graphics card (the super clocked edition with 2 GB of RAM).

DMP Inconsistencies, Part 2

It’s been 24 hours since my last post. At this point, it seems as though disabling the virtual memory on my DPM 2007 server was only a partial solution. My protected volumes have remained consistent, but my Exchange storage groups have become inconsistent, and I am unable to make them consistent.

I knew that disabling the virtual memory was a risky solution, but I wanted to try it any way. I guess my next move will be to replace the server’s system board with something that can accomodate more RAM.

Data Protection Manager Inconsistencies

Even though I operate what is essentially a one man shop, I use System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 (DPM) to protect my data. Although my DPM server has been working relatively well for quite some time now, I have been getting a lot of errors lately due to inconsistant replicas.

I spoke to someone at Microsoft about the problem, and they asked about my server’s hardware. My server met all of the requirements, but they explained to me that the 2 GB of memory that is required is a minimum, and that in many cases more memory is actually required. From what I have been able to gather, if the server pages data to virtual memory during the replica creation or synchronization, it will cause the replica to become inconsistant.

Unfortunately, I am operating DPM on an older server, and the server’s system board can not accomodate more than 2 GB of RAM. Since I can’t add any more memory to the server, and replacing the server isn’t an option right now, I tried disabling the server’s virtual memory.

Only time will tell if this was a good idea or a bad idea, but as of right now all of my replicas are consistant. I’ll keep you updated on how this idea ends up working out.

The Windows Experience Index

When Microsoft first introduced Vista, one of the new features that was introduced along with it was the Windows Experience index. The basic idea was that the performance of various system components was rated and assigned a numerical score. The lowest score represented your overall Windows Experience Index.

At the time, Microsoft wanted to simplify things for home users by getting software publishers to list a minimum experience index rating for applications rather than firm hardware requirements. In other words, if an application required a minimum score of 2.0, and your computer was rated at 3.0, then you could be guaranteed that the application would work. Well, that was the theory anyway. Ultimately, I don’t know of any software publishers that actually began using the Windows Experience Index.

Although nobody really uses the Windows Experience Index to determine what applications they can perform, I do use it to test the effectiveness of hardware upgrades on my primary workstation. Tonight something interesting happened though. My computer previously had scores ranging from 5.0 to 5.9 and had an overall score of 5.0. I ended up replacing the system board, the CPU, the power supply, and the graphics card. This time when checked the Windows Experience Index, all of my scores were 5.9.

What I didn’t realize is that in Windows Vista, the scores are capped at 5.9. No matter how good your hardware is, you will never score higher than 5.9. This means that there will eventually come a time when the Windows Experience Index becomes meaningless as a benchmark because of improvements in hardware. Windows 7 also includes the Windows Experience Index, and the maximum score has been raised to 7.9. Even so, I have to question the effectiveness of the index if it is capped. Oh well, I guess that’s what the Performance Monitor is for.

Automated Installation for Windows 7

It’s kind of funny how timing works out sometimes. About a week ago I mentioned in one of my blog posts that I hadn’t seen an automatic installation kit for Windows 7 yet. Today Microsoft sent an E-mail message to beta testers asking them to try out some of the new Windows 7 tools. Among these tools were:

• The Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit
• The Application Compatability Toolkit
• The User State Migration Tool
• The Microsoft Deployment Toolkit

None of these tools are really new. We had all of them in Vista, and some have been around for longer than that. I haven’t had a chance to download any of the new versions yet, but it will be interesting to see how much or how little these tools might have changed.