Essential Business Server

Virtualizing Essential Business Server

I would like to apologize to everyone for the lack of blog posts lately. I have been hard at work on my latest book, and that has been consuming all my time lately. Thankfully, I wrapped up the book this morning and I hope to return to a more normal blog posting schedule.

The book that I just finished is solely mine. I actually only wrote five chapters in it. Even so, writing this book was a learning experience, as it always is. This particular book was about Windows Essential Business Server.
Any time that I write a book I always set up a lab so that I can test the techniques that I writing about. This time I decided to use virtual machines rather than physical ones. According to Microsoft, Essential Business Server can be virtualized. Even so, I really struggled with getting Essential Business Server to work right in a virtual server environment.

If you have ever worked with Essential Business Server, then you know that there are three servers that make up the server suite; a management server, a messaging server, and a security server. Ultimately, I was able to virtualized the management and security servers, but I ended up having to run the messaging server on a separate box.
Another issue that I struggled with was network connectivity. For some reason, my host server (which had always worked fine in the past) periodically dropped my network connectivity. I have not had this problem for any other virtual machines, so I suspect that the problem may be links to Essential Business Server. So far I have not been able to come up with definitive proof though, so I plan to continue researching this issue.

Installing EBS with Hyper-V

For about the last week I have been ripping my hair out trying to install Essential Business Server for a project that I am working on. Every time that I have attempted the installation, I would get to the third server (the messaging server) and get an error that Setup failed because it was not able to extend the Active Directory schema.

I have gone over the Microsoft documentation numerous times, and it seems as though I am doing everything correctly. Tonight I stumbled onto an interesting Web page though (http://connect.microsoft.com/EBS08/community/discussion/richui/default.aspx?NewsgroupID=2554&RootArticleID=317560). Although Microsoft says that EBS will run on top of Hyper-V, there have apparently been a lot of problems with doing so.  Although some people claim to have been able to pull off a full EBS deployment using Hyper-V, I am running out of time in getting this deployment done. Tomorrow I am going to try using physical hardware.