Windows Server

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) Management

Found this story while surfing the net, seems that the management software for Red Hat’s virtualization software needs to be run from a Windows Server, they say that they will have a Linux version ready around 2010, but at the time of this story and for a little while anyways, you will need some sort of Windows box to managed the virtual environment. Read the insert below and then check out the full story.

“As a major Linux vendor, one might expect that Red Hat’s new Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) for Servers solution would be able to run on Linux servers.

You’d be wrong. Not only is that not the case, but the Management Server piece of RHEV, which provides virtualization management capabilities, requires users to be running Microsoft’s Windows Server.

That’s no typo: A Linux vendor is requiring its users to run one of its key new products on the rival, closed source Windows operating system.”

Here is the link to the full article.

-NS

Exchange Server 2010 Management Architecture

I myself haven’t even started playing with Exchange Server 2007, I know, pretty weak, eh? Well there is not much I can do when I am busy managing 7 clients IT Infrastructures and they are happy with Exchange Server 2003 SP2. Well the next iteration of Exchange Server is Exchange Server 2003, the new management architecture is based on PowerShell and allows you to manage multiple Exchange 2010 organizations… for the full read-up on Exchange 2010 Management Architecture click here.

Why you should backup the SQL Installation Folder

I cannot and will not take credit for the following, but since my fellow senior engineer does not have a blog I figured I’d share this with everyone out there, because when searching for a solution, this one did not present itself.

Scenario : SQL Server, slow performance, and erratic behavior.

Solution : Reboot the server.

Outcome : Server Hung, for what seems a longer than usual amount of time.

Steps taken to rectify this behavior : Hard Power off the server (don’t ever do this, I mean sometimes you have to, but wait just a little bit longer before resorting to this) Things that could have been tried before, would be to run services.msc from another workstation or server, and possible you could connect and stop some services speeding up the process.

What ended up happening? The client shut the server off with thepower button.

Server boots back up and as you’d thing, SQL Server Service failed to start…

Customer reboots again.

SQL Server fails to start once again. Customer called EPIC Information Solutions (the company I work for)

A Programmer was on the task with the senior engineer mentioned above. We came back from a well deserved lunch and the VP of Managed Services asked us to help the programmer and the senior engineer. We tried pretty much everything, permissions on files, on services, hardware profile under services was disabled(which should be enabled, but that didn’t fix it) always got SQL Server Service failed to start “Access Denied” nothing seemed to fix it. Procmon.exe couldn’t identify which files it was failing on, there was no way to check to see if the databases were okay or not. Renaming Master.mdb and Masterldf.ldf netted the same results, nothing seemed to work. We used and abused Google like you wouldn’t believe… the backups were unreliable as they were years old. Sure there were backups of the SQL Databases, but how can you restore a SQL Backup when you cannot start the SQL Server Service and restore them with SQL Management Studio…. The worst came into view, rebuilding the master.mdb. We really didn’t want to do that.

Last ditch effort from my friend the senior engineer.

Rename the “Bin” folder under the “Microsoft SQL Server” folder and restored from a backup that ran last night.

Folder was restores, back to services.msc, highlight the SQL Server Service, and click start. Done… service started. SQL Server Management Studio started up and he was able to connect to the database. Our Programmer tested the app that required SQL and sure enough, it was working fine.

Thus as the title says, for the amount of space SQL Server directory takes… Back It UP!

Cheers,

NS