Windows 2008

The polished turd that is Dell’s Gold Level Support department really isn’t all that supporting

If you follow me on twitter then you’ve heard bits and pieces of this already on my twitter stream.

In preparation for the onslaught of security patches which were released on October 14, 2009 I went ahead and patched all our severs the day before as it had been a couple of weeks since I had triggered patching and I wanted to get everything else installed so that there wouldn’t be any dependency issues with installing the new patches.  All of our servers, about 60 in all, patched correctly except for two of the three servers which host our web application which our customers use.  Now I say that two of the three servers didn’t patch correctly, but the third server wasn’t allowed to reboot so I don’t know if that one patched corrected or not at the time.  But with two machines of the three offline, I wasn’t willing to chance it. Continued »

SQL Server 2008 Clustering Article in SQL Server Magazine

For those of you who haven’t check out this months SQL Server Magazine, the cover article was written by yours truly about Clustering SQL Server 2008 on Windows Server 2008.  This is an updated version of the article I did last December on Clustering SQL Server 2005 on Windows Server 2003.

I hope that you find it handy.  (Subscription is required.)

Denny

Windows 2008, where oh where has all my drive space gone?

If you are using Windows 2008, you may be like me.  Wondering where the hell all this drive space is disapearing to. Continued »

Join me on Sept 15, 2009 as we talk about Clustering SQL Server without a SAN

On September 15, 2009 I’ll be hosting a webcast entitled “How to Set Up a Cost-Effective Windows Server 2008 Cluster with SQL Server 2008 and Tune The Performance“.  During this webcast I’ll be showing how to use Starwind Software’s iSCSI Server software to replace to need for a SAN when creating your Windows 2008 and SQL Server 2008 server.

The presentation will start at 2PM EST, 11AM PST.  Pre-registration is required using the above link.

Do note that this presentation will be done a little bit backwards as we’ll dive into the technical content write away, then hit the slide show with the SQL Installation is running in the background.

See you there.

Denny

Windows 2008 C Drive doesn’t always extend correctly

When using VMs and Windows 2008 you have the ability to easily grow the C drive on your servers. This makes it much easier to assign only the space needed to the C drive of your servers saving you a ton of space.

However I recently had a few machines say that the disk was extanded in Computer Manager and diskpart, but Windows Explorer (aka My Computer) showed the old amount. And growing the disk a second time doesn’t help. Shrink the partition (either in diskpart or Computer Management) then extend it again seamed to fix it for me.

Denny

IIS 7 and Session State

While working on moving my companies data center from Texas to California we ran across an issue with IIS 7 on Windows 2008 because we were using the ASPState database to handle session state.

If you’re like me you probably upgrade when you have the chance.  If you’re like my company you don’t run just one website per server.  In our case this cluster of web servers runs 6 different sites, and the session state for one of them keeps resetting just about every page view.

Apparently one of the values which is used to create the session id is the ID number of the website in IIS.  Up through IIS 6 this number was a hash of the name of the site, so as long as the sites all had the same name you were set.  In IIS 7 this ID number is now just a running number based on the order you create the websites in.  So if you create the websites in a different order on one or more machines then your ASPState information will keep expiring since the hash values don’t match correctly.

The good news is that you can change the ID number by clicking the Advanced Settings link on the right hand side.

Denny

Use caution when using an image to setup servers which will be clustered.

A lesson that I learned while setting up our new data center for work, is to be careful when setting up your clustered servers.

Most of our servers are VMs, including a Windows 2008 Cluster (yeah I know not supported, I’m a rebel damn it and I want a Windows 2008 cluster installed under VMware ESX). Continued »

How to configure DTC on Windows 2008

This post is specifically about setting up DTC on Windows 2008.  If you are looking for the post about setting up DTC on Windows 2003 you’ll want to go to the post “How to configure DTC on Windows 2003“.

The basic idea behind DTC setup in Windows 2008 is very similar to Windows 2003.  DTC needs to be installed and then configured.  To install DTC open the Control Panel, then Programs and Features.  Click on the link to the right which says .  Eventually the Server Manager will open and finish querying the system for the list of features and roles which are setup.  Click on Add Feature button and select Application Server from the Feature list (you may need to click next to get past the welcome to the wizard screen.  On the screen which tells you about the Application Server click next.  On the next page you can select the services which you be installed as part of this role.  Select the Incoming and/or Outgoing Remote Transactions depending on which one you need.  If SOAP will be used you may need the WS-Atomic Transactions installed.  If so select that as well.  (In this example I’ll check them all.)

Then click next.  If you have selected the WS-Atomic Transactions you’ll be presented with a page to select an SSL cert.  You can either select one, of create a self signed cert, or request one later from a CA.  I selected a self signed cert as I didn’t have one already installed.  Click next, then install.  If you didn’t install WS-Atomic Transactions the next screen will simply have the summary and install button.

It will take a while as Windows is going to install .NET 3.0 as part of this install.  Now is a good time for coffee or a smoke.

After installation is complete click close.

If you click the plus sign next to Roles in the right hand menu you can navigate down to Roles > Application Server > Component Services > Distributed Transaction Coordinator > Local DTC.

Right click on Local DTC and select properties, then select the security tab.  This tab looks very similar to the Windows 2003 one.

Check which ever boxes you need to in order to get the DTC setup to match the other servers in your environment.  Be sure to enable “Allow Remote Clients” or client machines won’t be able to access the DTC on this machine.  If you want to be able to remotely enable DTC from another machine you’ll need to check the “Allow Remote Administration”.  It’s been my experience that once DTC is setup and working remove administration probably isn’t that important so I’d say leave that unchecked and simply RDP into the server if it needs to be worked on.  Your screen will look something like this.

When you click OK DTC will prompt you to restart it.  Click yes (unless you want to schedule the restart for another time) and DTC will restart.  You can see the DTC events in the log by selecting the “Application Server” option from the menu on the left.  You are going to want the most recent event to look something like this.

MSDTC started with the following settings:
Security Configuration (OFF = 0 and ON = 1):
Allow Remote Administrator = 0,
Network Clients = 1,
Trasaction Manager Communication:
Allow Inbound Transactions = 1,
Allow Outbound Transactions = 1,
Transaction Internet Protocol (TIP) = 0,
Enable XA Transactions = 1,
MSDTC Communications Security = No Authentication Required,
Account = NT AUTHORITY\NetworkService,
Firewall Exclusion Detected = 0
Transaction Bridge Installed = 1
Filtering Duplicate Events = 1
(Yes, I’m aware of the spelling issues in the error message.  That’s a straight copy and paste from Windows 2008’s event log.)When configuring DTC on a cluster you only need to configure one node.  This is because DTC is a cluster aware service so when you install DTC after setup clustering (or you setup clustering after installing DTC) the DTC service will already be setup as a clustered resource within the first cluster resource group created.  When you configure DTC for network access on a cluster the settings are written to the Quorum drive as well as the system registry which allows both nodes to share the settings.  If you have a cluster and you have to go through a firewall with DTC and have followed KB Article 250367 (I’m sure there is a Windows 2008 version of this KB article somewhere, I just haven’t run across it yet) you will need to have more than 20 ports available to DTC.  This is because when you configure the DCOM protocols to use specific ports you are configuring all of RPC to use those specific ports.  This means that the cluster administrator needs to use these ports as does the Component Services window which monitors for distributed transactions.  When dealing with a cluster it is recommended that you have at least 100 ports open between the machines within the transaction. If you need to setup MS DTC to talk to another DTC coordinator then you will probably need to use the No Authentication Required setting unless they support the other options.  Check with the vendor of the other coordinator to find out.

(These are the settings which you need no matter which version or edition of SQL Server you have installed.)

Denny

Installing SQL Server on Windows Server 2008

I ran across an excellent post from Shawn Hernan of the SQL Server Development team (the guys that write SQL Server).  Shawn has put out an excellent blog post on what needs to be done to get SQL Server2005 or SQL Server 2008 installed on Windows Server 2008.

 You can find the post here.

Denny