November 2008 Archives

As I mentioned in my last post I'm working on my first SBS 2008 install, it is a migration from a 5 year old SBS 2003 install I have maintained. I thought I had maintained it fairly well, but it turns out I missed a few major updates. I'm not really sure how but some service packs were not installed on components.

The Best Practices Analyzer is a tool that is used in the migration to determine the overall health of the "source" Small Business Server prior to migration. You can run it any time, and it will produce useful results, with instructions to fix the discovered issues.

The migration guide, which showed me where all these problems are is quite comprehensive. It provides for a variety of scenarios and alternative approaches to many instructions which might be dicey for one reason or another.

Once thing they didn't mention, is what to do if you can't insert DVD #1 into the source server because the source server has no DVD drive! Which is funny, because 5 years ago when I installed Small Business Server 2003, they knew this might be the case, and included both CDs and a DVD.

Anyway I copied the tools directory from the DVD onto a CD. A search of Google reveals it may be possible to mount the DVD via a network share and copy the files needed to update the AD to the server to run.

And by the way, don't tell Microsoft, but I was able to normally install CentOS 5 running in a Hyper-V VM on a legacy network adapter.

Now to figure out this pesky no USB for the migration answer file thing.

I try not to get too geeky and excited about new software releases, but I have to confess to a certain amount of joyous anticipation this week as I look forward to deploying Windows Small Business Server 2008. The main features I think will make this release an improvement for small businesses are

• Built in support for virtualization. These days many small businesses have more than one server for a variety of reasons. Even by consolidating only two servers onto one physical server, I estimate the savings in hardware cost can be as much as 20%.
• Lower administrative overhead, and associated cost savings. For instance: the issue of SBS storage locations has been a problem for me. I have used these instructions on every Windows SBS 2003 installation I manage, and that adds up to a bit of time. Wayne McIntyre at SBS Blog posted a great introduction to the Server Storage Manage tool that greatly simplifies those things in SBS 2008.
• Updated and improved Small Business Server functions such as RWW, sharepoint server, and Exchange with Outlook Web Access.

On the downside, you will need 64 bit hardware for this, and you cannot upgrade an existing SBS domain in place, you have to install SBS 2003 in migration mode and then demote your old SBS server. But then again, upgrades are usually at least a little painful.

And depending on how you look at things, prices have increased. Its hard to compare apples to oranges 5 years later.

Resources

• SBS Blog (mentioned above)
• Technet SBS 2008 Documentation
• The SBS DIVA (Susan Bradley)
• Microsoft Product Web Site

... getting the TODO list done. For a couple of weeks now, my Windows Small Business Server 2003 has been telling me the weekly backups failed. I think the tape drive in this 10 year old server hardware finally died, leaving me feeling a bit vulnerable to fires, floods, or more likely in my neck of the woods, an extended power outage.

I've also been meaning to do a test deployment of iSCSI target. (In iSCSI parlance, the target is the storage server and the initiator is the storage client. So, last night I finally got around to building and installing the IET on a CentOS 5 server I had installed for just such purpose. You must install GCC, the kernel-devel, and openssl-devel packages and any dependancies in order to build the IET kernel module and install it. (I was previously under the mistaken impression that you had to patch the kernel to use this tool. That is not the case.).

You can get the tar ball from sourceforge, via the IET website. I ignored the advice for RedHat users to get the rpm, because it is fairly old. The most recent version as of this writing was 0.4.16. As I mentioned, after installing the dependencies mentioned in the previous paragraph, the install went just as described int he README that is included in the tarball.

I edited the configuration file to make a single target from a whole RAID device, and restarted the daemon, everything worked more or less fine. (There's a single error in my message log that I haven't figured out yet, but everything seems to be working.)

Then, I had to setup the initiator on my Windows 2003 Server. This is built into Windows 2008 (and Vista), but for Windows 2003 (and XP) you need to download the initiator from Microsoft.

Once I installed the initiator, I told it what IP address to look for the iSCSI target at. Once it found the target, it new about the volume I published and let me connect to it. When connecting I checked the box to reconnect when rebooting. The final step was to click the "Bind All" button shown in the illustration.

Once the iSCSI initiator connected to the target, your network (iSCSI) volume looks just like a local drive to the disk manager. I thought this was really slick for about an hour's worth of hacking about and installing software.

If you are thinking about doing this, you should be aware of what happened to my 100 MB home network when I did this. What happened was: It croaked. The interface on the server got pegged at 100% saturation while formatting the drive I setup to use for backups. Its OK for me becuase of two reasons: 1) I'll only backup during hours when I am asleep and not using the network much anyway. 2) Its a proof of concept. I can always turn it off it it becomes a problem.

If I do this in the real world, I will probably do it on a separate storage network fabric, and it will be over gigabit Ethernet. I even know what sexy new little Cisco switch I would use, but that can be a topic for a future post.