Hyper-V Dynamic Memory Allocation strikes again… I have decided to no longer use Dynamic Memory Allocation on any of my virtual machines. It is a fine idea in theory but it is extremely buggy and I am not sure how it made it into a production OS… What’s the issue this time around? This is […]

Ran into a fun issue today… I had a pair of Server 2012 R2 servers in a remote office that refused to sync the proper time for their clocks. No matter what I did they were always off by five minutes. One of them was a domain controller for the office. In the process of […]

I had to reconfig my dysfunct home office network today but now everything is setup and talking correctly. I received a 16 port unmanaged switch and 3 USB lan adapters today and all is working correctly with my 3 Server 2012 R2 boxes. The cluster can move forward as soon as I have some more […]

So part of my “poor-man’s hyper-v cluster” experiment in my home office here has led me to start looking into storage options for virtual platforms. Hyper-V is apparently quite flexible, however fail-over clustering limits your options. So for those of you who are just joining us I am doing research on clustered Hyper-V for work. […]

I have a stack of old laptops sitting here from work (I occasionally get the old ones back when they are retired). It occurred to me that laptops would make a very good “home server stack” environment. Here is my reasoning…

Today I am working on setting up a BackupPC server to take remote internal centralized backups of some of our other servers on the cheap. I already had BackupPC installed and the basics configured but I needed to add a new drive to the system (for additional backup data storage) and I also needed to […]

I have been seeing some really odd issues lately on a couple of our Hyper-V hosts. I initially had chocked the issues up to slow storage access speeds caused by a possibly defunct storage controller on one particular server. However, recently the issues got worse. I was getting random errors that were preventing me from […]

Ran into an issue to day installing Server 2012 R2 from an ISO file onto a fresh/brand new VM. "0xE0000100: "Windows installation encountered an unexpected error. Verify that the installation sources are accessible, and restart the installation." A little Google-Fu fixed me right up. New VM’s only have 512 MB of “startup memory” and you […]

I love Hyper-V 3.0… particularly compared to earlier versions. It comes packed with some very nice new features, several of which are geared around the idea of thin deployment. One such feature is Dynamic Memory. Dynamic Memory allows you to set a base “Starting” amount of RAM for a server (say something low like 512 […]

The company I work for has some rather remote offices and we are in the process of virtualizing some of our infrastructure components, particularly our remote domain controllers. I have done a remote DC deployment in one of our other foreign offices and the replication of the Domain took quite a while. In that case, […]

The company I work for is a relatively small shop when it comes to virtualization and especially when it comes to Hyper-V. So that means I am usually working on individual host servers and not doing any kind of grand scale configuration using SCCM or some other enterprise level tool. I think most folks in […]