Active Directory and Windows Server 2003 End of Support – July 14th 2015

The date is soon upon us (14th July 2015) when mainstream support for Windows Server 2003 stops!

So what if you still have Windows Server 2003 in your environment?  Well, there will not be any patches, hotfixes or support available unless you have signed up for “special” extended support directly with Microsoft.

However it’s important to distinguish between Windows Server Active Directory level and the running Operating System.

Jeff Woolsey – Principal Group Program Manager for Windows Servers Virtualisation answered these questions:

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Question:

Active Directory has long offered the ability to operate at a “Windows Server 2003 Forest Functional Level” and “Windows Server 2003 Domain Functional Level.” How does this feature and functionality relate to the impending Windows Server 2003 End of Support on July 14^th, 2015? Will this feature still be supported after July 14^th 2015?

Answer:

Windows Server Active Directory Forest Functional Level (FFL)/Domain Functional Level (DFL) is not tied to any OS release (even though we named the feature that way). In this case, Windows Server 2003 FFL/DFL was introduced with Windows Server 2003 Active Directory, however, the ability for a Domain Controller to run at this level (AD version) is present in:

• Windows Server 2008
• Windows Server 2008 R2
• Windows Server 2012
• Windows Server 2012 R2

Thus, Active Directory 2003 FFL/DFL for a forest/domain where all domain controllers are using Windows Server 2008 or above will continue to be supported as those operating systems are still within extended support.

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Question:

Do customers need to upgrade the Forest/Domain Functional Level beyond 2003 FFL/DFL  to obtain support?

Answer:

No. Support for Active Directory 2003 FFL/DFL for a forest/domain where all domain controllers are Windows Server 2008 or above will continue to be supported as those operating systems are still within extended support.

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Question:

Is Active Directory 2003 FFL/DFL still supported with Windows Server 2012/2012 R2 Domain Controllers?

Answer:

Yes. Windows Server 2012/2012 R2 still support for Active Directory 2003 FFL/DFL. However, Microsoft’s recommendation and best practice is to adopt a higher FFL/DFL as soon as practical to ensure that all new deployments use Distributed File System Replication (DFSR) and take advantage of numerous new features and security enhancements such as:

1. Claims Based Authentication
2. Kerberos Armoring
3. Fine Grained Password Policies
4. And more…

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Question:

Is Active Directory 2003 FFL/DFL included with Windows Server v.Next?

Answer:

No. As Windows Server 2003 will soon be out of support, Active Directory 2003 FFL/DFL will be marked deprecated with the next release of Windows Server. We will no longer allow customers to create new forests/domains with these functional levels. This is primarily to ensure that all new deployments use Distribute File System Replication DFSR (and move away from the legacy File Replication Service FRS). Our guidance to customers is to move to a higher DFL/FFL as soon as practical to avoid future issues.

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Question:

Where can I learn more about the differences in Active Directory Functional Level?

Answer:

To learn more about the enhancements in Active Directory Functional Level, click here:

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/understanding-active-directory-functional-levels(v=ws.10).aspx

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Activate or deactivate feature(s) in Configuration Manager using hidden files – NO_SMS_ON_DRIVE.SMS

In System Center Configuration Manager (ConfigMgr) you can activate or deactivate certain features using hidden files.

In particular if you want to prevent ConfigMgr from enumerating certain NTFS volumes you can simply drop an empty file name called “NO_SMS_ON_DRIVE.SMS” to the root folder of the NTFS volume in question.

ConfigMgr will install binaries (files and folders) of a software to a distribution point on the NTFS-formatted volume that contains the most space.

Scenario: Our distribution points where on servers that had multiple roles like RODC, DNS, DHCP, Print Server etc… As the binaries go on the largest drive which was our root drive C:\ where the operating system was installed it caused some issues with running out of disk space.  By putting the “no_sms_on_drive.sms” we avoided this issue.

Another benefit we got is that we excluded the volume from our backup (as we didn’t want 100 of the same copies of software and updates) which made it manageable and efficient when replicating the backup over the WAN. 

More info on list of all hidden files and features: http://blogs.technet.com/b/configurationmgr/archive/2012/09/17/controlling-configuration-manager-2012-using-hidden-files.aspx

 

 

Problems Running MAP Toolkit to inventory your VMware Environment

Microsoft provides a free toolkit called Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit know as MAP.  It’s a toolkit that you can use to scan your environment (agent less) for multi-product assessment and planning.  Once you have scanned your environment it provides a detailed breakdown of different elements of products in a presentable Excel (CSV) file format.

One area in particular that is useful to scan is your VMware environment.  By running a manual scan you specify the vCenter IP and credentials that have the rights to login using the VMware Web Service.

In the inventory wizard you can specify the ports used to scan.  The default ports are 80 and 443.  Some VMware environments use port 8222 or 8333 but these are not listed by default in MAP.  You would have to manually add them (straight forward process).

When recently scanning a VMware 5.1 and 5.5 environment neither of those ports gave back any results.  We found the vCenter Web Services was using Port 9443.  However we were not entirely successful.  We had to install the VI Client on the MAP server.  Once installed we got the entire environment inventoried.

More information can be found here:

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/14935.map-how-to-inventory-your-vmware-environment.aspx

 

 

Present an iSCSI Virtual Disk to Hyper-V host(s) using Storage Spaces for Cluster Shared Volume (CSV)

Cluster Shared Volume (CSV) = shared storage that can be used by multiple nodes in a cluster to simultaneously read and write without corrupting the disk.  This is equivalent to Virtual Machine File System (VMFS) on VMware.

In a very simple form the cluster would have a master node that would commit any changes to the disk.  For example if we had a 4 node cluster as below:

Node 1  – Master

Node 2 – Slave

Node 3 – Slave

Node 4 – Slave

And if Node 3 wanted to commit any changes then these would be executed by Node 1.

We can present shared storage to nodes (hosts) by setting the storage up as an iSCSI target.

Below is a quick example:

Utilising Storage Spaces (previous blog) we can set up a Storage Pool and from the Storage Pool we can carve out a “virtual disk”.

Under Server Manager -> File and Storage Services -> Storage Pool -> New Virtual Disk

The New Virtual Disk Wizard will start.  Under “Virtual Disk Name” section specify a name you will give this Virtual Disk and a description.

Then click “Next”.

Specify the “Storage Layout” option either:

Simple, Mirror or Parity (explained in detail in previous blog post).

I have selected “Parity” then click “Next”.

Specify if you want the disk to dynamically grow (thin provisioned) or fixed in size.  This depends on workload you wish to run.  As this is a lab I have selected “Thin” then click “Next”.

Decide upon the size of the disk and then click “Next”.

Verify the information you have selected through each option and click “Create”.

If no anomalies you should see a successful message of the disk being setup.  Click “Close”.

The “New Volume” Wizard will pop up straight after.  This can be configured later if required.

Select the “Server” and “Disk” then click “Next”.

Specify the size of the volume.  We setup a 5GB Virtual Disk.

From this we can set up multiple volumes if need be.

I have chosen the full size 5GB. Then click “Next”.

Select a “Drive Letter” and click “Next”.

Give a descriptive “Volume label” for reference point.  Then click “Next”.

Again if no anomalies then you should see a successful message.  Click “Close”.

We can now see the VDISK_iSCSI virtual disk (LUN) created and displayed as Volume E:

Setup an iSCSI virtual disk (LUN) which you will use as shared storage between HV1 (node) and HV2 (node) for CSV.

Under File and Storage Services -> iSCSI -> select “New iSCSI Virtual Disk”.

Underlying delivery mechanism = iSCSI.

The iSCSI Virtual Disk Wizard will start.  Select “Server” and “Volume” then click “Next”.

Give the iSCSI virtual disk a name and then click “Next”.

Specify iSCSI virtual disk size and then click “Next”.

If this was a SAN you would be specifying the LUN size.  As this is a lab I am specifying “Dynamically expanding”.

Assign iSCSI target.  These are the servers that will be able to use the iSCSI Virtual Disk.  Select “New iSCSI target” and click “Next”.

Specify name and description.  When connecting later this name will be important for identification!

Click “Next”.

Recommended to use IQN as this is very unlikely to change in an environment compared to IP and DNS.   This way you minimise disruptions to your storage setup.  Browse for the servers that will have access to the iSCSI disk(s) and click “OK”.

Once added click “Next”.

As this is a lab environment I am not setting up CHAP.  In a production environment you would want to make your environment as secure as possible so I would highly recommend using CHAP as an added layer of protection.  Click “Next”.

Verify your selections and click “Create”.

If no anomalies you should get a successful message. Click “Close”.

The iSCSI_LUN or virtual disk will show as “not connected” until there is an active connection from the access servers specified.  In this instance it’s SG-HV1 and SG-HV2.

Jump over to the Hyper-V host(s) – SG-HV1 and SG-HV2 and start iSCSI Initiator wizard from Start – Run.

Under “Targets” give the Storage server IP or DNS Name and select “Quick Connect”.

On the pop up window select the “discovery targets” and click “Connect” and then “Done”.

Note the name we gave earlier matches.

Next go to “Volumes and Devices” and select “Auto Configure” this should mount the iSCSI disk (LUN) onto the server.  Do the same process for all the nodes that you wish to have the LUN present.

i.e. SG-HV1 and SG-HV2.  Then select “OK”.

Then when you look under Disks section (either SG-HV1 or SG-HV2) you can see the iSCSI “LUN” of 5GB being presented to both nodes.

As you can see the disk is “online” and “usable” as iSCSI target on both SG-HV1 and SG-HV2 which you would expect like a SAN presenting iSCSI LUN to multiple hosts.

This can be used as a CSV once you have your cluster setup which we will describe in another blog post.

Hopefully I haven’t confused you 🙂

Good Luck!

Windows Server 2012R2 Storage Spaces – removing physical disk(s) from existing Storage Pool

Removing existing physical disk(s) from a Storage Pool is straight forward.  Once the disk is removed it will automatically rebuild any data written on the disk to the other disks.  If the capacity exceeds the possibility of removing an existing disk it will fail.  It will also fail if the disk layout is set to for instance parity and you only have 3 disks and you remove 1.

Removing Physical Disk

1) Select “Storage Pool” on the left hand menu.  On the right hand bottom view under “Physical Disks” select the disk you wish to remove and right-click “Remove Disk”.   Note: There is an option to “Toggle Drive Light” this will only work if you have a SCSI Enclosure Services (SES) version 3 array support

2) Confirm you wish to remove the disk and select “Yes”

3) If no problems you should see the disk removed and data rebuilt onto the other existing disks.  Note: If there is a lot of data the rebuild could take some time and impact performance

 

Removing physical disk with Parity (3 disks minimum)

1) Select “Storage Pool” on the left hand menu.  On the right hand bottom view under “Physical Disks” select the disk you wish to remove and right-click “Remove Disk”

2) Confirm you wish to remove the disk and select “Yes”

3) As you can see on below message.  The process will not allow you to remove the disk as we have configured “Parity” which requires a minimum of 3 disks.  So even if it was a mistake it would stop you!

Pretty cool!

Windows Server 2012R2 Storage Spaces – adding physical disk(s) to existing Storage Pool

Adding additional disk(s) to an existing storage pool is an easy process.

1) Select “Storage Pools” on the left hand menu.  On the right hand bottom section where it says “Physical Disks” select “Tasks” – “Add Physical Disk”

2) Select the disk you wish to add to the pool.  In this instance I only have a single 5GB disk.  Select “OK”

3) If no problems you will notice disk 4 which is 5Gb has been added to the pool and increased the overall total size available.

Setup Windows 2012R2 Storage Spaces on Windows 8.1 Hyper-V client

There is a lot of information about Windows Server 2012R2 and the native features available.  One of the ways to learn or get comfortable with the solution is to play around.

In my previous blog I mentioned we could use VirtualBox to present various disks etc. However below I am going to set up a quick lab on how to use Storage Spaces using Windows 8.1  Hyper-V client.

Storage Spaces:

– Introduced in Server 2012 as a native feature

– Designed for enterprise use where it takes just a bunch of disks (JBOD) with a storage controller and configure them in a pool for use

– Cost effective solution to present mission-critical storage with fault tolerance and resilience (mirroring and parity – not to be confused with RAID)

I used the following for my lab setup:

– Windows 8.1 with Hyper-V client installed

– Setup a virtual machine with Server 2012R2 running on Windows 8.1 – Hyper-V client

Operating System: C:\ 32GB Dynamic Disk with 2048GB RAM

Attach another 3 virtual disks of size 4GB or larger and 1 x 5GB virtual disk

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Storage Space Process:

1) Present “physical disks” that will be used as shared storage

Supported drive format: SATA, SAS or USB

Not supported drive format: VHDs, pass-through disks, storage subsystem that layer RAID implementation on top of the physical disks , iSCSI and Fibre Channel controllers

2) Setup new storage pool  using “Primordial” (disks that you can pool will appear here) or run Get-Physicaldisk PowerShell command to verify.

3) Setup Virtual Disks from the “Storage Pool”

Pool Limitations (Courtesy: Mastering Windows Server 2012R2 – ISBN: 978-1-118-28942-6).

– A hard drive must be 10GB or larger (although I got mine working when presenting minimum 4GB per disk)

– Cannot deploy a boot system to a storage space

– Any drives being added into the storage pool must not be partitioned or formatted.  All data on the drive will be lost

– All drives must use same sector size (4K/512e or 512)

– All storage must be compatible with storport.sys.  If your hardware appears on Microsoft’s hardware compatibility list it will work

– If virtual disk is to be used in a failover cluster, NTFS must be the file system deployed to the virtual disk

4) Setup volume for use

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LAB:

Setup Storage Pool

1) Open Server Manager and select “File and Storage Services” (Role needs to be installed under Roles and Features)

2) Select “Disks” and you should see something similar to below image.

If the disk is “offline” then right click and select to make “online”.  Also notice the “Bus Type” – SAS (acceptable format)

3) Next select “Storage Pools” on the left hand column and notice the disks that are available under “Primordial”.

On the right hand section select “Tasks” – “New Storage Pool”.

4) New Storage Pool Wizard begins.  Select “Next”

5) Give the Storage Pool a name and select “Next”

6) Select the physical disks that you wish to pool together.

Note: Mixing “manual” and “automatic” disks: When allocating disks you can have multiple “hot spares” in your pool, but you should not mix “manual” and “automatic” disks.  Choosing “automatic” will balance the pool automatically between “hot spares” and usable capacity.

7) Confirm selection you have made is OK on the summary page and select “Create”

8) If no problems you should see a message displaying the storage pool was created successfully.  Select “Close”

Setup Virtual Disk

9) Observe the new storage pool created.  Next select “Tasks” – “New Virtual Disks” under the “Virtual Disks” heading (bottom right)

10) This will start the Wizard to setup a carved out portion of the disk you wish to use from the storage pool we created.  Select “Next”

11) Confirm the selection of the storage pool and select “Next”

12) Give the virtual disk a name and select “Next”

13) In general you can apply the following for storage layout:

Simple: increased performance – no resilience : temporary, scratch and video rendering

Mirror: increased performance and increased resilience: general purpose and VHD library

Parity: capacity efficiency and increased resilience – best for archive data and streaming media such as music and videos.

Need at least 3 disk to protect from a single failure or 7 disks to protect you from 2 disk failures

14) I have chosen “Parity” and select “Next”

15) Thin or Thick (fixed) provisioning depends on requirement and usage.  If unsure rule of thumb is to use “fixed”.

Thin: Thin-provisioned disks use only what is needed at the very moment.

Fixed: If you select 5GB you will need 5GB capacity available to provision.

I have select “Thin” then select “Next”

16) Specify Size: I have specified 5GB to carve out of the available 9GB from the storage pool.  Select “Next”

Write-Back Cache (improve write performance thus help speed up applications):

An impression given that the data has been written (committed) to disk but in fact it has been sent to the cache for fast processing.

The commit happens as soon as the storage is ready to receive.

Some applications/services including Hyper-V uses something called write through to avoid storage caches because they need the acknowledgement that the write really went to disk.

Write-Back Cache is enabled by default.  You can disable by using PowerShell.

17) View the summary of selections made and select “Create”

18) If no problems you will see a successful message.  Select “Close”

Setup Volume

19) You will be presented with setting up a new volume.  You can cancel this and setup later if you wish.

Select “Next”

20) Highlight the “virtual disk” and select “Next”

21) Again you can specify the “Volume” size.  For instance I have 5GB virtual disk. I could setup 5 x 1GB volumes with different drive letters.

In this instance I have selected full 5GB size.  Select “Next”

22) Select whether you wish to have a drive letter, no drive letter or a folder location.  Select “Next”

23) Select “File System” as NTFS and give a volume label.  Select “Next”

24) If no problems you will see a successful message.  Select “Close”

25) Observe under various sections what is presented.  You should have:

– Storage Pool size: 5GB

– Virtual disk size: 5GB

– Volume D: 5GB

Link with more information:  http://preview.tinyurl.com/navcr52

 

DELL EqualLogic – DELL Storage Update Manager (DSUM) – Firmware upgrade made easy!

DELL Storage Update Manager has been out for a while.  It’s an excellent way to upgrade the firmware on your DELL Arrays.  Back in the days you were forced to use Putty and GUI which wasn’t bad but you had to check a lot of things like which firmware to apply, make sure the disk firmware was up to date etc….  Might not seem a big thing but anything to do with upgrading your production SAN storage environment made me uncomfortable.

To DELL’s credit I haven’t had a single problem with applying the firmware on our SAN’s.  I would highly recommend going for the  4-hour mission critical support, especially if you are an enterprise customer and have a lot of SAN’s.

So in brief below are the steps to implement:

1) Login to https://eqlsupport.dell.com and download DELL Storage Update Manager to your client machine

2) This is a Java based application that will run on any machine as long as you have Java enabled.

3) Select “Index.html”

4) You will be prompted to install Java SE 6 Update 31 or later (as of this writing).  Select “OK”

5) Once installed, launch by selecting “Run”

6) Presented with the familiar login page.  Enter the Group SAN IP (management IP) or hostname with credentials.  Select “Login”

7) You will be presented with all the member SANs in the Group with the current Active firmware.  If an upgrade is required it will prompt as per image.  Next select “Get Started” on the top right hand corner.

8) In this instance the active firmware is v.6.0.9 and the recommended firmware and upgrade path is displayed.

Note: In some versions you can jump straight to the latest if the firmware is not too old.  Make sure you double-check this at the Dell Support Website or contact their Support.

9) An Update plan summary will be displayed with the time taken.   In my experience it doesn’t take this long but make sure you schedule this in during a maintenance window  and also make sure all backup’s are up-to-date.

Select “Start Plan”

10) Hopefully you would already be logged in when you downloaded DELL Storage Update Manager.  If not login to the DELL Support Website and select each url displayed on your plan and download the files onto the location specified.  Once downloaded select “Rescan for files”.

11) If a disk firmware is required it will install this first.  In this instance we have a disk that is not supported on this platform.  Best practise is to contact DELL to raise a ticket and get the disk swapped over.  As this is not production array I have selected to press OK and continue.  You will notice the “Next” button is greyed out.

12) Select “clear” at the bottom right.  This will prompt for a message: “Do you want to delete this failed operation: Performing firmware update”.  Select “Yes”.

13) Once all the firmware are installed.  Select “Restart”.

Note: The arrays are still active and usable.  It installs the new firmware on the passive controller.  A restart would trigger the passive controller to be active and the active to be passive so it can receive the same firmware update.  The downtime  shouldn’t be more than 30  – 60 seconds (in my experience).  It will take some time to display the update on the Update Manager.  You can also download, install then shutdown the client.  Come back later and restart.  As long there are no problems with the active controller it will not failover.

14) Once all installed you will see a nice green tick against each array.  Review the last screens and select “finish”.  Job done!

Hope this helps, and good luck!

Change / Toggle Network Location from Public to Private on Windows Client / Server

I thought I post this as more exposure the better.  It’s easily done when setting up a new network connection it prompts us for a question about finding devices and content.  If you select NO then it will set your network location to “public”.  This can be a problem if you want to join a server to a domain when the connection is recognised as “public” rather than “private”.

There are two ways to change this:-

1) If you are running Windows 8.1 then you can follow the below process:

– Press the “Windows key” on your keyboard and type “Network Connection Settings” and select this

– Under “Connections” select the network connection you want to toggle from Public / Private or vice versa

– Next screen will display “Find devices and content” – Select either ON (private) or OFF (public)

2) Through PowerShell:

– Open an Elevated PowerShell prompt (right-click application and select “run as administrator”)

I highly recommend to install PowerShell ISE (Integrated Scripting Environment) as this will pretty much write the code for you as long as you know the logic.

– Type below as illustrated in the image:

Get-NetConnectionProfile  (hit return and observe outcome)

(Identify the “InterfaceIndex” value of your connection (LAN/Wi-Fi/Virtual) and then run:

Set-NetConnectionProfile -InterfaceIndex “number” -NetworkCategory Private (hit return)

Rerun:

Get-NetConnectionProfile

There are a lot of references  out there but I came across the below:

http://preview.tinyurl.com/prayhsa

http://preview.tinyurl.com/96555sr

How to run Hyper-V and VirtualBox on a client machine

I have been trying out different client hypervisors to virtualise my workload on one of my Windows 8.1 machines  for demo’s and knowledge building on various platforms.

Hyper-V is great (enabled through Programs and Features – Turn windows features on / off) for setting up Microsoft’s and Linux based operating systems.  The hyper-v client is the same for Windows 8.1 as it’s for Server 2012R2 with some functionality on 8.1 trimmed out (for obvious reasons).  So if you setup a virtual machine (VHD/VHDX) on Windows 8.1 it will also run on Server 2012R2.

As good as Hyper-V client is there is only so much you can do when your hardware is the limitation (1 disk)  of running nested virtualisation i.e. running Hyper-V client on Windows 8.1 to virtualise a workload say Server 2012R2 then run Hyper-V role on the virtual machine to setup various functions like clustering.  There is a great article below on how to enable this (note: this setup is not supported but great for lab environment to test functionality).

Article: How to install Hyper-V on a Virtual Machine in Hyper-V

Url: http://preview.tinyurl.com/o7fwoex

As I wanted to play around with Storage Spaces I found using VirtualBox (open-source) a better alternative.  However Hyper-V and VirtualBox don’t like to co-exist.  If Hyper-V is installed on your client machine it will lock the rights to virtualisation during boot.  To make this work there is another great article on how to setup dual boot.  One environment where Hyper-V runs and another where Hyper-V is switched off and Virtualbox is running (will enable you to virtualise 64-bit workload).

Article: Switch easily between VirtualBox and Hyper-V with a BCDEdit boot entry in Windows 8.1

Url: http://preview.tinyurl.com/n6hn2xd

Good Luck! 🙂