If you have been following on from Part 1 in this series, I covered installing VirtualBox and how to manage VirtuaBox using the phpVirtualBox web interface. Hopefully you already have VirtualBox installed and running nicely on your Windows Home Server, and have a Virtual Machine or two. All that’s left is to add the a few finishing touches too our configuration and we will have a great Virtual Machine hosting platform on top of Windows Home Server. Automatically Start and Stop Virtual Machines on Boot-Up and Shutdown On the rare occasion that you need to reboot your Windows Home Server, you want...

One of the slight drawbacks of my migration from a Windows Server 2008 R2 file server to a Windows Home Server 2011 file server was the lack of Hyper-V in WHS 2011. I used to run a few Virtual Machines under Hyper-V for testing purposes and wanted to do the same under WHS 2011. I decided to use VirtualBox as I have had a great experience with it before on my desktop’s and laptops. After following Part 1 and Part 2 in this series of articles you will be able to: Host Virtual Machines on your Windows Home Server 2011 box Manage Virtual Machines using a Web Interface Login to managing your...

Microsoft has released a connector for Windows Phone 7 which allows you to manage your Windows Home Server 2011 from your mobile phone. What Can It Do? With the My Home Server application you can do a few cool things including: Stream music. pictures and video to your phone Receive alerts from your Windows Home Server Administer accounts View backup statuses of computers on your network Add a home screen tile to monitor alerts and disk space Figure - View your WHS alerts on your Windows Phone Install on your Windows Home Server 2011 Go to http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=26799...

Windows Home Server 2011 makes a great server for hosting your media on. Out of the box it has cool interface for streaming your media over the web, but unfortunately it doesn’t play nicely with mobile devices like the iPhone, iPad or Android. If you want to stream music from your WHS 2011 to an iPhone, iPad or Android, you have to go third-party. Enter Subsonic, a free, web-based media streamer which transcodes music on the fly so it can be streamed to pretty much any device. You can find an extensive list of Subsonic mobile Apps here, but it includes apps iOS, Android, Windows Phone 7 and...

When you are trying to mount a LUN (by using Connect Disk) in SnapDrive, you may get an error saying “A timeout of 120 secs elapsed while waiting for volume arrival notification from the operating system”. Figure - SnapDrive timeout when connecting to a LUN This generally occurs when you have created a LUN using the NetApp System Manager first, and then tried to connect to it in SnapDrive. The reason for this error message is that when SnapDrive is connecting to a disk, it expects to see a formatted partition being connected – and when this doesn’t occur, it doesn’t know what...

Troubleshooting Microsoft Reporting Services email subscriptions can be a pain. How many times have you created a new subscription a few minutes in advance and not received it, then you are unsure if you set the schedule time correctly, or if you pressed the save button, or if the fix you made to reporting services didn’t work? It’s a time consuming process, but thankfully, there is a better way. Bad Example - Setting the report to run in a few minutes is annoying and can go wrong Instead, you can run some SQL commands on your reporting services to trigger the running and resending...

I was very excited with the announcement that Windows 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 would bring memory over-commit (dynamic memory) to Hyper-V, something that has been available in VMWare for a while now. Although I wouldn’t use this feature in a production environment (read this blog post for an explanation why: Memory over commitment, not for production servers), this new technology is perfect for use in the development and testing Hyper-V environment at SSW. The explanation on how to setup Dynamic Memory In Windows 2008 R2 is below, but before you try it out – be aware that it is currently in Beta,...

What goes on in a System Administrators mind? When they are in the office our priorities are Servers, Virtual Machines, VLANs, iSCSI Targets and all sorts of business level IT. The question is, how much of this knowledge do us System Administrator’s take home with us? How much to we apply to our own personal setups? With my “SysAdmin’s Mind” posts you will get an insight into how I do things at home – and along the way you may learn a thing or two that you can apply to your own setup. I have just started setting up a new desktop computer for myself so in my first post will cover the hardware...

There are two reasons you may want to enable serialized (one at a time) backups of Hyper-V Virtual Machines on your DPM server: You have all your Hyper-V Virtual Machines stored on a Clustered Shared Volume (CSV) and do not have a hardware VSS provider. You will notice that some of your VM’s often get a Recovery Point Creation Failed error. If you look at the DPM error log you will notice an error which says: Failed to prepare a Cluster Shared Volume (CSV) for backup as another backup using the same CSV is in progress. (ID 32612 Details: Back up is in progress. Please wait for backup completion...

If you are running Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V and have a SAN available, Hyper-V Live migration is a great way to make your Virtual Machines highly available. There is nothing like being able to migrate your VM’s to another node in the cluster and shutdown a host to perform maintenance – I still get excited every time I live migrate a machine! In some cases though, your Live Migration attempt may fail. Unfortunately the Failover Cluster Manager nor the event viewer sheds much light on the reason in most cases. A failed Live Migration attempt Unfortunately the cluster...