Slighty shabby and a late start to Thursday following the Windows Server 2008 R2 EAP dinner followed by the 1E TechEd party – a heavy night!
For the dinner, the UK team chose a fabulous Italian restaurant called Bacco (www.bacco.de/english/restaurant/restaurant.html) which I’d definately go back to and hosted a great evening… many thanks to Stuart, Gareth, Neil, Alex, etc. from Microsoft UK.
We were also joined by Allen Stewart & Rajesh Dave from corp. Allen is Principal PM for Windows Server and Raj is a PM for Windows Hyper-V. Both very interesting & incredibly knowledgable guys with deep understanding across a wide range of topics (and not just Microsoft!).
I pestered them for info on Hyper-V thin provisioning of memory and whilst they couldn’t confirm anything as we all said ‘we live in hope!’ 😉
…as for the night, I’d been invited to the 1E TechEd Europe party at Spindler & Klatt www.spindlerklatt.de – an uuber trendy restaurant/club in East Berlin frequented by the likes of Angelina, Clooney, and now Cook!
What a great party and many many thanks to the team at 1E (www.1e.com). Did I mention I was the 4th member of the business in the founding year? (yes I probably did & several times.. lots to drunk! ;-)) We went our separate ways in 1999, oh for a slice of that now… anyway, moving on!
Seriously though hats off to Samir, Mark, and Phil – they have built a company that knows how to throw a great party (regarded as the best at TechEd), and a team of very bright, talented people who have a lot of respect for the company and its founders.
Ouch my head is pounding! time to go to sessions, starting with…
ITS211 Keeping Your CIO Happy: Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 SLA Scorecarding with Operations Manager 2007 and SQL Server 2008
Service Level dashboard – free solution accelerator dashboard on Microsoft
SVR401 & 402 DirectAccess Technical Drilldown, Part 1 of 2: IPv6 and Transition Technologies + Part 2 of 2: Putting It All Together
– to be native will likely mean new network gear, is new network layer (layer 2 unchanged)
– hex is back! use of double colon notation, but can only be used once per address
– cannot mix with ipV4 mask bit notation
– host derived with mac address which has privacy issues, Win7 & R2 generate random based on interface, can be disabled (revert to mac based) with netsh interface ipv6 set global randomizeidentifiers=disabled
- Assigns a block of IPv6 address space to any host or network that has a global IPv4 address.
- Encapsulates IPv6 packets inside IPv4 packets for transmission over an IPv4 network using 6in4.
- Routes traffic between 6to4 and “native” IPv6 networks.
– you need to manually unblock ISATAP entry in DNS which can be done via the registry or command line, e.g.
C:>dnscmd /config /globalqueryblocklist wpad
Registry property globalqueryblocklist successfully reset.
Command completed successfully.
ISATAP is a huge subject in it’s own right, the Intra-site Automatic Tunnel Addressing Protocol Deployment Guide is available at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=0f3a8868-e337-43d1-b271-b8c8702344cd&displaylang=en
Putting it all together..
– Check tunnel endpoint authentication using ‘klist’ to list Kerberos data
– Use NRTP to direct DNS queries to a specific server for a particular names space (view using ‘netsh namespace show effectivepolicy’)
– PKI needs to be right as certificates are the foundations
– you must publish the revocation list
– NLS (Nework Location Server) is just a https website accessible from the DA server, e.g. nls.corp.example.com
– if it doesn’t work, it could be a couple of days troubleshooting!
If you’re thinking of setting this up in a virtual lab, I also took note from Allen Stewart’s blog at http://blogs.technet.com/wincat/
…if you’re planning to virtualize your lab environment on Hyper-V, you should ensure you’re using Legacy Network Adapters for the child partition where you’re running the DAS. Using the default synthetic NICs is OK for all the other resources in the test lab, but for the DAS itself, it’s important to have both the Internet and Corpnet NICs as legacy ones, to ensure proper passing of traffic between both sides of the DAS. If you use the default synthetic adapters, you may end up in a situation where traffic doesn’t properly flow from the outside to the inside, even though all your IPsec, 6to4, Teredo, and IP-HTTPS settings are correct. Basically, you’ll be in a situation where connectivity will fail at a basic level, with you not even being to successfully ping the internal DNS server using its ISATAP address.If you’ve already built your lab on Hyper-V using the synthetic adapters, the fix is pretty simple. Just replace them with legacy ones, reconfigure the IP addressing as specified in the guide and rerun the DirectAccess wizard, again supplying all the information specified in the guide. After doing so, all your traffic should flow properly.
– Thanks Allen!
DAT312 All You Needed to Know about Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Failover Clustering
– new features
– applications need retry mechanisms built in to provide seamless failover
– no longer have to take down the cluster to upgrade, supports rolling upgrades
Want to deploy stretched clusters? lots do. As in separate geo-redundant clusters, not separate nodes e.g.
– sql 2008 failover clustering install breaks on windows server 2008 R2 and needs to be slipstreamed with SP1 (If only we knew this last weekend!)
(slipstreaming is incorporating patches into the installation media to effect a higher level of install base over RTM – Microsoft tend to do this but not always quickly!)
see http://blogs.msdn.com/psssql/archive/2009/03/17/how-to-fix-your-sql-server-2008-setup-before-you-run-setup-part-ii.aspx for more info
– during upgrades to a 2-node cluster there will be a period of time when you are exposed to node failure, and must not have a failover attempt for fear of corruption. removing the node from the cluster owners will stop premature attempted failover.
Further Microsoft resources.. (will add others also)
SQL Server ® 2008 Failover Clustering White Paper: http://sqlcat.com/whitepapers/archive/2009/07/08/sql-server-2008-failover-clustering.aspx
Recommended Books Online Doc Refresh #7 (May, 2009), or later: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms130214.aspx
Failover Clusters – Getting Started: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms189134.aspx
Rolling upgrade process and best practice: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms191295.aspx
Maintaining a Failover Cluster: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms178061.aspx
Setup command line usage: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms144259.aspx
Configuration.ini file usage: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd239405.aspx