Blog de Joe Freeman

My 5 machine Windows Server 2012 virtual lab was using 91GB of space on my Macbook after installing the OS and infrastructure components into the host and guest machines. I was able to reduce the actual disk space used on my MacBook SSD by 50% through Windows Server deduplication and virtual disk shrink operations. That results in  47GB  savings of physical disk space. Disk Drive Layout I have Windows Server Virtual Machine that runs Active Directory, DNS, Hyper-V and SQL Server Management Studio.  It also hosts 4 other guest machines whose disk drives are over provisioned for the actual drive allocated. We can do this because none of the guest machines use all their disk space and because. As an advanced topic, we can get additional savings with Disk Deduplication where windows can create only one copy of disk space that is identical across the guest VMs/VHDs located on the same server drive.  The same operating system files exist across all VMs so we can...

Note: This is a quick off-the-cuff blog so I don't lose my installation notes. I created a Microsoft Virtual Lab  on my Mac to learn and develop against.  Now I want to add Message Bus for Windows Server to that environment.  The message bus requires SQL Server, for queue persistence. I'll use SQL Server instance / VM I've already installed.  The message bus runs in a cluster configuration with from 1-3 message bus machines. I'll use a single node because I'm learning/devloping and not performance testing it. Message Bus and SQL Server VMs will all be part of my virtual lab's AD domain, virtdev.freemansoft.com. You don't have to use Active Directory but it makes configuration simpler.  My Windows 7 development machine is not part of the virtual lab domain so we will have some configuration to do to give that client access. Quick Service Bus Overview The message bus provides a simple way of implementing asynchronous message passing between diffe...

Scenario I have a Windows 7 VM that I do general development on in addition to writing Java or other code on my Mac.  Sometimes I want to push code from my Windows 7 VM to a virtual Windows Server Lab set of VMs.  Other times I want to write a program on the Mac that communicates with servers in my virtual lab.  Direct IP address connection is always possible across these machines butI want name based address resolution so that I can test software the same way it would be in our data center. The virtual lab is powered down most of the time so the DNS solution must work well for general internet traffic when that lab's DNS server is unavailable.   The virtual lab has its own AD server that registers all the Domain members host names and IP addresses. In my case, I have it act as a subdomain of a domain that I have. The subdomain DNS is visible to machines on that private network whether they are in the AD Domain or not. My Windows 7 development VM and my ...

I have a small virtual lab running inside hyper-v hosted on a Windows Server 2012 standard instance.  The host is running AD and DNS and has a GUI interface.  The virtual lab machines all run Windows Server 2012 Core. Connect to the Hyper-V Instances There is an array of ways to manage or execute operations on Windows Server 2012 core instances. Use the Server Manager -> All Servers  tool.  Highlight the server and right-mouse to see the following options Computer Management:  This provides remote access to the Computer Management console. This will not work out of the box due to firewall rules. Remote Desktop Connection: This does not work because core instances do not have any GUI installed Windows Powershell:  This essentially runs a remote Powershell command. I've had inconsistent results with commands typed in this window Use the Hyper-V management console accessible from the Server Manager -> All Tools  menu...

Modified 2013/02/09 to add remote management enablement We're going create a Hyper-V Microsoft virtual lab environment on a Mac with the following configuration as discussed in this previous blog article  http://joe.blog.freemansoft.com/2013/01/run-microsoft-virtual-lab-on-mac-with.html .  We can use the same approach on Linux machine using VMWare workstation / player. Our mini-data center consists of 5 machines. A Windows 2012 Server hosting Active Directory and DNS.  The machine also holds/manages the hyper-v environment used to run the rest of the machines Two Windows 2012 servers to be used as application machines One Windows 2012 server used to run SQLServer 2012 One Windows 2012 server used to run the on-prem version of windows service bus We're not actually going to install any application software in this article.. The basic steps are Install Windows Server 2012 that will be our AD/DNS/Hyper-V host Hack the VMWare/Fusion/Workstation dhcp....