Richard J Green

Windows Server 2012 Essentials and the Failed Migration

Last week, I took a day out of the office as annual leave to migrate my home setup from Windows Home Server 2011 to Windows Server 2012 Essentials, taking in all of the blog posts I have written over the previous months’ about how I intend to use some of it’s new features.

Suffice to say, it wasn’t a success, but I have completed the lessons learnt and I am now preparing for a second attempt.

The main protagonist in the failure was the recently acquired 3ware 9590SE-12ML multilane SAS/SATA RAID controller. After installing the card about a month ago to verify it’s functionality, I saw the message “3ware BIOS not initialized” and the 3ware site left me comforted in the fact that this was due to the fact that I had no drives connected to it. When I connected my two new Intel 520 Series SSD drives to it to create a RAID1 mirror for my new OS drive, I saw the same message still even though the drives we detected okay. I installed the 3DM2 software in Windows Home Server 2011 and I was able to manage the card via the web interface (which is really nice by the way), however after creating the volume unit, the controller began to initialize the disks and the system froze instantly. I left a it a minute or two just in case, but no joy. A hard power off and restart then left the controller completely missing from the POST and startup with even the BIOS not showing it as connected. After trying a few different things, I was able to intermittently get the card to be detected, but not without causing major stability issues and it still wouldn’t properly initialize the BIOS during POST. A colleague leant me an Adaptec card for a day to test and this card was detected okay, allowed me to create a volume and the volume was detected within Windows okay, so I had it down to a compatibility issue between the motherboard and the 3ware card.

I decided that the issue with the motherboard compatibility could be related to the fact that it is a Micro ATX motherboard with the AMD Brazos chipset and the AMD E-350 ultra-low power processor and that the card could perhaps not be able to draw sufficient power from the PCI Express 16x (4x Mode) slot so I began looking at some other options. The processor has actually been one of the things I wish I had done differently of late. When the server was first built and put online it was great, but as I began to utilize the Home Server for more backend centric tasks, I began to notice the 1.4GHz Dual Core processor struggling and some tasks would timeout if they happened their timing happened to collide with other simultaneous tasks.

With the Ivy Bridge 3rd Generation Intel Core family CPUs, Intel released a line of CPU appended with the letterT. This family of CPUs are low power compared to their letter-less or K processors with the Core i5-3470T being the most efficient, pipping even the Core i3 T variant to the peak TDP and performance titles. Compared to the 18W peak TDP of my AMD E-350 chip, the Intel Core i5-3470T consumes a peak TDP of 35W, however it gives in exchange 2.9GHz Dual Core processing with Hyper-Threading allowing Windows to see two additional virtual cores, however because it is an i5 chip and not the lower specification i3 chip, it features TurboBoost which allows the CPU to boost up to 3.6GHz under high load. Using data from cpubenchmark.net, the AMD E-350 produces a score of 774, whilst the Intel Core i5-3470T produces a score of 4,640.

Investing in Ivy Bridge is more expensive then investing in the 2nd Generation Sandy Bridge which also offers some T branded chips for energy efficiency, however the CPU benchmark for the Sandy Bridge vs. the Ivy Bridge speaks for itself not to mention the fact that the Ivy Bridge reduces the TDP by 7W, the extra few pounds between the chips is worth the money.

To support the Ivy Bridge Socket 1155 Core i5 processor, I was going to need a new motherboard. I like ASUS as their are the market leader in motherboards in my view, and I decided upon the ASUS P8Z77-V LX board for several reasons. It’s a step up from the Micro ATX board I have previously been using, up to a standard ATX board.

The benefits of this are it avails me 4 memory modules in a dual channel configuration whereas I only previously had two slots with a single channel. The slot count isn’t an issue as I upgraded about six months ago from my originally purchased Corsair Value Select 2x2GB DIMMs to 2x4GB Corsair XMS3 DIMMs. The new DIMMs allowed me to make use of the higher DDR3 PC3-12800 1600MHz speeds, doubled my memory ceiling as due to running SQL Express on the backend for the MyMovies database I was hitting very close to 4GB daily and gave me a theoretically more stable system as the XMS3 memory is designed for overclocking and high performance cooling with it’s head spreaders, so running them at a standard clock should make them super stable. The other benefit is the increased PCI Express slot count. The new board gives me 3x PCI, 2x PCIe x1 and 2x PCIe 16x, one of which is a true 16x PCIe 3.0 slot and the other a PCIe 2.0 slot with 4x bandwidth.

The other reason for selecting it was the Z77 chipset. The Z77 set affords me the widest range of slots, interfaces and is also the best bang for buck having the best power consumption for the chipset out of all of the full feature chipsets (ignoring the Q77 chipset as although this adds Intel vPro, you lose a lot of slots through it).

All told, with the pair of new SSD drives for the OS mirror, the new Core i5 processor and the new ASUS motherboard, my overall power consumption will increase by what equates to £10-15 a year. When you consider the performance uplift I am going to see from this (the hint is worlds’ apart), it’s £10-15 a year very well spent.

The T variant of the Ivy Bridge supports passive cooling which aligns with my previous mantra of keeping it quiet, but I have come to the conclusion over the last year that this is unnecessary when I have a Cisco 2950T switch and a Cisco PIX Firewall making way more noise than a server would and the fact that it is all racked in my garage, out of earshot of the rest of the house for the one to two hours a month I many spend in the garage, it’s just not worth the thermal though process trying to engineer it quiet and cool. I have also been getting concerned lately of the drive temperatures on the Western Digital Green drives, stacked up inside the 4U case, so I’m switching to active. I selected he Akasa AK-CCE-7101CP. It supports all nature of Intel chipsets including the Socket 1155 for Ivy Bridge and has variable fan speed and decibel output. It’s rated up to 95W TDP for the quad core i5 and the i7 family chips, so running it on the 35W T variant of the i5, I’m hoping it will run at the quiet end of it’s spectrum, putting it at 11.7dB which is silent to the passing ear as it happens anyway.

To assist with my drive cooling problem and also an on-going concern about what I would do to deal with a drive failure or upgrade in a hurry (currently, it’s shutdown the server, drag and keyboard, mouse and monitor to the rack from my study to access the console session, open the case and connect the new drive cables etc) I decided to invest in the X-Case 3-to-5 Hot Swap caddy’s. These caddy’s replace the internal cold swap drive bays which require manual cabling and drive screwing with an exterior access, hot swap caddy system. All the drives in a block of 5 are powered via two Molex connectors, reducing the number of power connectors I need from my modular PSU, and the five SATA data ports on the rear of the cage are to be pre-connected inside the case allowing me to hot add and remove disk without powering down the server or even having to open the case. Each caddy also features a drive status and a drive access indicator so that I can readily tell if a drive fails which drive is the one in question, making fault resolution much easier. This is all the more important and useful with Windows Server 2012 Essentials. The cage also incorporates an 80mm fan which draws air out of the drive cage to keep the disk temperatures down.

To summarize then, I’m doing the following:

  1. Upgrading the ASUS AMD Brazos Motherboard to an ASUS P8Z77-V LX Motherboard
  2. Upgrading the AMD E-350 Dual Core 1.4GHz CPU (774 Score) to an Intel Core i5-3470T 2.9GHz Dual Core CPU (4,640 Score)
  3. Gaining an Extra Memory Channel for my Corsair XMS3 2x4GB DIMMs
  4. Adding X-Case Hot Swap Drive Caddies
  5. Gaining a Bit of Active Cooling

I’m still waiting for a few of the parts to arrive but once they do, it’s going to feel like the Home Server is going to be getting it’s 18 month birthday present in the form of several serious performance and ease of use and management upgrades. I’m really looking forward to it and in a sad kind of way, I’m glad that the upgrade didn’t work out the first time, otherwise I wouldn’t have invested in these parts which I know I’m not going to regret buying.

Once I’ve got everything installed, I’ll run another post to show the images of it and I will hotlink to my old pictures to do a little before and after for comparison, then it’ll be hot trot into Windows Server 2012 Essentials I hope.

 

by on January 20, 2013

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Partners on Exchange in Windows Server 2012 Essentials

Reading some of the comments and views on Windows Server 2012 Essentials this evening, it appears that quite a number of partners aren’t very happy with the lack of Exchange as was previously found in Small Business Server (SBS).

I think this is short-sighted of these partners making these comments. If you are a partner, what makes you more money? New deployments or supporting existing ones? I would hazard a guess that it is the new deployments. SBS made Exchange easy, really easy, which meant that the amount of work to configure Exchange to work was limited. The hardest part was migrating any existing mail systems into Exchange.

Windows Server 2012 Essentials is designed around feature integration with Office 365. This means that you can offer your customers not only Exchange, but also Lync and SharePoint (yes, I know SharePoint was in SBS too, but it wasn’t the greatest of configurations). What’s more, how available and accessible is a single SBS server verses Office 365? Yep, Office 365 is better. So by giving your customers Windows Server 2012 Essentials and Office 365, are they not getting a better product, giving them more functionality and most likely a better customer experience, translated into happier customers?

All this, leaves you as a partner more time to focus on upsell, selling the customer more, varied products or trying to break into new customers or verticals and spending less time answering to menial support incidents, and lest not forget that moving to Office 365 isn’t a walk in the park by itself. If a customer is currently using SBS then their existing messaging environment will likely need to be updated to support some kind of temporary co-existence while users are migrated, and all of this is professional services work, work that frequently carries a big price tag and has high margins on it.

The moral of this story is that cloud is happening and I think that those partners who embrace it will succeed. Those who oppose it will likely find themselves losing work to people who do embrace it and for me personally, what sounds better as a job title? Systems Implementation Engineer or Cloud Solutions Integrator or Cloud Solutions Architect?

by on November 25, 2012

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Windows Server 2012 Essentials Storage Spaces Vs. RAID

In Windows Server 2012 Essentials as with the whole Windows 6.2 kernel family, Storage Spaces and Storage Pools re-invent the concept of Drive Extender from Windows Home Server v1. With several options for resiliency in Storage Pools, I thought I would touch on what bang you will get for your buck with each protection level and compare it to physical RAID levels.

For all the examples, I will be using 2 500GB disks unless the example requires more such as RAID 5 or 10 where I will use the minimum number required to achieve the set. If you are using 1TB, 2TB or greater sized disks, then simply multiply the figures here to work out your gains.

RAID 0 (Stripe – No Resiliency in Disks, Two Disks Required)
1TB Raw / 1TB Usable

RAID 1 (Mirror – Single Disk Resiliency, Two Disks Required)
1TB Raw / 500GB Usable

RAID 5 (Stripe with Parity – Single Disk Resiliency, Three Disks Required)
1.5TB Raw / 1TB Usable

RAID 10 (Mirror of Stripes – One Disk in Either Stripe or Both Disks in One Strip May Fail, Four Disks Required)
2TB Raw / 1TB Usable

Storage Space Simple (Equivalent to RAID 0 – No Resiliency in Disks, One Disk Required)
500GB Raw / 500GB Usable

Storage Space Two Way Mirror (Equivalent to RAID 1 – Single Disk Resiliency, Two Disks Required)
1TB Raw / 500GB Usable

Storage Space Three Way Mirror (Equivalent to RAID 1 with a 2nd Mirror – Two Disk Resiliency, Three Disks Required)
1.5TB Raw  / 500GB Usable

Storage Space Parity (Equivalent to RAID 5 – One Disk Resiliency, Three Disks Required)
1.5TB Raw / 1TB Usable

The thing to be clear on Storage Pools and Storage Spaces over traditional RAID is that RAID consumes the entire disk, obscuring it to the physical operating system and limits you to the capacity of the underlying disk subsystem. This makes adding new disk to an existing RAID set  and extending it’s capacity challenging unless you are using RAID 5 whereby you can simply add disk and extend capacity. Storage Pools and Storage Spaces are different in that the Pool amalgamates the capacity of the underlying disks together, then pools overlay the disks to provide the availability. This allows you to do clever things like use three disks in a single Pool to provide both a Two Way Mirror to provide protection to read/write files such as documents and a Parity to provide protection to read only workloads such as video or music files, maximising the yield from your disk investment. With RAID, so achieve these separate protection levels, you would need five disk instead of three.

I think the only challenge with Storage Pools and Storage Spaces is going to be to calculate the capacity requirements and optimising the use of the disks: In my scenario I have 6 2TB disks and trying to decide what levels to protect the different content types at and whether to split each workload type into a dedicated Storage Space or whether to Pool Spaces between workloads is interesting as I want to make sure that my content is protected as effectively as I need it, but at the same time, as a consumer, I can’t afford to blow £150-£200 on new disks all the time so I need to maximise my investments.

The core advantage of Storage Pools and Storage Spaces for me over RAID is that it does allow you to fine-grain control your disks making the most out of them, thin-provisioning (over provisioning as it actually should be called) allows me to design the disks for future expansion ahead of time and it allows me to add disks and expand pools (online) without complicated RAID array configurations, changes and scary thoughts of migrating RAID levels (if you have a controller which supports such a thing).

I’ll be doing another post in the coming days on my options for Storage Pools and Storage Spaces, and where I am leaning and why.

by on November 25, 2012

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Windows Server 2012 Essentials Initial Admin Thoughts

I spend my days working with Windows Servers and more increasingly Windows Server 2012. Whilst I may not know everything there is to know (and who does after all), I like to think I know quite a bit on the subject and therefore my understanding of what’s good and proper is generally sound. Once the installation of Windows Server 2012 Essentials completed I was drilling through some of the back-end interfaces to dig up parts of how it worked and was strung together and these are my opinions based on those views as an administrator.

Active Directory Domain Services (ADDS)

As we know, Windows Server 2012 Essentials unlike Windows Home Server 2011 creates a domain. It does this with the greatest of ease for the end-user driving the install, but with ease, you lack control, evident here.

The domain is created with a Windows Server 2012 Domain and Forest Functional Level which is good, however the Active Directory Recycle Bin feature, added in Windows Server 2008 R2 ADDS is disabled which I think it should be to help people out who accidently delete users or computer accounts.

The domain is created with a .local domain suffix which for me is not nice as they can end up causing you problems depending on what you are trying to do with the domain environment. If you read some of the literature for Office 365 they don’t support federation using ADFS with .local domains.

The case sensitivity of the installer has big implications on the domain name created. I personally like to see a lowercase domain name (FQDN) with an uppercase Pre-Windows 2000 domain name (NetBIOS) but the installer uses the same name for both. From my previous post on installing Windows Server 2012 Essentials, whatever you type in the Internal Domain Name text field will be used for both, so be careful with that. You can change the Pre-Windows 2000 domain name using Active Directory Users and Computer (ADUC) or the PowerShell Cmdlets, but whether this will have implications for the Dashboard and other Essentials functionality is not clear without testing.

When new users and computers are added/connected to the domain using the dashboard and the client computer connector software, the new objects are placed in the Users and Computers containers respectively. I tried using redirusr and redircmp to move the new object creation to an OU, but this didn’t work and everything still hits the containers. Manually moving the objects later seems to cause no issues, but I think it’s very bad that the installer doesn’t at least create initial OUs for these objects as objects in containers can’t be linked to GPOs.

In Active Directory Sites and Services, no IP Subnets are configured to link to the site and the site is left with the standard name of Default-First-Site-Name. I don’t see any problems in renaming this and adding the subnets.

DNS

The DNS role is installed as a requirement for ADDS. The installation is basic, very basic. One Forward Lookup Zone is created for the DNS domain name specified in the installer, but no Reverse Lookup Zone. No Forwarders are configured so all recursive lookups will be hitting the Root Hints servers unless you are configuring the Essentials server to use the ISP router as its DNS server, which brings the next point, linked to DHCP. Clients will be receiving DHCP leases normally from a self-bought or an ISP router which will be configuring the clients with itself as the sole DNS server.

Unless the connecter client does something very nasty like configure a static DNS server on the NIC in use for the Essentials server, how will it be able to resolve DNS records on the server as it will be relying on the records from the router?

Lastly on DNS is that Scavenging is disabled, so if you do use DHCP and have your clients leasing addresses directly from the Essentials server (which I would recommend) then the stale records won’t get cleaned up.

Certificate Authority (CA)

The installer configures an Enterprise Root CA on the server which is an online root and issuing CA in this instance. Anyone who knows PKI knows that an online root CA is bad news. I know it’s the only option as you can’t expect people to drop two servers, one to remain powered off for it’s life as an offline root CA, but doesn’t stop it from being horrid.

The most annoying thing here is the name that the CA is given. [DomainName]-[ServerName]-CA. This is totally unfriendly and looks ghastly in any of your certificates. The CA isn’t configured to grant the account you specify as the administrator account during the installer as a KRA or a DRA so hope that nobody in your house or office tries to be clever and EFS encrypt their documents before losing the private key to open them.

Network Access Protection (NAP)

This role is installed to assign policy for the VPN and Remote Web Access. The administrative console for it is not installed to keep your blind to its configuration, but you can easily install this using Server Manager by adding the RSAT Feature for NAP.

Remote Desktop Services (RDS) Gateway

This component is used for the Remote Web Access. As with NAP, the console is not installed to keep you in the dark, but you can again install this using Server Manager by adding that RSAT Feature for RDS Gateway Tools.

Oddbox

Other random bits and pieces I noticed whilst poking around where as follows:

  • Memory Usage for the base install is 1.4GB and CPU Usage while idle was 4% on my Hyper-V 3.0 VM from my Core i3 desktop PC. It will be interesting to see how my physical AMD E-350 Zacate Home Server processor handles it or how the processor in the HP Microserver would fare?
  • No Group Policy Objects are configured aside from the two default domain policies. Do not rename either of the default policies as options in the Dashboard update the configuration of the policies and if the dashboard is looking for them based on name and not GUID, then you will hit problems.
  • The Server Backup feature  within the dashboard relies on a dedicated and assigned local disk. There is no option for making use of Windows Azure Cloud Backup which is now supported in the Windows Server 2012 iteration of Windows Server Backup. I think Microsoft are missing a trick here as there are other 3rd parties already cashing in on the cloud backup market a la Windows Home Server 2011, such as Cloudberry.
  • Deleting any of the default server shares such as Recorded TV or Company (if you aren’t a company and you aren’t using Media Center for Live TV Archiving to the Essentials Server) for example causes warnings of missing folders in the Dashboard and causes Critical status alerts in the alert panel. There is a workaround for this courtesy of  Philip Churchill at http://www.mswhs.com/2012/09/remove-default-shares-in-ws2012-essentials/.

by on November 25, 2012

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Windows Server 2012 Essentials Installation Screenshots

I took an hour out today to do an installation of Windows Server 2012 Essentials inside a Hyper-V 3.0 VM so that I could familiarise myself with it a little before I consider porting my existing Windows Home Server 2011 install over. I’m not a Windows Server 2012 virgin as I’ve been working with it for a while in my capacity at work so I was primarily interested in the experiences of the Essentials edition compared with the Standard and Datacenter editions for enterprise.

Before you begin anything, it’s worth checking the system requirements at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj200132.aspx. The biggest point here is a minimum of a 160GB disk for the operating system installation which can be partitioned into a 60GB operating system volume and a 100GB data volume. This is a bummer for some people who may have taken the decision to run their OS on SSD as one of the most common sized SSD drives around and at an affordable price is a 128GB drive. I think Microsoft should have lowered the disk requirement to cater for this 128GB SSD market, but that’s just my opinion as the majority of people will likely be using 1TB or greater disks in their builds to get the storage capacity and density.

After being asked the usual language questions and if you want to modify the disk partition layout, the installation is complete pretty quick as is with new Windows releases and the Essentials Setup Wizard commences.

After the updating and preparing your server phase, the server will reboot twice. One of these will almost certainly be to bring online the Active Directory Domain Services role, but the other I’m not sure what causes that? The quick observers among you will also notice that very briefly, the server logs on automatically as the Administrator account, displaying the Modern UI Start Menu, before once again, the Essentials Setup Wizard resumes. Once complete, you will see a final screen of the wizard, hopefully with a nice green tick stating that the installation is complete and the server is ready to be used. The URL for connecting clients and the usernames you specified are confirmed here too.

It’s worth pointing out that at the phase where you are asked to provide a username, you cannot use the username Administrator. It appears that Windows Server 2012 Essentials keeps this one up it’s sleeve for it’s own use and you aren’t told the password for it at any stage. Once the installation completed, I took a quick dive through all of the screens in the Windows Server 2012 Essentials Dashboard to see what options are available and configured as default. These are all shown in the image gallery below.

 

by on November 25, 2012

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