I'm building a cheap server from commodity hardware that should have at least some fault tolerance regarding its storage. Now that "Storage Spaces" are available directly in the Windows server OS, is there any point in trying to set up a RAID array (probably RAID 1 in my case)? Or, to make the question more exact, what are the advantages / disadvantages of Storage Spaces vs. RAID 1?
I had a PC with two physical disks:
- C: containing the host operating system
- D: containing a folder
D:\VMswhere all my virtual machines were stored
Now, the C: disk died. I bought a new one, reinstalled Windows on it, enabled Hyper-V feature and now I just need to open the VMs from the D:\VMs folder. However, I don't seem to be able to find a menu item or anything that would allow me to do that - the only thing I see is the "import" command which unfortunately requires the VMs to be explicitly exported (my machines weren't).
I would think that when I have all the files constituting a VM (the VHD file, some XML files describing the settings etc.) it should be somehow possible to just "open" these existing VMs in Hyper-V, right? What command am I missing?
Edit: I know I can create a blank virtual machines and then just point them to use existing VHDs. However, I am not sure about all the different settings I've made to those VMs so I hope there's a way to simply open those existing VMs instead of recreating them.
We are thinking about moving our virtual machines (Hyper-V VHDs) to Windows Azure but I haven't found much about what kind of fault tolerance that infrastructure provides. When I run VHD in Azure, I've got two questions:
Is my VHD and all the data in it safe? I think that uploaded VHDs use the "Storage" infrastructure so they should be automatically replicated to multiple disks and geographically distributed but should I still make a full-image backup just to be safe? (Note that of course I will be backing up the actual data inside VMs that I care about; I just want to know if there is a chance greater than 0.0000001% that one day I will receive an email from Microsoft telling me that my VM is gone and that I should create or restore it from scratch).
Do I need to worry about other things regarding the availability of my VMs? I mean, when I have an on-premise server I need to worry about the hardware itself, about the host operating system, what would happen if my router failed, if my Hyper-V's C: drive failed etc. Am I right in thinking that with Azure, their infrastructure takes care of all of this?
Thanks.
On my server with 3 disks, one disk died and I'm trying to do a restore. The server looked like this:
[DISK1] | C:, main system drive <-- this one died
[DISK2] | D:, data disk
[DISK3] | Dedicated backup disk
Windows Backup was set to do a daily backup of "everything" (system, C: and D:) to a dedicated backup disk.
Now I'd like to restore to a new (and different) which should be my new C: drive and the main system disk. My procedure was:
- Install a new disk
- Start the computer with Windows Server DVD in the DVD tray
- Boot from DVD, go to the restore screen
- Select System Image Recovery
- Let it scan the available backups, pick the latest one, I then deselected that I want to restore only C: (I don't need to restore D:)
However, this ends with this error:
"The Volume ID could not be found. (0x80070495)"
My guess is that during the backup, Windows somehow stores the volume name / id somewhere into the backup and now that my new configuration doesn't reflect that disk structure perfectly (the replacement disk contains nothing, is of greater size, doesn't have the same partition etc.) it fails. However, from my point of view, the backup / restore system should expect this and reformat the empty disk as required.
Or is something else to blame? What should I try?
I have Request Filtering enabled in my IIS 7.5 and want to keep it that way, however, one site is basically just a proxy for some internal Java application and I'd like to disable Request Filtering for that site. Is it possible to do that?
There are quite a few external IIS log analyzers but since IIS 7 has quite a nice administrative UI and new modules can be created for it, is there a module that would display / analyze log files directly from within IIS 7 Manager?
I have a Hyper-V host with 4 physical HDDs, 300 GB each, and this machine will host a couple of VMs, each probably with a size of approximately 150GB.
The VMs are not mission critical but I still need some kind of protection against HDD failure and would rather avoid RAID (please accept that I would rather find a software solution, for various reasons). First I was thinking of a setup like:
HDD 1:
VM A
full image backup of VM B
HDD 2:
VM B
full image backup of VM A
etc.
So if disk 1 fails, I can recover both machines from disk 2, and vice versa.
However, that feels very "manual" and I also need to have VMs of the proper size - e.g., if VMs grew to 200GB, this strategy would break down.
If the box was Windows 8 Server with the new "Storage Spaces" feature, I would almost certainly go for that (at least it sounds ideal for my scenario).
But in this pre-Windows 8 time, what do people use on Windows Server 2008 R2? Is there some built-in service that provides something like Storage Spaces today? Can 3rd party utilities like Drive Bender provide this functionality? Are they proven and reliable?
Out of curiosity, why does it often take seconds to obtain network configuration via DHCP when the CPU is capable of processing millions of operations per second and ping to the router takes a couple of milliseconds?
In my home environment with one WiFi router and about 5 devices, it is not rare to see times like 5-10 seconds.
We have many rules in our internal DNS server and I'd like to use them in my local hosts file. Is there any utility to do this kind of conversion?
Update: The DNS server is Windows Server and the use case is that we have many zones I need to use withouth my DNS being pointed to that server so I need them converted to my local hosts file.