Mario's questions

I am new to XenServer and want to experiment with adding new virtual machines. I am running XenServer 6.1 and XenCenter. I have successfully created a new VM by burning a DVD and during the creation in XenCenter referring to the DVD by selecting 'DVD drive 0' under 'DVD drives on MyServer' under Installation Media, so I know I can create a virtual machine successfully.

I don't want to have to burn a CD/DVD each time I want to install another OS since I am going to be experimenting with a few different OSs. I would like to be able to install from either a USB flash drive or a new Storage Repository (SR).

So far I have read a lot documentation (both XenServer and Google) but I can't seem to find the answer to my question. I shared a folder on my windows box that contains the .iso and then tried creating a CIFS SR pointing to that network share, but even though it shows up in XenCenter once I am done creating it and see under status it says OK and Connected I can't use it. Under Installation Media when creating a new VM, I see it but there is nothing selectable under it (for instance, 'DVD drives on MyServer' exists and under that is 'DVD drive 0'. I can select this and this works).

I have also tried loading the .iso on a flash drive. I can see it under removable storage but cannot figure out how to reference it during a VM creation. Can anyone please tell me what I am doing wrong? It seems like it should be easy to install from a network folder or usb drive if I have the .iso

I have a database in dev (SQL Server 2005 on Windows Server 2008) that I need to move to prod (SQL Server 2000 on Windows Server 2003). My process is as follows:

1. Login to dev, open SQL Server Management Studio
2. Right click on the database | Tasks | Backup. Keep all default options (full backup etc.)
3. Move .bak file locally to prod (no network drive), login to prod, open SQL Server Enterprise Manager.
4. Right click Databases node | All Tasks | Restore database.
5. Change Restore as database to reflect the same database name.
6. Click radio button 'From device'. Click 'Select Devices'
7. Click Restore from: Add..., browse to .bak file (small - only 6mb)

Now I am ready to restore the database, so I click OK and get the following error:

"The media family on device 'E:...bak' is incorrectly formed. SQL Server cannot process this media family. RESTORE DATABASE is terminating abnormally."

This error is immediate.

I have tried a few different variations of this - restoring the db to dev machine with a different db name and log file names (where it originated), creating an empty database with the same physical path to files before and trying to restore to that, making a few different .bak files and making sure they are verified before uploading them to prod. I know for a fact the directory for the .mdf and .ldf files exist on prod, though the files themselves don't exist. If, before I click OK to restore, go to the options tab instead I get the following error:

Error 3241: The media family on device 'E:...bak' is incorrectly formed. SQL Server cannot process this media family. RESTORE FILELIST is terminating abnormally.

Anyone have any bright ideas?

OK folks,

My company hosts quite a few websites. These websites all require a connection to SQL Server 2008.

When we deploy a site to a new server, we constantly have to modify the web.config to contain a connection string with the appropriate username and password. This requires the person deploying to setup a user for that database with all appropriate permissions, then modify the config file.

What I would like to do is, instead of creating a user for each database, create one user with permissions to every db and not specifiy a username and password in the config. This would save a lot of time, and I believe make it more secure (clients have access to the web.config via ftp, but many times we don't want them in the db).

Also, this must work where SQL Server exists outside of the current domain. It sounds like this may foil using Windows Integrated Security...

I have never used any setup other than specifying username and password (mapped windows domain user access). It sounds like I need to use Windows Integrated Security, but I can't find anything on MSDN for IIS 7.

Anyone's thoughts on security and setup would be appreciated.

I did notice this post but am looking for more specifics.

I have 2 servers running Windows 2008 Server Web Edition and am running websites on both of them. I would like to be able to mirror IIS settings onto each box from the other so that, in event of a 'server 1' crash, I can log into 'server 2' and quickly get all sites that were running on 'server 1' up and running. This isn't a simple mirror as I already have sites on 'server 2' that need to stay running, so basically I want to add the sites from 'server 1'.

I am sure I will get some comments about this, so yes, our servers can handle the increased load. I also want to stay away from discussing DNS so please let's not do that. I also realize I would need to add specific IPs to the 'server 2' network adapter and am fine with that as well so long as I can cut down on other manual tasks to get a better uptime and reduce manual errors.

Currently I am backing up databases and code on each box to the other, but as you can imagine restoring is a slow, manual and laborious process that is error prone.

I am looking for the ability to easily recover all settings that went with each site. For instance: SSL Certificates, IPs, physical path to the code for the site , bindings, handler mappings etc. I would hope to have all app pools restored too, just as they were on the other server with the correct framework version & pipeline mode.

As I understand it, the applicationHost.config houses most of this stuff. But if I am adding sites to a web server already running others I would assume that I couldn't replace this file since that would mean losing all of my current settings. I also am also not too keen on manually modding this file.

After looking around I found a release candidate of Microsoft's Web Deployment Tool (learn.iis.net/page.aspx/346/web-deployment-tool/). So finally, now that you have a bunch of background here comes the question:

Does anyone have any experience with quickly and (mostly) automatically adding sites to IIS 7 that is already running other sites? Has anyone done this with both "appcmd add backup" approach and [Web Deployment Tool][2] and if so what difficulties have you come up with?