Chris W's questions

I've been reading around Hyper V and how it manages virtual networking & I think I've spotted a problem with a small cluster that has been put together for me by our networks team to host a SharePoint farm.

The servers is question have two NICs - 1 to be used for standard LAN traffic and the other for communication with SAN storage.

On a default installation when the Hyper V role is enabled and a Virtual Network is created for each NIC then as I understand it the following should happen:

1. Create a virtual switch.
2. Create a vNIC with the same name as the vSwitch.
3. Host unbinds itself from the physical NIC and binds itself to the new vNIC.

The result is the host OS uses the same virtual networking route that the child VMs use and any new guest VMs can create their own vNICs against the appropriate vSwitch.

In the case of the servers that I'm looking at I see that on each of the host machines the vNICs have been unbound and the machine has been re-bound back to the physical NICs.

Everything works fine as far as I can tell. The set-up has been replicated across all blades in the cluster so Live Migration etc works fine.

Am I correct in my understanding of Hyper V networking as I've briefly summarised above? (If I'm wrong you can ignore the rest of the post...!)

If so, given the changes that have been made in this set-up are there any potential problems that may arise with the hosts machines bound the physical NICs?

We've have an intermittent issue with network activity freezing on random VMs at random times - the solution is to either re-start the VM or live migrate it to another host. Another intermittent issue is for hosts to BSOD and re-start occassionally - crash dumps seem to indicate a problem within a network driver. So far I've been getting told that the issue is probably just drivers or BIOS settings and various things have been tried without success to stop the problems. I'm wondering if our problems could be related to the hosts binding to the physical NICs when they should be bound to the vNICs instead.

Has anyone been able to successfully edit the Standard calendar in 2010?

I'm trying to change the working times as none of our admin accounts seem able to do it. We're running Project Server 2010 RTM on SharePoint 2010 RTM with Project Pro 2010.

When I click the Edit Calendar button in PWA it triggers Project client to open up but it just opens up an empty project and I've not access to edit the Standard calendar using any of the published steps.

It would be great to hear if someone has managed to do this so I can work out if it's a general glitch in this build or is it just a problem with out setup.

This is a re-hash of a question I asked a while back - after a consultant has come in firing ideas in to other teams in the department the whole issue has been raised again hence I'm looking for more detailed answers.

We're intending to set-up a multi-instance SQL Cluster across a number of physical blades which will run a variety of different systems across each SQL instance. In general use there will be one virtual SQL instance running on each VM host. Again, in general operation each VM host will run on a dedicated underlying blade. The set-up should give us lots of flexibility for maintenance of any individual VM or underlying blade with all the SQL instances able to fail over as required.

My original plan had been to do the following:

1. Install 2008 R2 on each blade
2. Add Hyper V to each blade
3. Install a 2008 R2 VM to each blade
4. Within the VMs - create a failover cluster and then install SQL Server clustering.

The consultant has suggested that we instead do the following:

1. Install 2008 R2 on each blade
2. Add Hyper V to each blade
3. Install a 2008 R2 VM to each blade
4. Create a cluster on the HOST machines which will host all the VMs.
5. Within the VMs - create a failover cluster and then install SQL Server clustering.

The big difference is the addition of step 4 whereby we cluster all of the guest VMs as well. The argument is that it improves maintenance further since we have no ties at all between the SQL cluster and physical hardware. We can in theory live migrate the guest VMs around the hosts without affecting the SQL cluster at all so we for routine maintenance physical blades we move the SQL cluster around without interruption and without needing to failover.

It sounds like a nice idea but I've not come across anything on the internet where people say they've done this and it works OK. Can I actually do the live migrations of the guests without the SQL Cluster hosted within them getting upset?

Does anyone have any experience of this set up, good or bad? Are there some pros and cons that I've not considered?

I appreciate that mirroring is also a valuable option to consider - in this case we're favouring clustering since it will do the whole of each instance and we have a good number of databases. Some DBs are for lumbering 3rd party systems that may not even work kindly with mirroring (and my understanding of clustering is that fail overs are completely transparent to the clients).

Thanks.

I've got a single folder within the list of All Folders that I can't change any user permissions on.

I'm logged in as an admin and when I view security for the folder it says I have full rights to the folder yet i can't change anything on it or it's sub folders even though it clearly shows me as having rights to "Modify the rights users have to objects".

As a test I added a new sub-folder called Test which created ok but I'm not able to then delete the sub folder or change it's permissions either.

Interestingly we changed permissions on one sub-folder last week without issue but when I check that folder today I now can't update it.

Any ideas anyone?

After setting up User Profile sync with AD I've noticed that the newsfeed section of each user's MySite is now flooded with lots of random notes detailing changes that have been pulled in about their (and their contacts') profiles.

Is there anyway to purge this activity and stop updates from the sync service getting listed on the newsfeed? Our users are likely to find it strange getting updates about changes to their own profiles that they didn't make themselves.

We're considering pre-provisioning each user's MySite in SP 2010 - I know MS don't recommend it but it's a Uni installation and we'd like to have the student accounts set up in advance rather than have everything go bananas when a few thousand people all turn up on the same day and start having a look around our available services.

Can this be done via a script of some sort? I presume Powershell has some mechanism to trigger the creation without the user having to physically visit their site?

I've got a fairly simple SharePoint 2010 farm set up: 2 WFE servers with Network Load Balancing hosting the main portal site.

As per Microsoft's best practice recommendations I've set up My Sites in a separate web application. As some of the user base are not using domain joined PCs they have to login once for the portal (http://portal) and then again when the access My Sites since they're crossing in to a separate web application on a separate host (http://mysite). Portal & MySite are both hosted on the same physical WFE servers.

Is there an easy way to set up some thing to stop this happening and just have them login once?

I understand that there's plans for us to deploy ISA in the not too distant future - could we use ISA to manage authentication to the two sites so that the users only need to log in once?

This question really relates to allowing to logon to a SharePoint installation from home but I guess it's a general IIS security question.

When the login box pops up to collect the windows credentials the user can just type in their user name on Safari/Chrome/FF and they can login correctly. On IE authentication fails as it seems to pass their local machine name by default and the user needs to replace this with domain\user. Not a big problem in some cases but we'd prefer it if the users didn't have to enter the domain name portion.

Is this simply a feature of IE that we can't control or is their something we can do with IIS/AD etc that will allow us to provide a default domain if one isn't specified?

We're looking to move a bespoke intranet across to SharePoint. One query that has come up is whether we can do the following easily:

1. When user logs in for the first time they should be forced read and accept an Acceptable Use Policy for the site.
2. Agree a separate agreement that relates to their data being shared with other parties.
3. (Optional) upload their profile photo. They can skip this step if they don't have one but they should be prompted to do it each time they login subsequently.

The above is all nice and easy in a bespoke app but I can't see how to do this with SharePoint. Can we build a custom workflow that is tied to the user logging in? So far I can only find how to attach workflows to libraries and lists.

I've been reading up on running a SQL Cluster in a Hyper V environment and there seems to be a couple of options:

1. Install guest cluster on 2 VMs that are themselves part of a fail over cluster.

2. Install SQL cluster on 2 VMs but the VMs themselves are not part of an underlying cluster.

With option 1, it's little more complex as there's effectively two clusters in play but this adds some flexibility in the sense that I'm free to migrate the VMs between and physical blades in their cluster for physical maintenance without affecting the status of the SQL guest cluster that's running within them.

With option 2, the set-up is a bit simpler as there's only 1 cluster in the mix but my VMs are anchored to the physical blades that they're set-up on (I'll ignore the fact I could manually move the VHDs for the purposes of this question).

Are there any other factors that I should consider here when deciding which option to go for?

I'm free to test out both options and probably will do but if any one has working experience of these set-ups and can offer some input that would be great.

Edit:

Good points raised about adding mirroring to the mix to add a second copy of the database. I'm considering whether to just go with 2 SQL instances and use mirroring alone since this backend will be used for a single application since it will be a fairly stable set-up with regards to users etc.

The main point of this question though was specifically to do with the cluster set-up. i.e. is it better to

a) On the Hyper V hosts, build a failover cluster of the VMs and then, within the VMs themselves set up a second cluster and install the SQL Cluster - guest cluster on top of the host cluster

or

b) Just set-up the SQL cluster within the VMs and don't have the underlying failover cluster setup on the host Hyper V machines themselves.

I've seen advocates of both options but I don't really understand the pros and cons of each approach.

I've been playing around with the 2010 beta for a couple of weeks, experimenting with topology options etc. I think I've got myself totally confused as to how it works hence if there's any SP experts out there that can explain things in simple terms for me I'd appreciate it!

I want to setup a farm with 3 servers providing the content & MySites. I presume that the way to do this is to load balance or DNS round robin traffic between the 3 servers.

The bit where I'm confused is that My Site Settings page asks for a specific My Site Host hence all my site traffic will be pushed to a single server even though we have 3 in the farm. If this hosts fails I presume MySites will be unavailable.

Is this right? How do I configure it so that access to MySites is load balanced across the 3 servers in the farm?

We're running a number of VMs on a 6 node failover cluster of blades using Hyper V.

We have an intermittent issue (every few days at different times - not a fixed frequency) of VMs losing network connectivity. Console access to the VM suggests all is fine and the underlying blade has normal connectivity. To resolve the problem we either have to re-start the VM or, more usually, we do a live migration to another blade which fires up connectivity and we then migrate it back to the original blade.

I've had 3 instances of this happen with a specific VM running on a particular blade however it has happened once with a different VM running on a different blade. All VMs and blades have the same basic setup and are running Windows 2008 R2.

Any ideas where I should be looking to diagnose the possible causes of this problem as the event logs provide no help?

Edit:

I've checked that each blade is running the latest NIC drivers and all seem to be fine.

Something that is confusing me - a failover or restart of the VM resolves the issue. Whilst I need to work out the underlying issue that is causing the NICs to hang I'm also concerned that the VM didn't failover to another node which would have solved the outage for me. Is there a way to configure the cluster so that it can tell that the VM guest has lost connectivity and fail it over? As things stand the cluster is assuming that the VM is running happily as I presume Hyper V says everything is great even though there is a problem.

Edit:

Thought I'd update this since the problem is still outstanding - less frequent but still seemingly random as to which VM is affected. Latest checks were that all VMs were running the same MPIO drivers and the same drivers versions for the virtual NICs. Everything looks to be identical with some VMs that are running on the same blade centre but outside of this cluster & these VMs have never experienced any problems.

We're playing with the SP 2010 Beta ahead of a planned deployment later this year in an academic environment.

We anticipate that the majority of traffic will be through MySites when everything is provisioned so we're looking at how we can plan our SP topology to scale nicely.

An initial thought is to run the main portal on one server, host "Student" MySites on one server and "Staff" on another.

Is it acutally possible to do this easily or are we going down a bad path?

Specifically - can we have 2 different MySites site collections, each hosted on a dedicated server? If so, can we configure SharePoint to work out from the users's logon account type of user they are and route them to the correct server?

We have a Failover Cluster built up on 6 blades, each running Hyper V. Each box is running Server 2008 R2.

We've got a number of VMs running that all have the same basic config:

VHD stored on a cluster shared volume. 2 virtual NICs (1 for LAN connection and 1 for SAN connection).

All of our VMs will happily migrate between any other blade apart from one single VM which is running fine on it's current blade but will not migrate to any other location.

What could be the cause of it or where should I look to get a detailed error message as I can't seem to find much information logged in any of the logs.

Edit:

I know the usual culprit is mis-matching resource names. We've already been there with the NICs named differently on some of the blades. As far as we can tell now everything looks to be identical on each bit of metal.

We have a VM running SQL Server on a 6 node cluster of blades. The VM's data files are stored a SAN attached using a direct iSCSI connection.

As this SQL server will be running a number of important databases we're debating whether we should be clustering the SQL Server or will the fact that the VM is running in the cluster itself sufficient to give us high availability. I'm used to running SQL clusters when dealing with physical servers but I'm a bit sketchy on what is best practice when all the servers are just VMs sat on Hyper V.

If a blade running the VM fails I presume the VM will be started up on another load. I'm guessing the only benefit that adding a SQL cluster to the setup will give us it that the recovery time after a failure will be a little quicker? Are there any other benefits?

I seem to be getting this annoying error intermittently.

Although my internet connection is working fine the Connect To dialog insists that I can't connect to my VPN connections as there isn't an active connection. If I dig down to the actual Control Panel > Network Connections screen I can connect the the required connection without any problems so this is an annoyance rather than a major issue but I thought I'd see if anyone knows of a permanent fix to this.

I've already tried amending the binding order to make sure my LAN is listed before anything else which hasn't helped.

I've got a Win 2K3 server that is hosted in a data centre hence all administration is done via RDP.

The last couple of times I've re-started it after patching the server hangs - on the way down from the looks of it as IIS & SQL are still publicly responsive but my access to RDP goes straight away. The server will sit in this state indefinitely and it needs me to get a data centre engineer to do a cold boot on it as they can't get console access to it locally either.

The event logs simply state that my restart failed with another log entry suggesting an application pop up appeared warning that the machine would not be available until it was started locally?

What could be causing this - I know 3rd party apps sometimes don't play nice with the shut down command but there's no evidence in the logs as to which app is the problem and the advice from the MS knowledge base is to remove apps 1 by 1, restarting each time until the problem is fixed! This is a live server so I don't have that luxury.

Are there any settings I could look at that may have fired the pop-up message and does anyone have any good suggestions for spotting the underlying cause without me needing to go for the MS approach of pull remove apps at random?

Log Entries:

22:15:20 - ID 1074 - The process Explorer.exe has initiated the shutdown of computer... for the following reason: Other (Planned)

22:15:20 - ID 26 - Application popup: Windows: If you shut down this remote computer, no one can use it until someone at the remote location manually restarts it? Do you want to continue shutting down?

22:15:22 - ID 1073 - The attempt by user username to restart/shutdown computer server failed

22:15:41 - ID 1074 - The process Explorer.exe has initiated the shutdown of computer... for the following reason: Other (Planned)

22:15:45 - ID 1074 - The process svchost.exe has initiated the shutdown of computer... for the following reason: No title or reason could be found

I've started getting some errors in the App event log of one of our database servers (Windows 2003 & SQL Server 2005). The nightly full database backups are completing successfully however immediately after the job success is written to the event log there is a run of entries that say:

SQLVDI: Loc=CVDS. Desc=Release(ClientAliveMutex). ErrorCode=(288)Attempt to release mutex not owned by caller.

There's five of these logged - the server itself has more than 20 databases on it which are all backed up successfully.

The server is backed up by Bacula using a VSS backup.

Has anyone got any ideas what would be causing the errors? They seem to have started after a re-boot on Friday to install some patches which included KB960089.

Edit:

After getting the errors for a few days they've now stopped without any action on my part other than letting the backups continue as they were. It may be a coincidence but they stopped after Bacula completed its weekly full rather than the daily incremental backup.

On some customer sites we're using Windows Integrated authentication only to provide an initial Challenge Response before pushing the user to then login to the applications themselves with a login page for each application using a second set of credentials.

Is there a way to allow the user to change their (Windows) password when logging in as when I try setting the password to require a change on next login the user simply can't login at all.

These are web users only so don't have remote access to login to the server interactively to update their credentials.

FYI - these sites are running II6 on Win 2003 servers.

I have a SQL 2005 SP 2 server running a maintenance plan that performs full backups every day at 22:00, diff backups every 4 hours and log backups every 30 minutes. The plan backs up all system & user databases (all user DBs are in Full recovery mode). The full & log backups all complete and verify without problem - i've confirmed this by doing some test restores. Every morning the diff backup throws an error from 2 databases stating that no full backup exists.

It's always the same two databases that have this error - all others are ok. If I manually run a full backup again the diff's will run fine until the next morning.

I'm fairly certain that the problem is down to a VSS backup that is run at midnight by the company that manage the servers using Bacula. In the SQL logs I can see that VSS is freezing/thawing the system DBs and these 2 databases only when Bacula runs.

Obviously I can just get the hosting Co to stop backing up the DBs within their job since they're picking up my SQL backup files anyway but I simply want to know why this is happening. What could be different about these 2 databases as every option i've checked is identical to the ones that complete fine. I have the same plan set-up on another server which runs with no problems.

Thanks, Chris.