VMWare to Hyper-V Conversions

Over Christmas we had to do a bunch of VMWare to Hyper-V conversions at work. Once you've sufficiently prepared the VM, there are a whole bunch of ways you can do this, ranging from raw converting the vmdk, to mounting the vmdk and a blank vhd and then copying the contents between. We chose it as an opportunity to play with Disk2VHD from SysInternals.

If you're using SCSI disks in your VMWare VM then you will first need to ensure that you add the IDE controller driver, to hopefully avoid a BSOD when you boot under Hyper-V for the first time. Why don't you just set Hyper-V to use SCSI disks? Sadly because Hyper-V cannot boot from SCSI. Once you've added the driver and rebooted to ensure that it's stuck we simply ran Disk2VHD and pumped the VHD off to a network share.

Interestingly Windows 2003 x64 and 2008 were a lot more resistant to the change in "hardware" than older Windows versions, which needed a Windows repair, however I can't fault Disk2VHD for that as it was something I was expecting anyway.

What worried me most was that the first run we did Disk2VHD produced a mangled VHD which I managed to repair and get working by doing the following;

  1. Mounted the VHD and declined Windows offer to format the partition it could see.
  2. Extended the partition so that it filled the VHD (for some reason it had left a whole load of space free - none of the other conversions did this). I chose to use diskpart, but whatever you're comfortable with.
  3. Ran TestDisk to ensure that all was ok with the partition. In this case it threw up some weird error that I failed to note down and right now I can't 100% remember for sure if TestDisk helped or not. A chkdsk /f was definitely able to, however. After this the VHD was in perfect working order.

Fortunately all other conversions didn't seem to have this issue, and as much as I would've loved to investigate why this happened, I just didn't have the time.

Search bar support challenges

If you're even slightly geeky you will have seen any of several articles in the last 2 years that state "the URL is dead". With the inclusion of the search box in many browsers this is starting to become true, and is starting to present some interesting support challenges.

Every now and then you will need someone to visit a specific site, and you might not be able to connect to the user's device to assist. The solution in most cases is to politely educate the user (or get another user to assist) and move on, but I have had a few users who have been unable to understand the concept that the address/location input is actually what we're looking for. Perhaps the user has removed or shrunk the location bar so that its really insignificant, or perhaps they're just really too stressed to follow simple instructions.

For publically accessible websites the answer is to ensure that your site can be reliably found via all the major search engines, and have a link if necessary. This means that SEO becomes an important feature of your support framework. This is scary but something that very well will become a genuine systems and support concern.

Things get worse for internal-only addresses. In theory you shouldn't be in the position where you're not able to remotely assist a user inside of your own network, but lets face it, shit does happen - or it might be a guest/embedded device (such as a WiFi enabled phone). Whats the answer in this instance? Application level filtering and redirection in your proxy server(s)?

For the love of deity; Use BCC

The last 6 months I've seen 3 companies that I've used both professionally and personally for various services using CC to mass email their clients. This is not acceptable. As result one of my personal accounts is on various lists and receives a marked increase in junk mail.

The latest cock up came from MessageLabs. This is a company that provides email services. If they can't get this right, what hope is there for anyone else out there? If you're in the business of mass emailing any of your customers please, please either send individual mails or use BCC, and make sure that your staff understand why. It's not just a case of your customer's privacy, it's your company's also. Whos to say that on your list you don't have someone who want to steal your business?

This whole cock up doesn't fill me with confidence for MessageLabs, which is unfortunate as Symantec has bought Softscan, whom we use for mail filtering at work and they're now pushing new contracts onto the MessageLabs system instead. It begs the question as to whether or not they're actually technically a competent solution in comparison. In the past I've only had bad experiences. Anyone want to weigh in?

Windows Server 2008 R2 and CLOCK_WATCHDOG_TIMEOUT STOP errors

If you've got a Windows Server 2008 R2 box, running Nehalem based hardware you might find it handy to bookmark KB975530, which details a hotfix and workaround for CLOCK_WATCHDOG_TIMEOUT STOP errors you might receive with this configuration.

The Virtual PC Guy (Ben Armstrong) has a few more details on the problem.

Slow Relaying with Microsoft Exchange 2010

If you've got an application that sends messages via your Exchange 2010 server, using SMTP, you might've noticed that things have slowed down a bit. The reason for this is because the Exchange 2010 receive connectors have a "MaxAcknowledgementDelay" setting, that will inform you if the delivery is successful, within a certain time frame. If the timelimit is hit, it then acks the submission.

To disable this you can set your receive connector not to use this feature: Set-ReceiveConnector "Connector Name" -MaxAcknowledgementDelay 0

Further details are available on technet.