Welcome to Brendon Davis

Running Win08R2 w/ Hyper-V as a Desktop

Autor brendon | 17.09.2009 | Category Server, TechStuff, Virtualization

You would think by now that Virtual PC or ‘WindowsXP Mode’ on Win7 would be able to run x64 guests. In the Microsoft world, the only way to do this is with Windows 2008 Server and the Hyper-V Role. When the hard drive in my work laptop died, I decided to install the RC of Server 08 R2 with Hyper-V. I have been running this for about two months now as my main OS and am reasonably happy with it.

There are several roles, features & options you can configure on the OS to give it the look and feel of Windows 7. But it still didn’t feel quite right. At TechEd Mark Tigwell suggested I look over this list of configurations posted on TechNet blogs for running Server 08 as a desktop OS.

The settings listed shaw up the differences but do not include instructions to permit local User (non-admin) account managing rights in Hyper-V. Instructions for that can be found here.

Active Directory is a Service

Autor brendon | 18.04.2008 | Category Server, TechStuff

Well it’s about time…. How many times have you changed something in the schema, enabled a server as a Global Catalogue, etc and needed to restart for change to take effect but couldn’t; because it was also a File & Print server or ran DHCP for several sites.

Well now you can just ‘net stop ntds’ then ‘net start ntds’.

Simple as that…. And who says Microsoft is slow, it only took them 12 years…

Change Server Core Page File

Autor brendon | 24.03.2008 | Category Server, ServerCore, TechStuff

Fragmented page files have been known to drastically effect system performance and when you have servers hosting connections for hundreds of users this is not a good thing. When building servers for numerous customers it has been common practice to hard set a page file to 1.5x RAM size (To a maximum of 4GB).

Seeing how System Properties is missing from Windows Server Core, changing the size and allocation of the page file has become a little more involved.

Change Server Core Screen Resolution

Autor brendon | 22.03.2008 | Category Server, ServerCore, TechStuff

This may seem like a trivial and un-important task but if the server installs with a screen resolution of 800×600 and the screen’s optimum resolution is 1024×768 or 1280×1024 how do you change it?

You can’t just open up ‘Control Panel -> Desktop’ or run ‘control desk.cpl‘ as they don’t work. Read on for the instructions.