We run SharePoint Foundation 2010 as our Intranet, so with the release of 2013 I thought I’d install it using my TechNet benefits and take it for a test drive.
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Tag Archives: windows
BSOD: Vipre Premium and Citrix Tools
I’ve chased, along with Citrix and Microsoft support, a bug with my Windows 2008 servers running on XenServer for months, and believe I’ve finally got the fix figured out.
First a little back story.
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Security Essentials Free for Small Business
This is great news for Small Business owners.
We have more good news to help keep your Windows 7 Professional PC secure. If you haven’t already seen it, today we announced that small businesses will be able to download and install Microsoft Security Essentials on up to 10 PCs for free. Microsoft Security Essentials is a no-cost antimalware service that provides real-time protection to address the ongoing security needs of genuine Windows PCs, helping to protect from viruses, spyware and other malicious threats.
I’ve been using Microsoft Security Essentials on my home systems and as my free AV installation of choice for all client PCs needing anti-virus protection. Now I can recommend it to Small Business owners too. Kudos to Microsoft for this decision.
Increase the size of your virtual disk
Now that I read the title of this post, it sounds a touch dirty…
I had created a couple generic Win2k8 R2 VMs last week with 25GB OS drives. I hadn’t decided which services would be running on the boxes and 25GB would be more than enough for most applications. The only problem was that I had decided to install Sharepoint 2010 Foundation on one and SQL 2008 R2 on the other and both require 80GB of disk space. Good thing XenServer 5.6 and Window Server 2008 R2 make it easy to increase the disk size.
In XenCenter 5.6 select the virtual disk from the storage tab of the virtual machine, click Properties, select Size and Location, then increase the size of the disk.
Super simple, eh? This feature has been available for quite some time, v4.1 I believe, via the CLI but was exposed to the GUI in v5.6.
Now you need to extend the partition in Windows. Right click My Computer select Manage, select Disk Management, right click on the disk you want to extend, and select Extend. This starts the Extend Volume Wizard. Follow the prompts to complete the process. By default Win2k8 R2 extends the partition to the maximum available space available. So this wizard is just about clicking next, next, finish.
Take a look at the Citrix KB article for more info and additional instructions for the CLI procedure and how to extend a partition in Linux operating systems.
Note: Windows 2003 and XP are not able to extend the partition while the OS is running. You need to attach the disk to another VM and use DiskPart to extend the volume.
Remove Hidden Devices
When you work with virtual machines, either converting physical or working with new builds, you often have issues with hidden devices. Most often the hidden device that gives the most grief is old physical network cards. Thankfully the issues easily resolved.
To work around this behavior and display devices when you click Show hidden devices (source):
- Click Start, point to All Programs, point to Accessories, and then click Command Prompt.
- At a command prompt, type the following command , and then press ENTER:
- set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1
- Type the following command a command prompt, and then press ENTER:
- start devmgmt.msc
- Troubleshoot the devices and drivers in Device Manager.
- When you finish troubleshooting, close Device Manager.
- Type exit at the command prompt.
NOTE: Click Show hidden devices on the View menu in Device Managers before you can see devices that are not connected to the computer.
Note that when you close the command prompt window, Window clears the devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1 variable that you set in step 2 and prevents ghosted devices from being displayed when you click Show hidden devices.