April 21st, 2010
by Tristan Watkins
To understand the development environment design choices that this article pertains to, it may be worth glancing at the design section of my SharePoint development series before diving in, if you haven’t already followed those posts.
Cloning isolated VMs vs. scripted installation
One of the challenges we’ve always faced with SharePoint development has been the tension between cloning actually identical environments versus automating the deployment across distinct environments (or worse, repeating the installation manually). In the first case we save time by eliminating reconfiguration and this ensures a consistent experience for each user. This is particularly beneficial for software development. These benefits can also be obtained by scripting installation/configuration/deployment but there’s a considerable overhead associated with developing and testing those scripts. As SharePoint 2010 is still quite new and we’ve been working on projects for some time now, we didn’t have the luxury of waiting for those refinements and we needed to take advantage of these efficiencies as we had done with SharePoint 2007 projects.
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Consultancy and Design, Networking, SharePoint, Virtualisation | 
2 Comments »
November 27th, 2009
by Tristan Watkins
In the first four parts of this series I covered the project objectives and the system design, then turned my attention to the Hyper-V host image build and automated deployment. In this post I describe a SharePoint 2007 virtual machine build.
Where’s the SharePoint 2010 build?
In short, we’re working on it. I’ve produced a new SharePoint 2010 beta virtual machine for this environment but we’re not yet ready to publish build guidance. Stay tuned. Additionally… read more »
Consultancy and Design, SharePoint, Virtualisation, Windows | No Comments »
November 16th, 2009
by Tristan Watkins
In the first three parts of this series I covered the project objectives and the system design, then turned my attention to the Hyper-V host image build. In this section I will look at automating deployment of that host operating system. This is lengthy, but there’s a lot to cover.
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Consultancy and Design, SharePoint, Virtualisation, Windows | 2 Comments »
November 5th, 2009
by Tristan Watkins
In the first part of this series, I introduced the pros and cons of various SharePoint development approaches and the objectives of this system redesign. In this part I will focus on design choices and conclusions, starting with the core technology.
Why we’ve chosen Hyper-V
There are broadly five decisive factors: performance, management features (like snapshots), cost, 64-bit OS support and a full host OS (not just a virtualisation administration console): read more »
Consultancy and Design, SharePoint, Virtualisation, Windows | 5 Comments »
October 23rd, 2009
by Tristan Watkins
Further to my post from a few months ago on the this topic (dating back to the RC build), I’ve seen this same problem a few more times on the RTM build of Windows Server 2008 R2. My suggested approach still fixes the problem and it doesn’t recur, but I’ve still not been able to pin down a cause and I can find no documentation on host machine MAC assignments anywhere. read more »
Networking, Virtualisation, Windows | 12 Comments »
August 26th, 2009
by Tristan Watkins
I imagine the responses to this post’s title will fall in to one of three categories:
- What’s Windows Deployment Services?
- What’s Internet Connection Sharing?
- Why on earth would you use both in one machine?
To answer the last question I need to unveil a bit about the network approach that we’ve adopted for the Hyper-V on Windows Server 2008 R2 laptop build that I mentioned in my last post. read more »
IT Management, Networking, Windows | 4 Comments »
August 25th, 2009
by Tristan Watkins
We’ve recently been piloting a laptop developer build on Windows Server 2008 R2 Release Candidate (Build 7100) with the Hyper-V role. One of the first receipients of this build complained of connectivity problems in Office Communicator once every minute or two. For as-yet undiagnosed reasons we have lengthy sign-in times for Communicator, so this loss of connectivity rendered it completely unusable. This same problem was visible in Outlook, although less disruptive since we use Cached Exchange Mode. Both Exchange and the OCS server are hosted but we also noticed the problem with interrupted file transfers so it clearly wasn’t just an internet connectivity issue. It looked like something to do with the NIC, the cable or a network device.
The network trouble was accompanied by a series of System log event errors from MVSMP:
Port ‘SWITCHPORT-SM-F277C685-E5F8-490D-8CD1-913B854FABD2-0-1′ was prevented from using MAC address ’00-15-C5-7E-EB-39′ because it is pinned to port ‘SWITCHPORT-SM-F277C6′. read more »
Networking, Virtualisation | 2 Comments »
