Friday 24 December 2010

SBS 2011 – Installing The OS Into A VM – Time

There seems to be a bit of a caveat when it comes to installing SBS 2011 into a VM on Hyper-V with regards to the VM picking up the proper time during the initial OS install.

We found that once the OS had finished installing both the time and time zones were not correct despite the time zone being set within the Answer File.

To mitigate any timing problems when installing the OS into a VM we can either:

  1. Enable Time Synchronization in the VM’s Hyper-V Integration Settings temporarily.
    • Make sure to disable Time Synchronization once SBS shows its successful install screen.
    • This allows the VM to have its time correctly synchronized with the host’s clock.
  2. SHFT+F10 after the initial reboots and set the time using the command prompt.
    • image

If the VM OS install is being done in Migration Mode then any time mismatches between the source and destination servers will cause a total loss of the SBS 2011 install resulting in the need to step back on the source server.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Hello Philip.
I hope you are doing well.
I was just at a VAR meeting in Chicago were they were pushing Server 2012 and Windows 8.
It is not quite what my clients want at this time. Or maybe the truth is that I am not prepared to offer it as I don’t understand it enough yet.
Anyway, I am setting a new Dell server for a client that we are upgrading from SBS 2003 to SBS 2011. It will be a new install as opposed to an upgrade because their current server is not working properly and they are only a 15 person organization.
The question is whether I should install the SBS in a virtual machine on the new server. I have never done this before in any of my SBS installations.
And if so, why and can you point me in the right direction to learn about virtualization?
As always, thanks for your help.
Gale Miner

Unknown said...

Hello Philip.
I hope you are doing well.
I was just at a VAR meeting in Chicago were they were pushing Server 2012 and Windows 8.
It is not quite what my clients want at this time. Or maybe the truth is that I am not prepared to offer it as I don’t understand it enough yet.
Anyway, I am setting a new Dell server for a client that we are upgrading from SBS 2003 to SBS 2011. It will be a new install as opposed to an upgrade because their current server is not working properly and they are only a 15 person organization.
The question is whether I should install the SBS in a virtual machine on the new server. I have never done this before in any of my SBS installations.
And if so, why and can you point me in the right direction to learn about virtualization?
As always, thanks for your help.
Gale Miner

Philip Elder Cluster MVP said...

Gale,

If all that is needed is the one server OS then deploy it on the physical box.

Make sure you have a good and tested backup regimen in place too.

As far as learning, just do it. There are so many places with so much info, TMI really, that it is quite tough to figure things out.

Set up Server 2012, install the Hyper-V Role, configure a VM or two. Get a feel for the way things work that way first.

Then the plethora of Microsoft and third party resources will start to make sense.

Thanks,

Philip