Monday 22 August 2011

Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 SP USB Flash Drive Must Have Drivers & Utilities

There are a number of different little utilities that we drop into the _Drivers folder on the USB flash drives we use to load the Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 SP1 OS with. We also put these utilities on our Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 USB flash drives for standalone Hyper-V deployments.

  • ServerNameJoin.bat
    • NOTE: We drop all Server Core and Hyper-V servers into their own OU where we have all aspects of UAC disabled. Core management does _not_ work with UAC enabled.
      • Change OU structure to match your own.
      • Pause is there to allow us to see if the process succeeded or failed.
      • MYSERVERNAME: Must be the name of the Hyper-V server.
      • MYDOMAIN: Must be the name of the domain.
      • DomainAdmin: Must be the name of an admin account with permissions to join the domain.
    • netdom join MYSERVERNAME /Domain:MYDOMAIN.local /OU:OU=SBSServers-ServerCore,OU=Computers,OU=MyBusiness,DC=MYDOMAIN,DC=local /userd:DomainAdmin /passwordd:*
    • pause
  • John Howard’s HVRemote utility
    • This utility makes configuring the host for domain/domain, domain/workgroup, and the other iterations a breeze.
  • Chris Eck’s VHDTool utility
    • We use this utility to create fixed VHDs on _new_ LUNs/LDs or ones that have been properly initialized.
    • It is fast and easy.
    • NOTE: The size format is in bytes so add those zeroes!
  • Intel’s most recent PROSet driver and command line utility.
  • Appropriate drivers
    • Intel AXXSASIOMOD (LSI) Driver
    • LSI 3442 x64 Driver
    • Intel RAID driver

With the above on our flash drive we are able to jump right into configuring the Hyper-V node for clustering or standalone VM guest delivery.

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

5 comments:

stryqx said...

You might want to have a look at 5Nine's Manager for Hyper-V:
http://www.5nine.com/5nine-manager-for-hyper-v.aspx

Very useful for when your management station isn't cooperating, or simply don't have one.

stryqx said...

Oh, nvspbind/nvspscrub are also handy.

redleg said...

bit of GUIness from http://coreconfig.codeplex.com/ too?

Philip Elder Cluster MVP said...

Chris,

We will definitely check out the 5Nines tool.

We actually work with the NIC bindings via the registry. It makes things a bit easier for us since we have been doing it long before nvspbind and nvspscrub were discovered.

We will have another look at them.

Redleg,

SConfig does most of what we need to do out of the box. From there we have a set of batch files that finish off the Core configuration we use.

Thanks,

Philip

Philip Elder Cluster MVP said...

Chris,

NVSPBind.exe just saved my bacon! :D

I owe you a pint or a 25 year old single malt man!

Philip