Active Directory Installation, Configuration and Management-2

Active Directory Installation, Configuration and Management-1

Active Directory Site and Services with Replication
Active Directory Domain and Trust 

Hello Professionals,
In this section, I will be creating Additional and Child DC to migrate and upgrade the environment from 2003 server to 2012 server. I have pre-installed 2012 R2 server with static IP Address and updated host name and per best practice and nomenclature.
Before Starting on Lab setup we should first understand and know the AD primary and base level of changes in comparison of 2003 and 2008 windows server OS version.

1.    DC PROMO Command is not available in 2012: In previous version of MS OS version like 2000/2003 ad 2008 to install Active Directory in server, this was the command which upgrade the server to Domain Controller server.  Feature added to Add Roles and Feature from where you can add and remove.
2.    In 2003 and 2008 Server OS Domain Controller require manual intervention to move to specific Sites but in 2012 on the installation and configuration wizard it will prompt and ask to move the DC to specific Sites.
3.    In 2003 Server OS, there was no feature as called Offline Domain join. Suppose one of your organization branch is there and you don’t want to occupy a resource on this location due to different reason. So you can join the domain offline using media.
4.    Another great feature was Read Only Domain Controller, where you can install a Domain Controller on branch location but it will be having not all feature installed. We will be discussing like how, what RODC works in more details in later this blog

Now starting AD installation on 2012 server  :)
Click Add Roles and Features from Server Manager

Select Role Based or Feature Based Option. There is another Option here is Remote Desktop Service and will be discussing later in the blog

I am adding roles on this server so will select the highlighted and next.
There is another great feature in 2012, that you can add or remove  Roles and Features remote server in LAN. Its very advanced option and no need to login to destination server and its manageable from one server

Selet AD DS Roles and click on Add Features

At the same time i added AD LDS as well.

In below screen shots its explaining what meaning is AD DS and AD LDS Roles.

In this screen shot you can see in bottom that there is an option to export the configuration.
Server Manager configuration information is stored in the ServerList.xml and user.config files found here:
    %appdata%\Microsoft\Windows\ServerManager\ServerList.xml
    %appdata%\Local\Microsoft_Corporation\ServerManager.exe_StrongName_GUID\6.2.0.0\user.config
When you click this option, an XML-formatted file is generated, that contains all the choices made in the previous screens of the Add Roles and Features Wizard. This file is presented to you as DeploymentConfigTemplate.xml to save at a convenient file location.
 Install the same Server Role and Feature on another Windows Server Os version by copying this configuration file and and run the below command on powershell
Install-WindowsFeature –ConfigurationFilePath
D:\ConfigurationFiles\DeploymentConfigTemplate.xml

and on advanced option you can use the same xml file to install the roles and feature on remote server by the below command
Install-WindowsFeature –ConfigurationFilePath
D:\ConfigurationFiles\ADCSConfigFile.xml -ComputerName $servername

Now installation is done.

Proceeding further for DC promotion wizard

I had all ready a 2003 DC and am adding this DC in the same forest

From server manager its very possible now that at the time of configuration you can move the DC to specific sites, where in 2003 ad 2008 it can be done after all configuration.

oopss i forgot to promote my functional level of Domain and Forest. To raise Domain functional level you need to open Active Directory User and Computers and right click on the Domain. here you will find a option Raise Domain Functional Level. To Raise Forest Functional Level you need to open Active Directory Site and Services and click on properties of the top domain name.

on this screen i selected this server to be act as GC and DNS. Its pop up to inform if i want a RODC that my Domain controller must have 2008 Windows Server Operating server version ans this feature is not supporting under windows 2003 server operating system.

this server added in Default First Site as i didnt create more site, but its good thought came in mind that create more sites and play more replication, lingering object and other lab practicals and troubleshooting.

This message is more of a notification to tell you that other domains on the Internet and other private network cannot resolve your domain name. At this point we should not worry and tense that what the error and what to do, This is a known issue in DCPROMO you can find the update here.
In some case admins should take this seriously and check
 1.When installing a child domain of an existing AD domain. In this case, the first DC in the child domain should indeed be able to create a DNS delegation within the parent domain.
  2.When installing an internet-connected AD domain for which the DNS delegation has been created manually. The dcpromo wizard checks for an existing delegation before trying to create one, and if it finds one, this should not warning or pop up

It another interesting part,here ntdsutil tool comes in picture and one installation media can be create for additional domain controllers that you are creating in a domain.

here the default paths of AD installation files

at this points of time this wizard inform you that updates adn modification will also perform on Domain partition and schema partition.

Final check before installing the Roles

After this server rebooted  and DC promotion is finally done.

So till now we had only installed 2012 DC in 2003 Forest infrastructure and next action plan will be explore more roles and feature for Windows Server Operating systems. will update very soon...

Active Directory Installation, Configuration and Management-1

Active Directory Site and Services with Replication
Active Directory Domain and Trust 

Introduction (Features comparison, what's new)

VMware More about Log files and Basic Settings with Vsphere
ESXi Troubleshooting-I 

Before starting with home lab would recommend to go through with the Vsphere terminology that being used, and will talk about old version of Vmware,comparison and other things. 
Previous version of Vsphere the hypervisor was available in 2 flavour ESX and ESXi.Although both flavours were from same umbrella, same license patterns and considered as bare-metal installation hypervisor. in ESX version RHEL was derives as service console to provide and interactive environmental which user could interact with the hypervisor. This service console have in built feature of firewall, SNMP agents and a web server.
on the another hand, ESXi was the nest generation of Vmware products. ESXi install and run without service console with footprint of 130MB only, with extra security and enhanced feature of ESXi.
The Vmkernal is the functionality that is found in Vmware ESXi and it was available with ESX version only.

this is small list of comparison on Vmware versions .

VMware vCenter Server: Centralized management console to manage, deploy,manage, monitor, automate, secure the virtualized infrastructure.This server not only support for management capability but also template, customization, provisioning and deployment of vms, role base access control and very fine tunes resource allocation control.It also gives admins the tools for the more advanced feature vmotion, Fault tolerance,DRS and HA.
Other features are also
1. EVC, which leverage hardware functionality from Intel and AMD to enable CPU compatibility between grouped into Vspshere DRS clusters.
2.Host Profiles, which allow to enable consistency to host configuration across larger environment to identify missing or configuration issues.
3. Storage I/O Control, which enable cluster wide QOS control, that ensure critical applications receive sufficient storage resources even time of high usage or congestion.
4.Distributed Switch, which enable the networking settings that manage multiple host and clusters.
5.Network I/O, which allow for flexible partition Physical NIC bandwidth and provide QOS for different traffic.
6.Storage DRS, which enable dynamically migrate storage resource to bring down the storage I/O's ups and down. like DRS feature in term of CPU and memory utilization.

Update Manager:.
This is advanced and add-on feature of vcenter that helps admins to update their ESXi hosts and VMS with latest updates.
1. scan the objects/system that are not up to date with latest updates
2.Automated patching of ESXi host

After Installation, it is available as plug in vcenter console and can be activated after installing in console only.

VMware vSphere Web Client and vSphere Desktop Client :
A centralized management console for ESXi host which allows nd enable admins to manage the virtual infrastructure easily.There was a major change with Vsphere 5 version with web based vsphere client. it provides web based user interface to manage a virtual infra to enable admins where Vsphere client installation was not require. 

VMware vRealize Orchestrator: This was known as Vmware Vcenter Orchestrator before, work-flow which is installed with vcenter server, Using this feature, admins can create and automate workflow for different task available in VCenter list.There are other available plug-ins for further automation task in Active Directory, UCS and VRealize Automation.

vSphere Virtual Symmetric Multi-Processing: This Vmware product allow admins to create vms with multiple virtual process cores or sockets. this feature is not a licensing feature but this is a technology taht enable to use multiple process with in vm with multiple processors in the Host system and multiple virtual processors.

vSphere vMotion and vSphere Storage vMotion: Vmotion is a feature of ESXi and vcenter that allows/enable vm to moves running vm from one host to another available host. As same Storage vmotion, migrate vms from one storage to another available storage.

vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler: This is a another great feature which gives admins relief  when I/O's in term of CPU/Memory fluctuating very rapidly.
vSphere Storage DRS:Just like DRS help to maintaining utilisation in terms of CPU and memory in cluster, Storage DRS helps to keep balanced performance across the data-store cluster.

Storage I/O Control and Network I/O Control:vSphere dint have feature release of vSphere 4.1.Storage I/O Control (SIOC) enable and allows admits to assign relative priority to storage I/O and limits to VMs. These settings are applied on cluster-wide. You can enable this feature 

Policy-Based Storage: Admins can use storage capabilit and vm storage profiles to ensure vms on storage that provide the required capacptiy, availability and redundancy.

vSphere High Availability:We should put all our eggs in one basket! This terms well explain the HA feature.Infrastructure is more over concerned on availability of application and vms. Before this feature if physical server is down so related with that servers everything is stopped till that physical server is not up.this is an automated process for restarting vms that on running on esxi host which failed due to  unexpected reason. This feature got extra and advanced enhanced feature after 5.0 vpshere version.It allows to run up to 512 VMs per host (up from 100 in older versions) and 3,000 VMs per cluster (up from 1,280 in older versions).vSphere HA integrated more closely with the intelligent placement functionality of vSphere DRS,giving vSphere HA greater ability to restart VMs in the event of a host failure. The third and perhaps most significant improvement is the complete rewrite of the underlying architecture for vSphere HA; this
entirely new architecture, known as Fault Domain Manager (FDM), eliminated many of the constraints found in earlier versions of VMware vSphere. vSphere HA does not provide failure if the issue is with guest OS or on time of failure of guest OS, admins can configure HA to monitor VMs and restart them automatically as per priority if they fail to respond to heartbeat. This feature is called VM Failure Monitoring, and it uses a combination of heartbeats and I/O activity to attempt to detect if the guest OS inside a VM be restarted automatically. Ist very important to understand the vm restart priority if HA start as we as it cam be configured that in the HA activity the vm you want to be power off on or.

vSphere Fault Tolerance:FT provides protection against host failures with no downtime. At the time of host failures, the hosts running both the primary and secondary VMs failed—vSphere HA will reboot the primary VM on another available server, and vSphere FT will automatically create a new secondary VM. As of vSphere 5.0, FT also integrated with DRS, although this feature does require
Enhanced vMotion Compatibility (EVC). Recommended by VMWARE that multiple FT virtual machines with multiple vCPUs should have 10GbE networks at hosts level.

vSphere Storage APIs for Data Protection and VMware Data Protection:another important for any infrastructure, not specific to virtual or physical infrastructure, what is the overcome policy and steps at the tme of disaster and after that.VMware vSphere 6.0 has two key components: the vSphere Storage
APIs for Data Protection (VADP) and VMware Data Protection (VDP).
VADP is a bunch or et of APIs that provide enhanced backup functionality of virtualized environments. VADP enables feature like file-level backup and restore; support for incremental, differential, and full-image backups;native integration with backup software; and support for multiple storage protocols.

vSphere Replication:This product enable data replication from a site to another site, in early version of vSphere 5.0, used at the time of only if any conjunction with VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) 5.0. vSphere Replication enables customers to replicate VMs from one vSphere environment to another vSphere environment. This means from one data-center  to another datacenter. Here one site is called as production and another site is like DR site. If any issue with the primary site, admins can migrate there resource/vm to DR to minimize the impact of un wanted or accidental situation.

Now ESXi is ready in Home lab with installation only.
Make Sure vm is selected to boot with CD, or you can set in from BIOS also after BIOS setup key.

Press Continue

F11 to Accept and Continue

 I added only 10 GB for ESXi installation, and here we are doing local installation. There are other different installation method. Like USB or on SAN

Root password to access the ESXi host.

Scanning means at this position ESXi installation will check HCL and minimum requirement. As you can see i gave only 2GB RAM for ESXi so its prompted me to increase.

I powered off my system and increased the RAM to 4 GB and continue to HCL checking it will start installing ESXi. 

ESXi is installed and before reboot eject the ESXi bootable ISO. 

Finally ESXi is installed with automatic IP. Before starting to advanced configuration, i gave static IP, VLAN, disabled IPV6 and domain settings.
Restarted ESXi one more time.

As per basic configuration, we are done with ESXi installation.Here are lots of things to configuration.We will be updating very soon.

VMware More about Log files and Basic Settings with Vsphere
ESXi Troubleshooting-I 

HYPER-V

Installation, Configuration Phase-1
HYPER-V Networking Concept

Hello Professionals,

You will be getting updates for comparison, enhanced feature, advanced feature for HYPER V.

 ·       

•             Introduction to Microsoft Virtualization
• ·         Virtual Machine Fundamentals
• ·         Network Configuration
• ·         Storage Configuration
• ·         Managing Hyper-V
• ·         Cluster and Migration Technology
• ·         SCVMM-Installation, Config and Management

Now these days every organization is trying to reduce their cost and all cloud vendors are helping them very smartly.

Microsoft HYPER-V and Cloud technology has its own capability and enhanced feature in comparison with old versions. There is lots of benefit for virtualized environment in terms of hardware resource, power, licensing, etc. These days benefits matter for organization and they have to decide either they want in terms of cost cutting or enable the environment for stable and robust infrastructure.

We should understand the hper-v requirement first, What is requirement that clients want to get with this hyper-v  technology. Because that calculation will help you to implement the virtualized environment to make stable.

That tactics will start from the basic that how you will be proceeding with these basic stuffs and configuration CPU, Memory storage, networking.

The first HYPER-V feature was introduced in 2008 release.

Microsoft Virtual Server, which was a virtualization solution Microsoft acquired as part of the Connectix acquisition. 1 2 (Reference Links ).

HYPER-V Basic Concept:

 Type 1 hypervisors run directly on the bare metal of the server and directly control and allocate resources to virtual machines. It allows virtual machines to still be able to directly access of the processor for their calculations, giving the best performance interms of resource

Type 2 hypervisor runs on a host operating system. The host operating system manages

the underlying hardware.These type of hypervisor runs on OS. Here you will not getting best performance in terms of resource.

Introduction Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V :

The initial version of Hyper-V provided a solid foundation for virtualization with limited

set of  capabilities.

•  Up to 64 GB of memory per VM.
• VMs (up to four vCPUs each). This calculation depend on guest OS devices and functionality.
• Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) format for virtualized storage up to 2 TB in size. Only 4 devices could be connected to the IDE controller (2 to each of the 2 IDE controllers), while each of the 4 virtual SCSI controllers supported up to 64 devices, each allowing up to 256 VHDs attached via the virtual SCSI.
• HA failover.
• Migrate vms in cluster ( How its work will explain you later because this was the very weak point of Hyper-V in 2008 release.)
•  Supported VSS live backup of virtual machines.
•  Create VM Snpahost.( In Windows Server 2012 R2, VM snapshots term is replaced with           checkpoint.)
•  Pass-through disk access for VMs was possible even though not generally recommended.
•  It was sometimes required if VMs needed access to single volumes greater than 2 TB in size (which was the VHD limit).
•  Integration services are responsible to communication between host and vm. Like mouse, keyboard, network, time sync and the most important heartbeat.
•  Vm can be create with 10GB Lan Support.

  Fall back Point in legacy HYPER-V Model

1.  NTFS was not shared file system and can be mounted and restricted by only one OS at a time, which means when a virtual machine moves between hosts in a cluster, must be dismounted from the source host and mounted on the target host. Which is manual task and not as per best practice because disaster and issues never gives you a call.
2. For migration from one host to another host VM had to be paused to enable the memory, processor, and device state to be saved to disk. Where some of other third party apps stopped work and that is called as production outage.

 

And MS took this known issue/ bug very seriously and resolved in the updated release of R2 version of 2008 with term created and called as Live migration.

 Comparison Chart

feature	2008r2	2012	changs upto
Logical processors on hardware	64	320 (640 without Hyper-V role)	>5
LP:VP ratio	8:1 (12:1 for Windows 7 VDI)	No limit
Physical memory	1TB	4TB	4x
Virtual processors per host	512	2048	4x
Virtual processors per virtual machine	4	64 (includes NUMA awareness)	16
Memory per virtual machine	64GB	1TB	16x
Active virtual machines per host	384	1024	2.5x
Maximum cluster nodes	16	64	4x
Maximum cluster virtual machines	1000	8000	8x
Maximum VHD size	2 TB  (with	64 TB(with VHDX)	32x

Now lets move to Lab and start installation of OS with Basic configuration.

 













We are done with Basic Installation of 2012 OS part and before proceeding with advance feature and configuration, I updated host name and moved the system from workgroup to Domain structure.

Adding now Hyper-V role to the server, but here is the catch and big issue for me. Spent approx. 8 hours to find solution for this known issue and finally got it. This solution is not supported by MS at any cost and recommended only for test lab or study purpose only.

 

To overcme from this issue First you have to change the PowerShell execution policy scripts to Remote Signed and run the below command.

Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned

• ·         Restricted - No scripts can be run. Windows PowerShell can be used only in interactive mode.
• ·         AllSigned - Only scripts signed by a trusted publisher can be run.
• ·         RemoteSigned - Downloaded scripts must be signed by a trusted publisher before they can run.
•       Unrestricted - No restrictions; all Windows PowerShell scripts can be run

This command will enable HYPER-V Feature

Enable-WindowsOptionalFeature –Online -FeatureName Microsoft-Hyper-V –All –NoRestart

  

 

This will enable Administrative tools to manage the HYPER-V Manager.

Install-WindowsFeature RSAT-Hyper-V-Tools –IncludeAllSubFeature

 

To create cluster and its require services.

Install-WindowsFeature RSAT-Clustering –IncludeAllSubFeature

 Just Adding Multipath for my interest here.

Install-WindowsFeature Multipath-IO

 And after all these reboot the server.

Installation, Configuration Phase-1
HYPER-V Networking Concept