Veeam B&R Version 7 Upgrade Experience

Posted on July 9, 2014 by admin

Sometimes moving, upgrading, migrating – call it what you may – an infrastructure application from one major release to another proves to be a tedious process. In the case of Veeam Backup and Replication, for my involvement, it wasn’t so bad. This is the way I went about it.

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Veeam Backup and VMware Independent Disks

Posted on June 26, 2014 by John

Recently one our DBAs mentioned that there are periodic interruptions in network connectivity occurring at the time Veeam backup jobs were running. Our SQL Servers are all in High Availability (HA) Always on Availability Groups (AAG). There are at least two servers in each of the AAGs and all were experiencing issues over time. So what’s the connection with a running SQL server and a Veeam backup job?

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Using Multiple Physical NICs in Hyper-V

Posted on June 16, 2014 by John

I have a lab environment that I use to “try before implementing “things” Microsoft. The lab is hosted on a PC running Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V. The physical Hyper-V server may host at least 4 guest Windows servers with different operating systems running concurrently to create a SQL clustered environment or a web server farm or both. Generally, this requires a Domain Controller, and two or more SQL servers in a Windows Failover cluster. The SQL servers my be set up to use Log Shipping, host an Always on Availability Group or just be configured in a traditional SQL Failover cluster.

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Windows 8.1 Upgrade – again

Posted on May 17, 2014 by John

This is my second attempt at upgrading my Windows 7 Ultimate OS to Windows 8.1. Why Windows 8.1? It’s usable or so I’m led to believe after working on Windows Server 2012 R2. They’re the same right? Well, at least Windows Server 2012 R2 is “usable”. Continue reading →

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What’s happening during a Veeam backup

Posted on December 8, 2013 by John

I recently had a conversation with an associate concerning Windows Failover Clusters failing over at the time a Veeam backup job is running. The situation involves two virtual machines running Windows Server 2012 configured as nodes in a Failover Cluster. The cluster supports SQL Server 2012 High Availability in a two node Always on Availability Group. The problem that the DBA noticed was that the network connection (NIC) was momentarily being dropped. The cluster saw that and failed over. This was repeatable and was happening during a time when the backup job was running. What could be the issue? Continue reading →

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Filezilla download exceeds 100%

Posted on December 3, 2013 by John

I recently ran into a situation using Filezilla to download a large file through a VPN that caused the download to exceed 100%. In fact, if I didn’t stop it, the download would have continued. If you do stop the download and try to use the file, say it’s a ZIP, you find the file to be corrupted, which it is. Key participants in the story: Microsoft FTP server running v6.0 (hey, the BBC’s FTP server was recently hacked, so keep the opinions under control), a VPN, Router(s), Filezilla, and a very large file.

Here’s the scenario. I’m connecting through a VPN to get to the FTP server. The large file is an ISO. From past experience, I found that unless you’re getting an ISO or a VHD from the Microsoft download site, you will have trouble. Best to break the ISO up into smaller chunks.

My favorite tool to do this is 7ZIP. Read about it at http://www.7-zip.org/. I use 7ZIP to split the 4GB file into CD-size, 650MB files. When the download is complete, I use 7ZIP to combine the segments into a single file. A DVD, split up will result in 6+ CD’s.

I set the FTP properties to allow a single file at a time with a maximum speed of 200MBS and place all the individual files into the queue and start it.

Hours pass and I check back to find the first download is still running and has exceeded 100% with the file size over 800MB and rising.

I try restarting, etc., but I get the same results through the VPN. It’s ask Mr. Google time. It takes a while to phrase the question to get meaningful responses but the answer is quite simple.

It’s described in this post on the Filezilla forum. http://trac.filezilla-project.org/ticket/4753.

Essentially a router in the path will drop the ftp control connection. Filezilla is looking for a “226 Transfer OK” from the server to signal the end of file but doesn’t get it so it thinks it’s been timed out and try to resume the transfer.

My solution was to use a different entry point to the VPN and hope that I bypassed the bad router. I did and the downloads worked perfectly.

What I thought interesting was the “pissing match” I found that occurred on the forum. Here’s the link. http://trac.filezilla-project.org/ticket/4672. These people have enough education to be able to read, write and type but as far as any emotional intelligence is concerned – there isn’t any. Truthfully, it makes research tedious. If only Mr. Google could intervene with a solution, instead of suggesting I take a trip, buy a car or stay at a hotel…wait, isn’t that Mr. Bing?

Have fun.

 This posting is provided “as is” with no warranties, guarantees or rights whatsoever.

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My Windows 8.1 Upgrade

Posted on November 21, 2013 by John

No pictures – just a story. I want to relate my personal experiences trying to upgrade my vintage Dell Inspiron 8600 laptop with 2GB RAM, a 1.5GHZ CPU, and a 100GB 5400rpm disk drive running Windows 7 to Windows 8.1.

Full disclosure, I have an iPad and I’ve been using it for about six months. I have had no real need to use the laptop in my current work and the older the computer gets the slower it appears to run.

The other day, I stopped at Best Buy for something, wandered over to the computer section and spotted the new Surface 2 RT and the Surface Pro 2 – or is it the Surface Pro 2? Being a Windows person, I’ve always been intrigued by the Surface since they shrunk down the original end-table-sized device to its present form factor. I’m still curious to see how it stacks up to the iPad 3 that I’m currently using to type up this blog post on. There are a number of blogs and YouTube videos comparing the two products, so I won’t go into that here. The idea of just being able to play with a new toy just hooked me. I had a retail copy of the Windows 8 Upgrade product from my days working at Microsoft so I decided to try my hand at an upgrade of a new OS on old machinery. Hey, I was successful installing Windows 7 on a Dell Latitude 600. Why wouldn’t this work?

First step is to not shoot yourself. Why render a perfectly usable computer into a worthless hunk that you need to rebuild at an inconvenient time? So, I used Acronis to make a disk backup of my Windows 7 machine. I had a spare 5400rpm 120GB disk, so I popped that in and restored the backup image to this disk. My retail copy is a upgrade so it needs Windows 7 installed in order to run.

Booting up in Windows 7, I popped in the Windows 8 32bit DVD and off it went. Setup started copying files and doing its thing. Two hours later, it rebooted. When it came back up, I was in the Black Screen of Woe telling me that the upgrade failed and I should try again. I noticed a link at the bottom of the screen that allowed me to “Learn more”. So I did and found out that “You can’t install Windows because your processor doesn’t support NX.”

Learning more, I found I needed a 1GHZ PAE, NX or SSE2 processor with 1GB RAM, DirectX9 Graphics card and some disk space. Well, I guess I didn’t have the right processor or maybe the NX wasn’t switched on. Booting the computer into BIOS, I found there were no configurable options for the processor. Just like a Bose audio system, press the power button and off you go.

Ok, that’s it! End of story. Oh, one surprise – when I rebooted, the upgrade program restored the system back to Windows 7 and removed all traces of Windows 8 from the computer. That was nice! Thank you Microsoft!

I don’t have a windows “mouse-based” computer to play with Windows 8 and I’m not contemplating getting a Windows 8 phone in the near future and unless Santa leaves a Surface RT under the tree, I won’t be spending any time with one soon. I guess it’s back to running Windows Server 2012 through Remote Desktop if I want the new Metro experience. RDP to a Windows 2012 Server? That my friends is a royal pain in the ass.

 This posting is provided “as is” with no warranties, guarantees or rights whatsoever.

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Ethernet over Powerline – adding WiFi

Posted on July 28, 2013 by John

I’ve written about using Powerline adapters in the electrical wiring of your home or office to extend the typical Ethernet LAN in an earlier post. Using two adapters, turns your electrical wiring into one giant Ethernet wire. This is a great solution if you have a residence or office space that is not wired for Ethernet or if you have poor WiFi reception in various parts of the building. Continue reading →

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Veeam Backup & Replication Computer Trust Relationship

Posted on June 24, 2013 by John

Veeam Backup and Replication, is a fantastic product for managing VM backup, replication to other data centers, and recovery. You can find details on the Backup and Replication product as well as on the monitoring application called VeeamOne at the website, www.veeam.com. Continue reading →

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