Windows 8 Consumer Preview: Cannot acces NetApp CIFS share

Posted on April 4, 2012 by Thomas Maurer

If you try to connect to a NetApp CIFS share via Windows 8 beta you may cannot access the share because of the following error:

SMB connections fail with error “Invalid Signature”

Cause:

This behavior may be due to the “Secure Negotiate” feature added to SMB 2.24 for the Windows “8″ beta release, which relies on the correct signing of error responses by all SMB 2 servers (including those supporting only protocol versions 2.0 and 2.1). Some third-party file servers do not respond with a signed error response causing the connection to fail.

Microsoft has two workrounds for this problem:

Enable signing on the third-party file server.
Disable “Secure Negotiate” on the client.

You can disable “Secure Negotiate” with the following PowerShell command:

Set-ItemProperty -Path "HKLM:\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanWorkstation\Parameters" RequireSecureNegotiate -Value 0 -Force

Checkout the Microsoft KB2686098

Update

Only some minutes after I released this blog post I got an anwser from Glenn Sizemore (NetApp) how you can enable SMB 2 signing on the NetApp.

ONTAP CLI:

options cifs.smb2.signing.required on

PowerShell:

ipmo DataONTAP
Connect-NaController controller
Set-NaOption cifs.smb2.signing.required off

Thanks for that.

Windows Server 8: Enable CSV Cache

Posted on April 2, 2012 by Thomas Maurer

Windows Server 8

In Windows Server 8 beta, Microsoft released a lot of new features for Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV). One of them is CSV Cache. CSV Cache gives you the possibility to allocate system memory (RAM) of the cluster nodes as cache. This can improve the performance of read requests in workloads like Hyper-V.

Now to enable the CSV Cache on a cluster you have to do this with Windows PowerShell.

First open the PowerShell prompt
Set the size of the CSV Cache. The default it 512MB. With this command you will reserve the Memory on all Cluster nodes for caching.
```
(Get-Cluster). SharedVolumeBlockCacheSizeInMB = 512
```

Now you have to enable the Cache on on the Cluster Shared Volumes you want to use.

Get-ClusterSharedVolume “Cluster Disk 1” | Set-ClusterParameter  CsvEnableBlockCache 1

If you want to know more about CSV Cache, you can read this blog post from Elden Christensen on the Failover Clustering and Network Load Balancing Team Blog.

Installing Windows 8 Consumer Preview on the Samsung Series 7 Slate PC

Posted on April 1, 2012 by Thomas Maurer

If you have a Samsung Series 7 Slate PC which normally comes with Windows 7 but you want to try out the Windows 8 Consumer Preview on it, Samsung offers now drivers and a firmware upgrade for your Slate.

You can get it here: http://www.samsung.com/global/windowspreview/

Windows 8: How to create a Windows To Go USB drive

Posted on March 29, 2012 by Thomas Maurer

Microsoft released a new feature called “Windows To Go” with Windows 8. With this feature it is possible to boot your Windows 8 from a USB drive on any PC. In this post I show you how you can do this.

Requirements

UBS drive with 16GB free Space
A PC running Windows 8
The Windows 8 Consumer Preview ISO

Step-by-Step

First let me show you my setup to begin with.

I have my System Drive (C:), the USB drive I want to use (E:) and the Windows 8 ISO mounted (F:)

Run diskpart
With “list disk” you can list all your disk
Now select your usb drive (select disk 1) and clean it. After that you can create a new partition and format that and close diskpart.
```
select disk 1
clean
create partition primary
format fs=ntfs quick
active
assign letter=e
exit
```
Now in my case the ISO is mounted as drive F:. Now with dism I can apply the Windows Image to my USB drive (E:)
```
dism /apply-image /imagefile=f:\sources\install.wim /index:1 /applydir:e:\
```
Now you have to make this drive bootable
```
bcdboot e:\windows /s e: /f ALL
```
now you are done. You can now boot your USB drive. The first boot will take some time to setup.

If you want to know more about Windows To Go I recommend you the Microsoft session from the BUILD conference.

Install Ubuntu 12.04 on Hyper-V

Posted on March 26, 2012 by Thomas Maurer

Some months ago I made a blog entry about “Install CentOS on Windows 8 Hyper-V“. Now with the new Linux kernel 3.0 the Hyper-V Integration Components are integrated in the kernel. Now Ubuntu 12.04 will be based on the new Linux kernel and this is why it should run perfectly on Microsoft Hyper-V.

Download Ubuntu on Ubuntu.com. Until 12.04 is released you can download the daily builds from here.
Start the Hyper-V Manager and create a new Virtual Machine
Install Ubuntu 12.04
after the Installation everything should work fine

Setup System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 SP1 CTP

Posted on March 10, 2012 by Thomas Maurer

Windows Server 8

This quick how-to blog postshows you how you can setup the new released System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 SP1 CTP.

Get software

First download the software:

You also need a Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 with SQL 2008 R2 and Service Pack 1

Setup SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1

Install a Windows Server 2008 R2 with SP1
Install MS SQL Server 2008 R2 with SP1
Open SQL Firewall Ports, so SCVMM can access the SQL Server

Setup SCVMM 2012 SP1 CTP

Setup a Windows Server 8 with the latest updates
Install the .NET Framework 3.5 Features with the Server Manager

or with Windows PowerShell:
[Powershell]
Add-WindowsFeature NET-Framework-Features
Add-WindowsFeature NET-Framework-Core
[/Powershell]
Install The Windows® Automated Installation Kit (AIK) for Windows® 7
Install the Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008 R2 Native Client
Install the Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008 R2 Command Line Utilities
Start the setup.exe and click install
Choose VMM management server and click next
Configure the SQL connection to your SQL Server
Configure a service account. The service account you use has to member of the local administrator group on the SCVMM server and it should not be the default domain administrator.Because if you use the domain administrator as service acocunt you can not use it as “RunAs” account in SCVMM.
Configure the Library share
Install