One of the major challenges with moving to a new OS is dealing with older applications.  This was an issue with the release of Windows Vista and in order to mitigate that with Windows 7, Microsoft has released a feature called XP Mode, which runs a Windows XP SP3 virtual machine in the background that can be used to run legacy applications.  What is really interesting is that as a user, you only see a shortcut on the desktop or start menu and interact with the application as you would any other application.  Launch an application and the VM wakes up (by default it hibernates when not in use) and presents the application, close the app and the VM hibernates!

There are two components that need to be installed, Windows Virtual PC which is the successor to Virtual PC 2007, and the XP Mode VM.  Once they are installed there is a simple set up process to turn on Automatic Updates, set a username and password for the XP VM and you are on your way.  The VM can be joined to AD and act as any other domain member.

There are the typical Virtual PC settings such as memory, disk, networking etc… but the addition of Auto Publish allows applications that reside in the XP VM to appear in the Windows 7 start menu.

So to the end user they access the applications just like any other.

Any application that is installed in the XP VM can be published simply by dropping the shortcut to launch it in All Users –> Start Menu  As an example I placed the IE6 shortcut in All Users\Start Menu and launched it on Windows 7 next to IE8.

You can also mount any USB device in the XP VM as Windows Virtual PC now supports USB devices!

If you are looking to use this to solve an enterprise wide app compat issue you can use this same technology with the addition of a management suite with MED-V, or Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization, which is currently in beta (as is XP Mode and Windows 7 at the time of this writing) or the Application Compatibility Toolkit which we wrote about previously.

For more information see:

Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization

Download MED-V Beta 1

Microsoft Springboard Portal

Setting a password for Directory Services Restore Mode is something that is done during the setup of Active Directory.  As a best practice it has always been recommended to change that password on a regular basis, as you would with any other password.  The challenge was the process to do this was complicated and required you to use NTDS in Windows 2003.

This has been addressed in Windows Server 2008 where we can now sync the DSRM password with a Domain Administrator account.  There is a hotfix that needs to be installed which you can download here.  (Note: You do need to request the hotfix and it should be included in SP2)  After it is installed and the server is rebooted, you can run the following command to sync the passwords.

ntdsutil "set dsrm password" "sync from domain account <DomainAdminAccountName>" q q

A lot of people are making the switch from Virtual Server to Hyper-V lately.  I’ve done it on my home network and Thelazyadmin.com servers are in progress of moving to Hyper-V as well.  While you can simply copy over the VHD and create a new VM in Hyper-V and mounting that VHD there is a tool that can help you with this task.  VMC2HV is a free tool that can be used to import a Virtual Server (or VirtualPC) based VM into Hyper-V.  It is a pretty simple tool to use, specify the name and credentials for your Hyper-V server, choose the VMC file of the machine you want to import and click Create Virtual Machine.

A few things to note when using this tool…

• Once the migration is complete you will have to uninstall the VMAdditions and install the Integration Components.
• Installing the Integration Components will update the HAL so going back to Virtual Server/PC will be difficult
• Hyper-V will not boot from virtual SCSI so you will have to move the VMs boot drive to the virtual IDE bus
• You can run this tool on X86 and x64 installs of Windows Vista and Server 2008, locally or remotely from the Hyper-V server.

You can download VMC2HV here!

A few weeks back we posted an entry on how to boot from a Windows 7 or Server 2008 R2 VHD.  Booting from VHD is new to Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 but one of the caveats was you needed a “clean” VHD to boot from.  There is a very simple way to create this VHD using an open source tool available on the MSDN Code Gallery called WIM2VHD.

WIM2VHD is a command line tool that converts the WIM image into a VHD you can use to boot off.  It does have a few requirements…

• The prep machine has to be running Windows 7, Server 2008 R2, either of which could be running in a Hyper-V VM
• A Windows 7 or Server 2008 R2 installation media
• The Windows 7 Automated Install Kit Beta

There are a number of switches you will need to know as well in order to create the VHD file…

• /wim: specifies the path to the WIM file
• /sku: which version (ServerStandard, Ultimate etc…)  You can also use the SkuIndex if you retrieved that with the ImageX tool
• /vhd: specifies the path and the name of the VHD to be created
• /size: specifies the size of the VHD in MB
• /disktype: specifies the type of disk, Dynamic or Fixed

There are some additional switches which you can find on the WIM2VHD documentation that allow you to further customize the VHD to be created.

So let’s say we wanted to create a Windows 7 Ultimate VHD on a 40GB fixed disk; we’d use the following command:

cscript wim2vhd.wsf /wim:X:\sources\install.wim /sku:ULTIMATE /vhd:C:\Win7Ultimate.vhd /size:40960 /disktype:Fixed

Or if we wanted to create a Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard VHD on a 40GB dynamically expanding disk we’d use the following command:

cscript wim2vhd.wsf /wim:X:\sources\install.wim /sku:SERVERSTANDARD /vhd:C:\ServerStandardR2.vhd /size:40960 /disktype:Dynamic

You can download WIM2VHD and the release documents here.

For as long as we have had Active Directory domains, we have been required to to join client to the domain while they were online and connected to AD.  Without that the join would fail.  Now you always had the ability to join with a script using the NETDOM command but with Windows Server 2008 R2 we can now join a client to our AD domain while offline.  The real benefit hear is that there is no need to supply or enter domain admin credentials.  As you’ll see below a TXT file is created but just for fun open it up with notepad and see what you can make out :)

It is a simple three step process that requires you to run a new utility called DJOIN from an already joined Server 2008 R2 computer.

1. Create a text file with DJOIN that contains the required information for a computer to join AD
2. Import the text file using DJOIN on the target computer you wish to join AD
3. Once connected to the domain, reboot the computer and it will join AD

For joining a computer to the domain using DJOIN there are some switches you need to know about first.

• /provision – used when there is no existing AD account for the computer
• /reuse – if you already created a computer account in AD and would like to use it
• /domain – specifies the domain to join
• /machine – specifies the name of the machine, if the computer has a different name it will be renamed
• /machineou – specifies the OU to join, if you omit this it will automatically be placed in the default computers OU
• /savefile – saves the file to be imported.

A typical command would be…

djoin.exe /provision /domain thelazyadmin.com /machine client01 /machineou Desktops /savefile client01.txt

To join client01 to the domain we would next import client01.txt with the following command run with administrative privileges…

djoin /requestODJ /loadfile client01.txt /windowspath %systemroot% /localos

Reboot once the client is connected to the domain and the join will be made.

The one thing I missed with Server Core was PowerShell.  While you can run PowerShell cmdlets and scripts remotely, at times it would have been nice to run it locally.  The reason PowerShell was not included was due to the lack of .NET in Server Core.  That changes in R2.

Windows Server Core 2008 R2 includes a subset of .NET which allows PowerShell, as well as other components like ASP.NET.  Specifically Server Core R2 includes:

• .NET 2.0
• .NET 3.0 and 3.5

• Windows Workflow Foundation (WF)
• Windows Communication Foundation (WCF)
• Language Integrated Query (LINQ)

Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) isn’t included but then with no GUI in Server Core it doesn’t really matter much.

There are a few commands you need to know to get it working in R2.

Install .NET 3.0 and 3.5

Start /w ocsetup NetFx3-ServerCore

Enable 32 bit support, run the above, then

Start /w ocsetup ServerCore-WOW64

 Start /w ocsetup NetFx3-ServerCore-WOW64

Enable PowerShell

Start /w ocsetup MicrosoftWindowsPowerShell