I was busy doing some testing with SBS 2008 recently and went to build a new VM from the ISO on my 2016 Hyper-V server. It failed with an error of “Windows Setup could not configure Windows to run on this computer’s hardware”. Interesting I thought, maybe it won’t run on my 2016 Hyper-V server, so I then went to build it on my 2012R2 Hyper-V Server and got the exact same … [Read more...]
How to clean up a large WinSXS folder on SBS 2011
I posted earlier in the month here about how to clean up a large WinSXS folder on Windows Server 2008 R2. Since then I’ve had a few questions about if this same procedure will work on an SBS 2011 server. Well given that SBS 2011 is based on Windows Server 2008 R2, the answer is a resounding YES. No you don’t need to do anything different from the procedure I … [Read more...]
How to clean-up a large WinSXS folder on Windows Sever 2008 R2
I was onsite this week and had a server with 21GB of files in the WINSXS folder which was pretty well huge in comparison to the overall 30GB in the Windows folder. To sort this, you need to do a few things. First up – install the Desktop Experience feature via the Add Features function from Server Manager. It will need a reboot, but once rebooted you will have the ability … [Read more...]
Trying to run Windows Server 2012 or Windows 8 on Hyper-V?
If you are trying to test out Window Server 2012 or Windows 8 by running it on a Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V system then you may well see your guest machines lockup on a frequent basis. I’ve seen this myself, but only after I started to do backups on the Hyper-V host on a regular basis. To resolve this problem, you need to download this hotfix and install it on … [Read more...]
Performance Testing Windows Servers as a NAS
Over the last two nights, I’ve shown you performance testing I’ve done on non Windows based NAS devices, Windows based NAS devices and now tonight, on pure Windows Servers. In my test environment I’ve got a couple of servers configured as just Windows Servers, ie – no Domain Controller roles or anything else. HP ML110G6 – this has 2 x 250GB SATA drives in a RAID 1 … [Read more...]