Enabling wireless on Windows Server 2008 - and eventually allowing Hyper-V guests to use it

A lot of you may probably ask why the need to enable wireless on a server operating system. Well, if you're like me who runs a server operating system on a laptop for testing purposes, there's a thousand and one reason why you would like to have it enabled. Now, since my Windows XP work-machine is now a virtual machine, I would need to have the wireless on my laptop enabled and working with Windows Server 2008. For this, you would need to install the Wireless LAN Service feature in Windows Server 2008. This article provides a detailed step-by-step procedure on enabling wireless on your Windows Server 2008. You just need to make sure that you have the appropriate Windows Server 2008 drivers for your wireless adapter or it won't work.

But my dilemma didn't stop there. I obviously don't want to access the internet via the Windows Server 2008 platform. That's what my Windows XP virtual machine is for. So what I did was to add an Internal virtual network using Hyper-V's Virtual Network Manager. This will create another network adapter on the host operating system - in this case, Windows Server 2008. I've renamed this WiFi-Guest-Bridge. Next, I've added a network adapter on the Hyper-V guest and mapped it to this virtual network. Once, I've done both of these, I've bridged the wireless network adapter and the WiFi-Guest-Bridge network adapter, thereby, providing wireless connectivity to my Hyper-V guest.

Keith Combs provided a step-by-step procedure (with screenshots) on how to configure wireless networking with Hyper-V guests in his blog

It is very important to name your network adapters accordingly as Windows does a real good job of using a generic naming convention (i.e. Local Area Network x) which adds confusion especially if you are dealing with a ton of virtual networks from within a single Hyper-V (or other virtualization) platform

RELOG tool in Windows Server 2008

I was configuring one of our customer's Windows Server 2008 to capture PerfMon counters for our analysis when I accidentally ended up storing the log file in binary format. Now, I didn't like the idea of reading the binary file as I will be importing it in a SQL Server database for Reporting Services to use. Although PerfMon has the ability to log directly to a SQL Server database using ODBC, I am not allowed to do anything outside of PerfMon. After digging thru some options in Windows Server 2008, I found out about the RELOG tool. The tool gives you the ability to extract out the counters from any format generated by PerfMon and store them in a different format. In my case, I had to store them as a CSV file



relog PerfMonCounterLog.blg -f csv -o PerfMonCounterLog.csv



I was trying to find more about this tool from Microsoft TechNet but couldn't find any (or maybe I wasn't just looking hard enough) although MSDN has something about the method called ReLog which does exactly the same thing. It's exposed as an API so you can call it from an application should you wish to do so

Want to free up disk space on your Windows Server 2008 system partition?

Here's one idea I got from this blog post. It came from KB 920730: How to disable and re-enable hibernation on a computer that is running Windows Vista. It certainly was not Windows Vista, but who would want to let their servers hibernate? Besides, Windows Server 2008 is listed on the Applies To section of the KB article. I've decided to give it a shot. Run this command on your command-prompt with administrative privileges

powercfg.exe /hibernate off

Now, if you happen to take a look at your system partition and show all the hidden files, you would see a hyberfil.sys file, a hidden system file located in the root folder of the system partition. The Windows Kernel Power Manager reserves this file when you install Microsoft Windows. The size of this file is approximately equal to the amount of RAM installed on the computer. Since we dont need hibernation on servers, you can just remove this file using the command above. Sometimes I wonder why everything is on the system partition when you don't even need them

NewSID on Windows Server 2008?

I made a mistake of not having a backup of my base virtual image for testing and back in the old days, I used the NewSID tool from Sysinternals. Unfortunately, I am not back in the good old days as the tool is only supported to run on Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 whereas I am working on Windows Server 2008. Although there are claims that it would work on both 32- and 64-bit Windows Server 2008, I am not going to spend another minute trying something that I have not validated myself (thanks to a new paradigm in business models) just for this project. My next best bet - SYSPREP. Unlike the days of pre-Windows Server 2008 where you had to find the Windows installation media, find and extract the Deploy.CAB file to you hard drive and then execute the SYSPREP.EXE tool. Not anymore! Widows Vista and Windows Server 2008 has it out-of-the-box (and you wonder why you needed all that hard drive space to install them) on

%WINDIR%\System32\Sysprep

One thing to note is that you need to check the Generalize checkbox to create a new SID for a cloned system