I've installed VAMT 3.0 to work with Windows 8 and came across an issue where it crashed on launch: Despite there being no mention of it on the VAMT 3.0 requirements page, it actually requires .NET 3.5. Once installation of .NET 3.5 was complete, VAMT 3.0 started correctly.

During a recent WSUS upgrade from an old server to a new virtual machine running Windows Server 2008 R2, I saw an issue with the server not downloading updates correctly. The server appeared to synchronise correctly, but then no updates were downloaded. We originally saw an issue like this when we started using …

On an instance of CRM 2011 that was being patched to Update Rollup 6 prior to patching to Update Rollup 8, the following error occurred: System.Exception: Action Microsoft.Crm.Setup.Common.Update.DBUpdateAction failed. ---> System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException: Timeout expired. The timeout period elapsed prior to …

Building a Hyper-V virtual machine from scratch almost always seems to involve mounting an ISO image at some point during the installation process. I suspect that like us, many other organisations already have a network location in which we store ISO images. The ability to mount an ISO image from our usual network …

Those of you who know me or Rik will know that we’re both very keen on Windows Home Server. I’ve seen some time related issues with my Home Server recently, with message in the event log telling me that the time of the system (which seems to drift more than I’d like) could not be updated due to a variety of issues. …

We’ve recently seen an issue running Windows Server 2008 R2 with the Hyper-V role installed on an Acer 6593G laptop. We’d updated the BIOS to the latest version available from the Acer site (1.16 at the time of writing) and Server 2008 R2 would no longer boot once the Hyper-V role was installed. Rolling back the BIOS …

To add domain users to a local machine group using Group Policy, we need to use the Restricted Groups feature. For the example shown below, I’ll be using a Windows Server 2003 domain functional level. Create a new global/universal security group in Active Directory to contain the users which you wish to add to the …

One of the issues I’ve seen during our migration of virtual machines to our new Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V cluster relates to network load balancing (NLB). We have a number of NLB setups running which will need migrating in time. My first test migration of a pair of NLB virtual machines (actually, technically a …

At Black Marble, we’re in the process of migrating some of our virtual machines to a Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V cluster. The process of migrating machines from a single Hyper-V host to a Hyper-V cluster is not quite as straightforward as migration of a machine from one single host to another. In addition, our …