Running low on drive letters on the Windows server? Tired of splitting tons of semi-related data between separate drives or of having to deal with folder-by-folder permissions? Of reinstalling the OS when the primary partition gets full?

…think like a UNIX admin and use Windows mounted drives to create a heirachical tree of drives. It’s simple, no more drive letters to remember or map in a startup script. Just create one lettered drive and then map each type of data, NAS device, or however else you want to segment it, to a folder in that one drive. No need for expensive LUN-aggregation software, just use the Disk Management tools in Windows. It’s even possible to migrate all the data in C:\Program Files\ to a NAS device and then use a mounted drive to make the Windows-OS see the NAS as that “Program Files” folder. Having some performance issues with Exchange or SQL Server? You can use move or add a mounted drive to a separate NAS device to separate the log and database files for both server systems.

1. Open the Computer Management control panel, then the Disk Management sub-panel.
2. Right-click the volume you want to mount and choose “Change Drive Letter and Paths”
3. Click Add, select Mount in the following empty NTFS folder and then choose one of the following options:
   • Already have a folder created: type the path to an empty folder in an NTFS-formatted volume or Browse to it
   • No empty folder created yet: click Browse and find where you’d like to place the new folder, then click New Folder and create away

Drive Number Limits: Technically you can have an unlimited number of drives when they’re mapped to folder names instead of drive letters. In reality, approaching 100 separate mounted drives can start to bog down most stock 1U or 2U servers. More RAM and a faster OS-drive (C: drive) are needed to optimize support many more mounted drives.

Article tagged: Windows, Server, NAS, SAN, drive+letters, mapped, mounted, drives, extend, add, migrate, data, compress+drive, SQL+Server, Exchange, separate, database, log, files, performance

Mr. Dell Support Tech.,

It’s not possible to manually force full-duplex or half-duplex settings on ANY gigabit ports from ANY manufacturer.

Yes, those same ports can still be forced to 10Mbit or 100Mbit full-/half-duplex, only 1000Mbit speed doesn’t support it. No, Dell switches have not been “revised” since your training - they never supported this. Please tell whomever is writing your troubleshooting documentation to revise it; it’s just not correct.

-Mr. Tweak

Article tagged: Dell, phone, tech, support, gigabit, gigE, 1000mbps, 1000Mbit, network, networking, switch, port, force, full-duplex, half-duplex

The new Windows Server 2003 R2 operating system upgrade is a bundle of several separate feature-packs with Windows Server 2003 SP1. This is supposed to mean that W2k3 R2 is compatible with everything that ran correctly on the SP1 version of the OS. However, a quick round of testing is in order for any operations that have had problems caused by any post-SP1 security updates. Many security updates released since SP1 was released are already bundled into R2.

As for real features added to R2: Microsoft’s hype-machine-generated list of features added to R2 highlights several technologies, including the .NET 2.0 libraries and upgraded identity managment (Active Directory Federation Services), as “new”. Nonetheless, it looks like R2 does have some hype-worthy features that should have been better marketed. These features include the new WAN communication algorithms, for better network synchronization with less bandwidth use, and more granular storage management & SAN configuration tools.

Another support call to Dell today for a replacement SCSI drive, thankfully the server had a hot spare in the array or we would be restoring our whole Help Desk and Windows SUS systems. We were taking shifts on the phone while running the extended hardware diagnostics for a second time and, like all long support calls, I chatted with the Dell support tech. Among other things I complained about the removal of the Array Manager interface from Dell’s newest OpenManage 4.5 utility… the interface of the replacement is slow and cluttered.

The older Array Manager can cause problems, and isn’t supported, when installed alongside Open Manage 4.5. It turns out there is a new Array Manager hidden on the OpenManage CD or downloaded installer. It’s not supported officially, but it doesn’t cause the conflicts the old Array Manager did and you won’t be asked to install it before proceeding with other troublshooting. Here is the executable path and extra commands to run in order to install the new version of Array Manager alongside OpenManage:

(CD Drive or Extracted Installer Folder):\srvadmin\windows\SystemManagement\msiexec.exe /i SysMgt.msi ENABLEAM=YES

Adding disks to a new EMC AX100i at one of our offices, the fastest solution to expand the volume sizes was to upgrade them to Windows dynamic volumes and add the new disks to the volume. With no mirroring and plenty of server power, the use of the dynamic volumes was unlikely to impact performance but it would eliminate the need to transfer data off and on the EMC array. The dynamic volumes worked well at first, but turned out to be a bad idea that next time the attached servers were rebooted.

The iSCSI volumes were not attached when the servers started up and the “merge foreign disks” command needed to be run before the array could even be addressed by the server. The only way to keep the error from happening at every reboot was to remove the data, rebuild the volumes on the AX100i, and then move the data back - no time saved after all.

I expect that our use of the Microsoft iSCSI initiator had a lot to do with the problems. An iSCSI HBA would have made the volumes available earlier in the boot process and probably prevented the foreign disk status. Nonetheless, if we had wanted to spend the extra money on HBAs we probably would have bought a fibre channel array instead of iSCSI.

(A May 2005 article also mentions that loading Windows 2003 Server SP1 will result in crashes due to either Navisphere orPowerPath software.)

We run a Dell-branded EMC SAN at a regional office. After hearing that Windows 2003 Server SP1 is a clean service pack that has caused very few software errors or conflicts I was considering installing it on a test server. Fortunately I had other reasons to call Dell’s EMC team today and brought up SP1.

Do not install SP1 on Windows 2003 Servers connected to Dell/EMC SANs (and possibly EMC SANs). The Dell technician I spoke with mentioned being very busy this week removing SP1 from Windows 2003 servers that had gone BSOD (Blue Screen of Death). The Dell tech expects EMC to release updates to the Navisphere and/or PowerPath software to solve these issues soon.

My Future Testing Plans:
An interesting point in this is to always test all aspects of a production environment. This doesn’t mean to duplicate the production environment, especially in a medium-to-small company like mine. Not everyone can afford test labs like Microsoft, or even Fortune 1000 companies with “retired” SAN hardware in a closet. It would probably suffice to keep a workstation on the shelf with Windows Server 2003 and an HBA installed. During a late night or weekend window try to connect the SAN to the workstation’s HBA and install SP1. While you’re at it, throw a few minutes of the free IOMeter at the connection to see if the problems Dell’s tech mentioned can be found before rolling something into production.

Based on some good news in the media I almost took a chance that could have made for even more work and downtime. I got lucky, but I won’t depend on it next time.