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As the most of you know, Hyper-V does not support usb redirection. But with some relative easy steps we can redirect our usb disk to a Hyper-V virtual machine.

First on your Hyper-V Server host open Server Manager and select Disk Management

Then select your usb disk and right mouse click and choose Offline.

When done we close Server Management and open Hyper-V Manager. Select the settings of the virtual machine you would like to attach the usb drive to.

Select IDE Controller or SCSI Controller. Before you choose let me explain why I would choose the SCSI controller instead of the IDE controller for an usb redirected drive. A Hyper-V virtual machine can only boot from an IDE hard drive, you can only add a dvd drive on an IDE controller, you can only add 4 IDE devices. Another thing I would prefer to add an usb disk to the SCSI controller is I can add or remove disks to the virtual machine when it is running, to add an IDE controller disk I need to stop the virtual machine then add the disk and then start the virtual machine.

Now to add your usb disk to you virtual machine we choose Add

Now we choose for Physical hard disk: and choose the disk we would to add. If you have more disks available you can choose from a simple pull down list. You will only see here the disks that are set to offline so that was the first step we had to do. If you would like to add an internal hard disk you have to put it offline before you can add it.

Note: before you set another disk offline be sure there are no operating, system or application files on it because otherwise these or your whole server will crash.

When finished choose OK on the bottom of the screen and the disk is added to your virtual machine.

When we are going to look at your virtual machine and open Disk Management.

You will see the disk directly attached and you can use it within your virtual machine

If you would remove the drive from the virtual machine, go back to your Hyper-V Manager virtual machine settings on your host server.

Select the drive and choose remove and choose Apply or OK at the bottom of the screen.

After you have removed the disk from the virtual machine go back to Disk Management

Right click the drive and choose Online. Now the drive is available on your host server.

You can use this if you need to copy some files directly from the usb disk to the virtual machine or vice versa. Another thing you could use this is for is Windows / SBS backup this needs a local attached disk, although I don’t think this is a supported configuration! You can even if you have chosen for the SCSI controller change the backup disk when your virtual machine is running.

Exchange 2007 (no-SP, SP1 and SP2) isn’t supported on Windows 2008 R2, but since SP3 it is. As my installation disc / iso only contains Exchange 2007 SP1 I had to install first this iso and then directly update it to SP3.

Installations looks to go well. But first got a warning on the hub transport: “Setup cannot detect an SMTP or Send connector with an address space of ‘*’.”.

This warning could be ignored, the only thing we have to do after installation is create a SMTP connector, more information about this read here.

But at the end of the installation the Mailbox Role Failed with error: “An error occurred. The error code was 3221684229. The message was Access is denied..”

Solution:
To get the Mailbox Role installed we have to set the compatibility mode from the exchange setup.exe to Windows Server 2008 (Service Pack 1) and run the setup again and add the Mailbox Role.

Now installation goes fine.

After you finished the installation please update Exchange 2007 directly to SP3.

On a Windows 2008 R2 Hyper-V configuration with 2 network adapters I experienced the following problem: I installed a Windows 2008 R2 guest this was no problem, but when I try to do windows updates I got an “Windows could not search for new updates, An error occurred while checking for new updates for your computer. Error(s) found: Code 80072EE2” error message.

Everthing else looks fine, dns resolving works fine, network browsing looks good, I could access internet pages even the windows update page, but trying to update gives this particulary error.
Tried the same on a windows 2003 guest and everything looks fine. Installed another Windows 2008 R2 server same problem occurres.

Solution: After some more trouble shooting I found that when I start the windows update I lost network connection on that particulary network adapter, even on all other VM’s using that adapter and on the Host. Now I was connected with the other adapter so I didn’t see this behaviour in first place. So I bound the other network adapter to one of the Windows 2008 R2 guests and I could windows update with no error.

Because I would like to know what was causing this problem I found after some more troubleshooting and testing that the problem was caused by the Large send Offload setting enabled on the network adapter. After disabling this setting everything works fine.

The network adapter was causing the trouble was a D-Link DGE-528T Gigabit Ethernet Adapter.

When you try to to start a Hyper-V virtual machine on a Windows 2008 R2 server, you receive the following error:

An error occurred while attempting to start the selected virtual machine(s).

‘ServerName’ could not create or access saved state file E:\Hyper-V\ServerName\Virtual Machine\”Virtual Machine GUID”.vsv.
(Virtual machine ID “Virtual Machine GUID”)

Solution: I have no clue what caused this issue but the solution is add list permissions to the “Authenticated Users” group on the root drive where the virtual machines are placed (in this case E:). You only have to add list rights for “this folder only”.
So go to the security tab and choose advanced permissions, add Authenticated users and choose at Apply to: “This folder only”, check List permission and be sure you don’t check the replace all child object permissions with inheritable permissions from this object, otherwise you may have to restore the rights on all virtual machines permissions.

When you see the following evntlog error: Event ID 10016, Source:’DistributedCOM. “The application-specific permission settings do not grant Local Activation permission for the COM Server application with CLSID {61738644-F196-11D0-9953-00C04FD919C1} to the user NT AUTHORITY\NETWORK SERVICE SID (S-1-5-20) from address LocalHost (Using LRPC). This security permission can be modified using the Component Services administrative tool.”

Solution: If you don’t know witch application is given this error, you can copy the GUID behind CLSID and start the registry editor (regedit.exe) and search for the GUID. You will find witch application is creating this error.
After you know that you start Administrative Tools – Component Services. Expand Component Services, Computers, My Computer, DCOM Config. Then find the found application, in this case IIS WAMREG, choose properties and go to the security tab.

Then at Launch and Activation Permissions, choose customize (if not already chjoosen) and Edit.
Add the user account given in the event error, in this case Network Service account and give the account allow Local Launch and Local Activation rights. After that close all windows and restart IIS service.

Update: There is a similar error about another CLSID but the options to change permissions are greyed out. Read here how to solve this issue.

When using remote desktop connection to connect to windows server 2008, 2008 R2, sbs 2008, vista or windows 7 and would use saved credentials. This doesn’t work when you start the connection you get the following error:

“Your system administrator does not allow the use of saved credentials to logon to the remote computer computername/ipadress because its identity is not fully verified. Please enter new credentials.” “The logon attempt failed”

Solution: This happens when trying to connect to a computer / server in another domain and no trust relationships exists. Windows then steps back to use NTLM and the default domain machine policy prohibits use of saved credentials. You can change this domain based or for a individual machine:

Start local group policy editor, start – run – gpedit.msc
Go to Local Computer Policy –> Computer Configuration –> Administrative Templates –> System –> Credentials Delegation
Edit “Allow Delegating Saved Credentials with NTLM-only Server Authentication”
Enable the policy, click Show and enter the value “TERMSRV/*” into the list.

Do the same thing for the following policies:
“Allow Delegating Saved Credentials”, “Allow Delegating Default Credentials with NTLM-only Server Authentication” en “Allow Delegating Default Credentials”

Close the policy editor,
open a command prompt and use “gpupdate /force” to apply the policy directly

When upgrading your Exchange 2010 RTM server to Exchange 2010 SP1 you need to install a set of pre-required hotfixes. These hotfixes depent on with Operating System you run and witch Exchange roles you have installed on the server.

When you start the Exchange 2010 SP1 setup, you first can choose Exchange language option for upgrade. If you run multiple servers you can download the language bundle file from microsoft. So you can point to this file every installation and don’t have to download it multiple times.

After you choose the language option you can choose Install Microsoft Exchange Server upgrade. This starts a wizard and after the introduction and license agreement, the readiness checks are performed. This is where setup tells you witch pre-requirements are needed.

In my case all servers are running windows server 2008 R2. I have 2 load balanced Client Access / Hub Transport servers and 2 Mailbox servers configured with a DAG.

For the Client Access role the following updates are needed: KB 982867, 979744, 983440 and 977020.

For the Hub Transport and the Mailbox role only the Microsoft Office 2010 Filter Pack is needed.

In my case KB 979099 was already installed by windows updates so wasn’t needed.

When upgrading keep the following Exchange roles upgrade order in mind:
Client Access server
Hub Transport server
Unified Messaging server
Mailbox server

More information about upgrading, pre-requirements and known issues can be found:
by the Exchange team: Exchange 2010 SP1 FAQ and Known Issues
by Microsoft Technet: Upgrade from Exchange 2010 RTM to Exchange 2010 SP1

When starting a windows 2008 (R2) RemoteApp from or depends on a network mapped drive you get the error “The program did not start on the remote computer.”

Solution: The problem is caused because the program is hosted on or depends on a network mapped drive. When starting a RemoteApp the program doesn’t wait till the logon script script is finished but just start the program directly and cannot find the right drive or program.
Workarround is to map the network drive persistant so it’s available before the RemoteApp program starts or create a batch file as RemoteApp so you can first map the network drive and then start the program.

When you close a Windows 2008 terminal server or Windows 2008 R2 remote desktop services RemoteApp the sessions stays in disconnected state.

Solution: Since Windows 2008 there is a local / group policy called ‘Set time limit for logoff of RemoteApp sessions’. You can set the policy for both computer as user configuration.

For windows 2008: Administrative Templates \ Windows Components \ Terminal Services \ Terminal Server \ Session Time Limits
For windows 2008 R2: Administrative Templates \ Windows Components \ Remote Desktop Services \ Remote Desktop Session Host \ Session Time Limits

Problem 1: When logging on to a Windows 2008 R2 Remote Desktop Services (former known as Terminal Services) you get the a balloon messages saying a temporary profile is loaded. Changes to the profile are not saved by exiting.

Solution: Backup all data in “%SystemDrive%\Users\UserName” or just rename the folder with .bak at the end. (if this is the first time you try to logon with this account there will be no folder with this username.)
Then start the registry editor and browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \ Microsoft \ Windows NT \ CurrentVersion \ ProfileList here you will find all user SID’s logged on to this RDS server. You will find here a subkey know as SID.bak take a look probably this will be the key of the user you get this error.
Delete this key and close registry editor (If you are not sure, first make a backup/export of the key before deleteing is). Then logoff and logon again.

Problem 2: When you try to logon to a Windows 2008 R2 Remote Desktop Services (former known as Terminal Services) server, you get the error: “The Group Policy Client service failed the logon.” “Access is denied.” and you are automatically logged off.

Solution: In my case this problem was caused by a corrupted NTUSER.Dat file. I solved it by logging on as a Administrator changed the user profile to local via Control Panel\User Accounts\User Accounts Configure advanced user profile properties. Then I replaced the NTUSER.Dat from the user by the NTUSER.Dat from the temp profile.
Probably this is caused by using a Terminal Server profile that is corrupted. Another Solution could be deleting this profile and building a new profiles for this user.