windows 2003's RAID5 doesn't support hot-spare --- observed with help from the great VMWare Player

I finally found some scsi virtual disk image to be used for my Windows 2003 server, a virtual machine I set up inside the 'VMWare Player"  in prep for 70-290,  my first MCSE test. In the past weeks, I had a hard time to have more than 2 free (IDE) disks in order to simluate an environment where I can set up RAID5 volumes.

The successful count of the RAID-5 capability inside windows 2003 server:

• lsiLogic is the controller type supported by the Windows 2003 server. busLogic is not supported w/o external driver.
• run Device manager to remove the old/broken busLogic controller then re-scan for hardware change
• run Disk Manager (diskmgmt.msc)
•  initialize all four brand-new identical 500MB scsi disks
• convert them all into dynamic disks
• create a RAID-5 volume using 64MB on each disk: right click on one of them, select 'create a volume' from the pop-up menu, check 'RAID-5', select disks & sizes to create.
  
• Nowhere, hot-spare is found in the create-a-volume wizard, or the resultant 3-disk RAID5 volume with one free dynamic disk available in the system

No wonder 'VMWare Player' is voted the best technology of the year by some IT pro magzine. Using 'VMWare Player', I just inserted a few entries to the .vmx configuration file claiming I have a few new disks and a SCSI controller now, on a suspended server. One the server is resumed, the controller & the disks are detected and installed properly. Can you imagine the hassle I would have had in a non-virtualized world. Arghhhhhhhhhhhhhh....

• buy a busLogic SCSI controller, only to find it doesn't work.
• waste time searching for proper driver, or return it and get a lsiLogic one to try my luck.
• buy 4 scsi disk to set up 3-disk RAID5, only to find the 4th disk can't be used as hot-spare anyway
• shutdown os, power off the box, open the case, screw driver, struggling with free dribe bays & cables, etc.

To have four SCSI disks on a SCSI controller, I just add the following to my blah.vmx:
---x------cut----------cut-----x------cut------------x----
scsi0.virtualDev = "lsilogic"
scsi0:0.present = "TRUE"
scsi0:0.fileName = "sda.vmdk"
scsi0:0.deviceType = "disk"
scsi0:1.present = "TRUE"
scsi0:1.fileName = "sdb.vmdk"
scsi0:1.deviceType = "disk"
scsi0:2.present = "TRUE"
scsi0:2.fileName = "sdc.vmdk"
scsi0:2.deviceType = "disk"
scsi0:3.present = "TRUE"
scsi0:3.fileName = "sdd.vmdk"
scsi0:3.deviceType = "disk"
---x------cut----------cut-----x------cut------------x----

VMWare player automatically added a few lines to the blah.vmx file after my lines too:
---x------cut----------cut-----x------cut------------x----
scsi0:0.redo = ""
scsi0:1.redo = ""
scsi0:2.redo = ""
scsi0:3.redo = ""
scsi0.present = "TRUE"
---x------cut----------cut-----x------cut------------x----

took smartcert.net practice exam for MCSE (70-290)

I ran into a link to smartcert.net today. My son is taking his nap thus I have half an hour to forty-five minutes to kill. So, I think, why not. I took the example exam for 70-290. the quiz session won't start within Firefox, just spinning forever. It took me a while to find IE, since I've deleted the shortcuts on the desktop and taskbar, since I rarely use it if not forced.
The test itself is pretty good, I'd say. Not sure whether they'd be this many ntbackup/vss question though. Questions are pretty long and the 2-minute clock is literally ticking in my face! got to read quick.

scsi disk image by QEmu for VMWare Player for a Windows 2003 guest

I need to have at least three spare disks to check out the RAID5 in Windows 2003 server, a guest OS running inside VMWare player with Windows XP as the host OS. I usually use QEMU's qemu-img command to create IDE disk images. However, VMWare player declined to take IDE2, and declined to allow me to use IDE1:0 (the cd-rom) as a disk device.

So, I thought I'd just use SCSI disks then. Not so fast, they say. QEMU doesn't support SCSI disk image. A Romaian hacker reported an altered qemu-img to create SCSI disk image. Unfortunately, his link on 'hack a day' returned a 404 error. not sure how far I want to go to get more than three spare disks for the RAID5 configuration practice needed for my MCP 70-290.

Ignoring the warning about the disks are IDE disks labeled as SCSI disks, I booted up the server. found-new-hardware wizard started. a driver was found but an 'aged' one, thus Windows 2003 server fails to install the new hardware named 'Buslogic multimaster scsi adapater' or something like that. bummer. I guess I'd just give it up for now, and take their words for it?

software RAID capability is Nice in Windows 2003

I have years of hands-on experience with Soltice Disk Suite under Solaris and LVM or alike under Linux. Trying hard to stay open-minded with ears up over the years, I don't think I heard a beep about the nice software RAID capability inside Windows 2003. Don't have figures for reliability/performance and such in the self-training kit book for 70-290. That aside, I was pleasantly surprised and truly impressed by the wizard driven RAID capability. Using Disk Management ( diskmgmt.msc), one can convert a basic disk to a dynamic disk, then to create a new volume by extending (spanning), stripping [RAID 0], mirroring [RAID 1], stripping with parity [RAID 5].

windows 2003 server std (sp1) : disk manager couldn't count ?!

Studying storage chapter for 70-290 last night, I created four 100M virtual disks under VMware Player. IDE2:0 didn't show after reboot, so I guess the free vmware player supports only 4 IDE devices after all.
Using disk manager (diskmgmt.exe), I initialized the three new disks as 'basic disk'. I then tried to create three primary partitions on disk1 in the size of 8M, 16M, 24M and in that order. The first 8M created properly. The 16M one showed up as a 8M, even if the partition-creation wizard's confirmation summary clearly showed I asked for 16M. The 24M one I intended to create was created at11M ?! I wonder if this has anything to do with the fact the minimum size is 8M. For all three, I answered it not to assign drive letter nor to format. Not sure what's wrong with this picture, except maybe, maybe vmware player.

what a shame: ASR stopped to work (server 2003 SP1 bug & fix)

It is disheartening to have ASR failure after SP1 applied to a DC based on Windows 2003 server. More so is the fix per MS technet article. One option is to relocate the AD/DS log to C:\ where the AD/DS database is. This option requires you to reboot the domain controller server to 'AD recovery mode' then run a dsutils.exe to relocate the logs. This dsutils.exe is not even installed by default! Moreover, having DS log on a different volume is recommended by MS for best-practice. Talking about testing against your own use cases!!!

As I know better with extensive UNIX/Linux experience, such a log relocation would be and should be simply a 'kill -HUP pidOfProcess' after changing some configuration file for this process, no matter how important it is, to point to the new location of the log files. Users should not even know a thing about it.

is this just blastings from a unix guy, or windows guys kinda agree or wished for as well?

deprecated SUS in MCP 70-290 ?

I am prep for my first Microsft certification exam, 70-290. I need to learn this stuff to feel comfortable dealing with the MS 2003 Server which BES 4 is running on. For the past few months, I have been studing with Microsoft's own self-training kit for MCSE 2003. When I googled for 'SUS' to download, a MS link says SUS is deprecated late December. My question is, if I am going to take the test late December, should I study for the new Wuss instead of the SUS ?