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Tuesday, May 18, 2010 1:13:38 PM 

I start to think, I will never get V2 of Royal TS out. There’s always something coming up consuming time and I’m not talking about family here. Things you expect to just work, do actually not – at least not always. First I was very happy when I got my new server. I was looking forward to setup all the stuff which should actually help me to develop more efficiently. I bought a nice box where I could run Hyper-V, run my test boxes on it as well as Team Foundation Server 2010 (which btw is great compared to Subversion!). But then, reality caught up on me.

Problems with the network driver on my Hyper-V box (reminder to myself, never trust a Broadcom driver – only use Intel network adapters!). The NIC on the host worked perfectly but all guests moved from another hyper-v machine weren’t able to get networking up and running, even when I used the legacy network device. Days of research and tests were necessary until I gave up and led me to try a different NIC brand. After installing an Intel card, everything worked fine – on host and on the guests. On a sidenote: this server box is a Dell box and is officially “Hyper-V certified”.

My Exchange server died a horrible death because of this incident. Fortunately no data loss. Btw, the nice guys @ netmonic offered to host my Exchange mailbox for a reasonable price and let me say, I would never go back to hosting it myself. Perfect service, good value, no headaches anymore! (contact them for the latest rates, the prices on their site are a bit outdated)

Then, out of the blue(!), my new server started to blue screen whenever I copied approx. 1 GB to or from the server. Even when doing backups, it blue screened somewhat after a GB. The server ran fine for weeks – even with the backups! The good news, there’s a fix for that (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/975530). The bad news, it wasn’t really easy to find and I am starting to lose confidence in MS server products. 

The past few months showed that things like WHQL, certified drivers, Hyper-V certification, all doesn’t really mean anything. If you are out of luck you can have a hard time. I hope everything is stable now and I can start to do actual work now…

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