Over the past few months I’ve been running out of space on a SAN drive in both the production and DR sites running Windows Server 2008.  (That’s one of those expensive growing pains).  We put in a request to have a LUN expanded then waited.  When we were given word that the LUN had been expanded I went into Disk Manager and rescanned the drives.  Disk Manager saw the expanded portion of the disk.  Now I needed to expand the partition.  So I right clicked the drive and chose Extend Volume.

 
(note: this screen shot for security purposes is not the actual server involved)

Now I had to sit and wait while Windows did its thing.  When it was finished Disk Manager showed a much larger disk. J 

I exited out of Disk Manager and opened My Computer only to find that Windows Explorer was not reporting new size of the disk.  After a little more searching, via Google, I came across this Microsoft article which in the More Information section talks about an undocumented command for Disk Part.

At a command prompt you need to enter the following:

C:\ > DISKPART

DISKPART> List Volume

DISKPART> select volume # (this is the number of the volume listed by the above ‘List Volume’ command)

DISKPART> extend filesystem

DISKPART> exit

Now Windows Explorer shows the new expanded size of the disk.

By default hibernation is not available in Windows Server 2008 and for good reason.  Why would you want your server go into hibernation?  Well there are exceptions when you might want to use hibernation, I just can’t think of any that would involve production servers though. 

In my case one of those exceptions happens to be that I use Windows Server 2008 on my laptop as the primary OS.  Mostly because I like to have an additional machine to test things on before I test them on our other environments; and a few of our developers work on Server installations for their local development environments, so having the ability to reproduce issues on a like environment without touching a server is a plus.  Now that you know why I have Server as my primary OS I’ll explain why I want to be able to hibernate.  It’s pretty simple booting and shutting down the laptop takes way too much time with a Server OS.  I’d rather reboot once during the week and hibernate the machine the rest of the time. 

So now how to enable the hibernate option in the power management settings. It’s just one line that has to be entered at the command prompt and Microsoft has documented it.

powercfg.exe /hibernate on

It’s that simple.  Now you can set your machine to go into hibernation.

In our server environments we monitor a few metrics of the servers health.  We have the monitoring software set to email us when any one of the metrics is measured above a predetermined threshold.  At the end of last week we started to receive emails about low disk space on one of our servers in production.  The server is running Windows Server 2008 x64.  By default Server 2008 does not install with the handy little Disk Cleanup program.  I did not know that at the time so I spent a good 15 minutes searching for it thinking I'd find it on my own. 

After the 15 minutes had passed I gave up and turned to Google.com.  This immediately shot back a bunch of results with people complaining that Microsoft did not include Disk Cleanup in base install of Windows Server 2008.  Which I agree, what was Microsoft thinking?  Microsoft’s response to some of these complaints was that if you wanted to use Disk Cleanup then you needed to install the Desktop Experience feature.  If you are trying to clean up the disk to save on space then why would you want to install more features that could potentially use more space then what you are trying to save? 

One post I ran across mentioned that Disk Cleanup really only needed two files to run, cleanmgr.exe and cleanmgr.exe.mui.  Copying them to their respective locations on the server allowed me to run Disk Cleanup but only by going in to the Windows\System32 directory and running the executable.  This would work for me or the other Administrator but if either of us were to be unavailable then the next person to come along would think that Disk Cleanup wasn't on the server since the fancy factory shortcuts aren't there.

For that reason I did some more searching and found this post that described how to add the button back to the properties windows of the drive (found by right clicking on the drive from windows explorer and choosing properties) on older Windows NT family systems.  I gave it a try on a test machine and sure enough it worked.

The only other shortcut missing was one from the Start Menu.

Start - > Programs - > Accessories - > System Tools -> Disk Cleanup

This was easy enough to add by copying the Disk Cleanup.lnk file from a machine which I installed the Desktop Experience feature on to:

"\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\StartMenu\Programs\Accessories\System Tools".

During all my searching to get Disk Cleanup installed without the Desktop Experience feature I came accross a post that described how to add Disk Cleanup to the Context Menu for a drive.  So as long as I was playing with the registry I figured I'd add another convenient way to access Disk Cleanup.

In the end I created a batch file and bundled it with the Disk Cleanup program files, a shortcut file and a reg file (with the registry keys for the Properties Window as well as the Context Menu).  Now deployment of this to our servers is just a case of extracting the zip file and running the batch file.

DiskCleanupInstall.zip (129.93 kb)

Update--
I just came accross the need to add Disk Cleanup to a 32 bit install of Windows Server 2008 which requires the 32 bit version of the Cleanup Manager files.  I've now attached a zip file to this post containing those as well.

DiskCleanupInstallx86.zip (128.59 kb)

I know its been a while since I posted anything.  I just wanted to let everyone know that I'm still alive. :)  I've been keeping fairly buisy actually.  My fiance was here on summer break from college so I spent most of my time outside of work with her the past few months.  Now that school has started again she has left to go finish her last semester. (Yeh!!) 

But just because she has left doesn't mean that I don't have anything to keep my attention.  At work we are in the process of moving datacenters and setting up new servers.  And in an effort to expand my horizons I've picked up a training kit for MSCIT Professional (Microsoft Certified Information Technology Professional).  Really jsut a fancy way of saying that I'm studying to take five exams that cover Windows Server 2008 technology, as well as I've picked up a CCNA training kit (I figure if I am to be a Network Engineer I should get some Cisco training).  Don't get me wrong I know that there are people that get these certs. and they don't know anything about the subjects.  But I happen to be in a posision where I get to practice on our Cisco equipment and now I'm building out servers with Windows 2008 on them so I think I'm looking for training in the right areas for now.  Hopefully soon I'll be able to have another technology post.  (I've got one project that I'm working on now iwth a developer that might be an interesting one to blog about). 

Until next time everyone!!

I've been spending mosto of today building some virtual machines for the QA department at work.  I used Microsoft Virtual PC to create the VMs.  Then I used VMwares stand alone converter to convert them into VMware images.  Once that was done I added them to a VMware Server (version 2).  I was finished the install by installing VMware Tools. After the machines booted back up though I found that I had lost the ability to use the mouse.  I thought this was strange as I've never had this problem before.  I did a little searching on google and found this:

Before any conversion uninstall MS VM tools.
After conversion if mouse does not work in VMware infrastructure Client console session - in my case it just disappers from the console, try to do next from http://www.petri.co.il/forums/archive/index.php/t-19387.html
" go into the registry and navigate to the keyHKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contro l\Class\{4D36E96F-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}
Remove the value msvmmouf from the UpperFilters Regvalue.Reboot....
tadaaa!!
If you wish you can take out the drivers completely by deleting these registry hives completely :
The driver:HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Servic es\msvmmouf
The Service:HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Servic es\VPCMapThe CopyHook Shell Extension: ( for folder access )HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\CLSID\{30C14BA C-122C-42ED-B319-1139DBF48EB8}\InProcServer32HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shellex\CopyHookHandle rs\VPCCopyHook
After a reboot you can delete the "Virtual Machine Additions" folder from program files..."

http://bsirotin.blogspot.com/2008/03/mouse-does-not-work-after-converting-ms.html

After I removed the entries in the registry everything worked as it should.