The Bottom Line: make sure your Exchange security solution/anti-virus is operating properly. Details below.

Here's an oddball issue we had this morning.

Have you been pulling your hair out trying to get a Windows Server 2008 R2 virtual machine deployed from a vCenter template to join a Windows Active Directory domain? Fear not, the solution is at hand and is realtively simple.

After reading the following thread on the VMware Communities site:

http://communities.vmware.com/thread/251925

I found out that one needs to use the FQDN of the AD domain and NOT the NetBIOS name of the domain, and also the user principal name for a user with proper permissions to join computers to the domain.

A friend of mine uses Samba and winbind on his CentOS Linux boxes for user and group information and Kerberos for authentication. He upgraded his domain controllers recently to Windows Server 2008 R2 and suddenly his winbind authentication broke.

Being a Linux admin at heart I want my Windows Powershell prompt to look like my bash prompt (yep, I'm a nerd, or OCD, or may a little of both).

What you'll need to do is place some code in your Powershell profile file. By default Powershell doesn't allow scripts to run unless they're signed. This is good security practice. There are many articles out there on how to sign your Powershell scripts and maybe one day I'll write one and put it up here on the I.T. Nerve Center, but for now I'll just give you the code to change your prompt.

We've been having problems deploying Windows Server 2008 R2 virtual machines from templates using the VMware vCenter and it's built in guest customization.

It appears that there may be an issue either with Microsoft's built-in sysprep utility in 2008 R2, or with VMware's vCenter guest customization wizard when using a Key Management Server, or KMS. A KMS is part of Microsoft's Volume Activation 2.0 as described here - http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/existing-customers/product-activation... and in this TechNet article - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb892849.aspx

I use an old Dell Latitude D610 for Windows 7 testing. I still want the Aero interface and the Dell Support web site doesn't have any Windows 7 drivers, let alone Windows Vista drivers.

After some Google'ing and trial and error I have been able to get the Aero interface running in Windows 7 on my D610.

The Dell package that will install the proper driver is R153383.EXE. The package installs the ATI MOBILITY RADEON X300 driver (as displayed in the Device Manager). It shows version 8.360.0.0 and is dated 3/14/2007

OK, so I now have a combination of things that will successfully PXE boot a Linux qemu-kvm virtual machine with Windows DHCP services and Windows Deployment Services (WDS). I'm using the gPXE CD ISO image to PXE boot the VMs. Now the WDS PXE process works as expected.

We have our WDS/RIS server setup similar to the following wiki article on the syslinux wiki:

http://syslinux.zytor.com/wiki/index.php/PXELINUX#Deploy_Linux_from_Wind...

Here's what I did on my workstation (I'm using Fedora 11):