Alpesh Nakar's Blog » HowTo

Applying WIM To VHD

Alpesh — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 10:35:00 +0000

This is a continuation of the series Re Imaging SharePoint VMs on the fly.

Now that you have captured your bootable virtual hard drive that was prepared for SharePoint Installation, you can apply that to another active partition or a virtual hard drive and then install whichever flavour of SharePoint you please!

As seen in the earlier post, capturing a virtual hard drive to create a Windows Image File is time consuming (compared to taking a snapshot in VMWare or Hyper-V) and memory intensive as well, however the advantage is that you can leverage on bare metal power – like having dual boot or multi-boot environment on your laptop.

So let’s apply the Windows Image File to the virtual hard disk or you could this another partition as well.

This completes the series & I hope it has been of value to you.

Applying WIM To VHD was published on Alpesh Nakar's Blog

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How To Change Inbound Email Domain In SharePoint

Alpesh — Tue, 03 May 2011 22:26:00 +0000

This is an interesting one and when I saw the answer to this question in the MSDN forums, I knew that is worth referring to on my blog.

This was the question:

When a list in SharePoint 2010 has inbound email setup, for example, it would be: MyList@sp2010.domain.local (sp2010 is the name of the SharePoint server, domain.local is the local domain).

How to change the @sp2010.domain.local to something else, like: @sharepoint.domain.local?

Jeff DeVerter (Rackspace) had the answered this question and this is his response, which was marked as the answer:

Go to IIS Manager>Default SMTP Virtual Server>Domains
1. Action> New> Domain…> Alias> Next> (specified domain)> Finish
Go to Central Administration>Operations>Topology and Services>Incoming e-mail settings
1. Enable sites on this server to receive e-mail? Yes
2. Incoming E-Mail Server Display Address: (specified domain)
3. Safe E-Mail Server: Accept mail from all e-mail servers
To test incoming mail go to: SharePoint site> Shared Documents> Settings> Document Library Settings > Communications> Incoming e-mail settings
1. Incoming Mail: Allow this document library to receive e-mail? Yes
2. Incoming Mail: E-mail address: shared
3. E-Mail Security: Accept e-mail messages from any sender
4. Send e-mail to shared@(specified domain), wait approximately 5 minutes,and check the site Shared Documents.

Source

How To Change Inbound Email Domain In SharePoint was published on Alpesh Nakar's Blog

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Move SharePoint 2010 Site Collection To Another Database

Alpesh — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 17:31:00 +0000

I have seen this question pop-up in the forums and I think I also got an email from one of my blog readers asking how they can move a site collection from one database to another database.

This can be done via SharePoint 2010 Management Shell [aka PowerShell] and this is what you need to do.

You must have the content database in place [created before you do this operation] for a particular web application and then use the following

Move-SPSite “http://justsharepoint.com/sites/team” –DestinationDatabase “ContentDatabase02” -confirm:$false

IIS reset

Done. Your site collection is now in ContentDatabase02

Move SharePoint 2010 Site Collection To Another Database was published on Alpesh Nakar's Blog

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Attach VHD and boot OS in Hyper-V

Alpesh — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 17:51:00 +0000

Again this is a reference blog post that I am copying across from Ravi’s blog to have all steps in one place and more so for my own reference on the web, just in case I lost my drives, laptop and skydrive was unavailable in future…

This is continuing with method 2 to prepare environment for building a SharePoint 2010 Farm [Dev]

Follow these steps, once you have the VHD using method 2

Open Diskpart
Select vdisk file=C:\.VHD
Attach Vdisk
select part 1
active
Assign letter=Z
exit
Now, at the command prompt, change to Z:\Windows\System32
Run, BCDboot.exe Z:\Windows /s Z:\
Run, BCDedit /store Z:\boot\BCD /set {bootmgr} device boot
Run, BCDedit /store Z:\boot\BCD /set {default} device boot
Run, BCDedit /store Z:\boot\BCD /set {default} osdevice boot
Change directory to C:\
open Diskpart again and run
Select vdisk file=C:\.VHD
detach vDISK
Exit

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Create an Operating System VHD from DVD

Alpesh — Thu, 25 Nov 2010 17:00:00 +0000

As a follow up to the previous post, this method was blogged well before Microsoft released WIM2VHD and I still use this method to create Windows Server 2008 R2 VHD using either ISO mounted or the actual media.

To be honest, a vhd is being created right now using this method as I blog this! Building a SharePoint farm in Hyper-V.. so you may want to follow the series…

So how do you create an operating system vhd from a media? I will copy the content from Ravikanth’s blog post as is – as I mentioned above about this method having been blogged way before we saw WIM2VHD

Insert Windows Server 2008 R2 OS media in the drive
Open Command-prompt and change to %programfiles%\Windows AIK\Tools\amd64 folder
Run “imagex /info :\Sources\Install.WIM. Install.WIM contains more than one OS edition and this command displays a list of all available images within install.wim. Note down the image index number for the image you want to capture as a VHD
Run “Diskpart.exe” and continue with the following commands
Create vdisk file=c:\.VHD maximum= Type=
select vdisk file = C:\.VHD
Attach vdisk
create partition primary
format quick fs=ntfs
assign letter=S
exit
Now, we need to capture the image we selected in step 3 in to the new VHD we just created
Run “Imagex /apply :\Sources\Install.wim S:\
Open Diskpart again
Select vdisk file=C:\.VHD
Detach vdisk

That’s it!

To note: If you are not comfortable using command prompt, then you can create vhd using the disk management mmc [gui based] upto step 11 and then jump into the command prompt and run steps 12-13 and then go back to disk management mmc and detach the disk [don’t delete!]

Using this method is much quicker to get an OS image applied to vhd then the previous method I had blogged. I will label this method 2 as reference to future posts that I am going to write in reference to how I used Ravi’s method to attach this to Hyper-V

Create an Operating System VHD from DVD was published on Alpesh Nakar's Blog

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Create a bootable VHD

Alpesh — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 17:00:00 +0000

Yes, there are heaps of blog posts and resources out there on this topic and this blog post has been in draft mode for a long time! Early this week, I wanted to create a fresh virtual machine for a very specific requirement and could not use my master virtual machine that I have configured to a state, where I can install any flavour of SharePoint 2010 without having to go through the complete build process – I might squeeze in a blog post on what is configured in may master virtual machine later next …

Back to the subject of this post… I wanted to create a fresh virtual machine and to have install Windows Server 2008 R2 is something I don’t enjoy… am sure you too would not want to do this couple of times in a month… hence the master virtual machine.

I have used this technique earlier and it has been a while since I have done builds, just realising now, that last time I did a small farm build for my home test lab – I did not use this method! DUH!!!!

This technique is all over the internet, but I am blogging this so I have a reference to when needed, so I can copy and paste and secondly this may eventuate into a series of blog posts as I build this virtual machine – hopefully

It’s basically WIM2VHD [Windows Image to Virtual Hard Drive]. Depending on the parameters specified, you can have a sys-prep image of the Windows Server 2008 R2 or Windows 7 in couple of minutes… no clicking nothing!!!

Requirements [Source]

A computer running one of the following Windows operating systems:
- Windows 7 RTM
- Windows Server 2008 R2 RTM
- Windows Server 2008 SP2 with Hyper-V RTM enabled (x64 only)
The Windows 7 Automated Installation Kit (AIK) or Windows OEM Pre-Installation Kit (OPK) installed.
A Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2 installation source, or another Windows image captured to a .WIM file.

Tip:

Just to get this working, I would not install AIK – I did it once and then copied the following files and this is what my folder structure looks like

This is located in C:\Install

So here is what you need to do

Insert Windows Server 2008R2 disk in the CD-Rom Drive
CSCRIPT "c:\install\WIM2VHD.WSF" /WIM:H:\sources\install.wim /SKU:SERVERENTERPRISE /VHD:Z:\JustSharePoint\SP2010VM\SP2010.VHD /disktype:fixed

Run this from the command prompt all in one line, please I cannot get it to fit here…

H:\ is my CD Rom Drive

Z:\ where I want the VHD create

/SKU ServerEnterprise Edition [You can see other examples on the source mentioned above]

/Disktype:Fixed – I wanted a fixed sized 40GbVHD, default is dynamic and 40GB

That’s it…. it will take a while since I have fixed sized vhd. Otherwise dynamic will be created in few minutes.

Now, I am not going to use this to boot into… I could but I am going to attach this to my VMWARE Virtual Machine… that’s next post… see I told you…this could eventuate into a series…

Create a bootable VHD was published on Alpesh Nakar's Blog

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How To Create SharePoint 2010 Site Collection In Its Own DB

Alpesh — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 02:54:38 +0000

Early this week on site deploying SharePoint 2010, the client wanted to create few site collections for their development team. He tried to create using the Central Administration and could not see any options for creating SharePoint site collections in their own databases!

Well, that’s not news to all of us in the SharePoint World! Is it?

It’s back to the command line to create a SharePoint site collection in it’s own database, just like the good old SharePoint 2007 days! The only big change for good being SharePoint 2010 Management Shell aka Windows PowerShell and no more STSADM.

So here we go –

You need to create a new content database for the web application and then you create a new site collection in that content database.

$w = get-spwebapplication

New-SPContentDatabase "DemoContentDB" -DatabaseServer "SQL\SERVER" -WebApplication $w

New-SPSite http://justsharepoint.com/teams/demo -OwnerAlias justsharepoint\alpesh -Name "Demo Site" -Template "STS#0"

Key:

Teams is a managed path

Template is the default Team Site

Database Server SQL

Database Instance SERVER

That’s it! One more small script to add to my arsenal of PowerShell scripts, as I keep learning bits of this powerful method to deploy and manage SharePoint 2010.

I have few short PowerShell scripts – that I hope to share in the days to come. Feedback and comments [especially on PowerShell or otherwise] always welcome!

Before I signoff, don’t forget to sign up for the newsletter to go into the raffle to win a SharePoint 2010 book!

How To Create SharePoint 2010 Site Collection In Its Own DB was published on Alpesh Nakar's Blog

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