One incident is a co-incidence. Two is a pattern. For the second time I dealt with a strange situation that did not seem to adhere to any predictability other than the fact that it will happen. Sometime. A Windows 2008 Server Core and now a Windows 2008 R2 Enterprise Server with Hyper-V and some virtual machines would run fine for days, then suddenly become unresponsive. The machine is up, Hyper-V VM's are inaccessible, console is locked up, can telnet to SMTP service but for the most part the system is dead. Only a hard reset helped. Until the next time.

The way I fixed the Server Core issue, and hopefully the R2 incident, is by configuring Hyper-V's network settings as follow:

• Since my servers each had two NICs, I configured one for the host OS called LAN, and the other for Hyper-V's exclusive use.
• The LAN interface is the one used to access the host itself.
• The Hyper-V interface is used exclusively for each VM.

• Ensure the "Allow management operating system to share this network adapter" setting is OFF.

  

Everyone knows this most likely, but the fastest way to determine which FSMO roles a domain controller holds is by typing in:

C:\Users\administrator> netdom query fsmo
Schema master               server.domain.local
Domain naming master        server.domain.local
PDC                         server.domain.local
RID pool manager            server.domain.local
Infrastructure master       server.domain.local
The command completed successfully.

I recently had an issue where a client's Microsoft Exchange 2010 server failed the best practices analyzer due to an "Database backup critical" error. I was confused at first since I had a fully functional wbadmin scripted backup that I could see backed up Exchange. Only after fiddling for a while did I discover the missing parameter I had to provide before exchange indicated a successful database backup and subsequently cleared out all the thousands of database log files it kept:

wbadmin start backup -backupTarget:\\1.2.3.4\backups -include:c: ^
   -user:msbackup -password:"password" -quiet -allCritical -vssFull -systemState

Without -systemState this never worked.

…when you look up close at about 100x magnification with polarized light:

Here they are at almost 5x life size:

…if you do not have a VERY fast internet connection, this will be a huge pain. I rebooted, started the onboard OS Reinstall process and it went ahead downloading Lion… With my connection this works:

But imagine that over a 384kbps ADSL line...