Enterprise-in-a-Box Series – Creating users in an AD

When dealing with Enterprise applications, you often need to use VM’s to try to replicate the environment where your solution is going to ultimately live on.

For SharePoint and BizTalk development, the best way to ensure that your solution will deploy and run on the target environment is to create a Virtual Environment that closely resembles what your customer has.  Besides the obvious benefits to the IT department (less heat, more CPU utilization, etc, etc.), there is the hidden benefit of efficiency and less integration bugs on a Virtualized environment.  How many times you have developed the “perfect software”, and when try to deploy to the QA or Production environment, you’ve spent lots of hours troubleshooting security permissions, user profiles, IIS settings, SQL permissions, Service account not having proper rights, etc, etc. I know I have had my share.!

To setup a Virtual Enterprise from scratch, the easiest way is to follow the steps by steps directions from Microsoft: Using Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 to Create and Configure a Two-Node Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Cluster

I recommend that you use a 64bit Operating System as a host to run the Virtual Server.  I have used a Dell D820 running Vista x64 with 4GB of RAM.  I have found this configuration to be very responsive and not very expensive.

Let’s assume that the solution for my customer will have 3 users, and each of them have different roles and responsabilities.

Role	User	First	Last	email
user	asmith	Aaron	Smith	asmith@contoso-local
supervisor	jsmith	John	Smith	jsmith@contoso-local
CEO	msmith	Michael	Smith	msmith@contoso-local

 

Once you have your virtual environment setup, it is time to add users and roles to get your environment setup. I have used Neil Thompson’s script to create AD accounts programatically.

Here is a slightly modified version of his script:

As you can tell, now I am able to programmatically add users so that I can test. One more benefit of this Enterprise in a box, is that once you are done with it, you can bundle all of the configuration and setup to your integration team.  No more manual configurations.!

Noticed that regardless of what my solution does, or what the problem is. I would be able to test and troubleshoot my solution under 3 separate roles.  There is no need to deploy to production for *real* users to test if my application does what it is expected to do.!

VPC 2007 not running on Virtual Server 2005 R2

I have been trying to port a VPC 2007 to run on our Virtual Server 2005 R2 with no success. This is the error I am getting:

Virtual Machine
The "Virtual Hardware Standard" (Virtual PC 2007) in the configuration .vmc file for "XXX Server" was not created by Virtual Server. "XXX Server" can start, but some settings may be changed and some settings may not be used.

other errors that I am getting:

Virtual Server
The virtual machine “XXX Server” could not be started. An unexpected error occurred.

Virtual Machine
"XXX Server" could not be started because a disk-related error occurred.

I am still not sure as to what the error is. So I ran the Inspect and also the compact utility on the hard drive hoping that this action might *magically* fixed this issue.

I get the message that it did succeed compacting:

Virtual Disk Operation
The virtual hard disk "E:\Virtual Machines\XXXServer\BaseWin2K3 Hard Disk.vhd" was compacted.

However, I still get the unexpected error message. At this point, I decided to merge the diff disk with the parent and then keep a single file. Clicking on the Merge virtual hard disk link yielded this:

After this is done, I get this message:

The parent virtual hard disk appears to have been modified without using the differencing virtual hard disk located at "E:\Virtual Machines\XXXServer\W2K3 Diff.vhd". Modifying the parent virtual hard disk may result in data corruption. It is strongly recommended that you lock the parent virtual hard disk to prevent this in the future. If you recently changed time zones on your computer, you can safely continue using this virtual hard disk.

So, I decided to create a new virtual machine. First step, I deleted the VMC file. Then create a new Virtual Machine with no Virtual Hard Disk defined.

After that was done, clicked on the Configurations for that new Virtual Server, then clicked on the Virtual Hard Disk properties, and added the Virtual Hard Drive that was merged earlier:

Started the New Virtual machine, and PRESTO..!! it's alive [muahh, muahh, muahh] and it has all of my latest changes into it.