Installing AppFabric Caching Beta 1, Part 2

Last week I blogged about how far I'd got with installing the AppFabric Beta 1 caching engine, in which I got stalled because the caching configuration only supports Integrated Security with SQL Server. In this part I'll cover how I've got round this problem by building a domain on my virtual servers. IT Pros may wish to skip ahead to Part 3 (or point out in the comments my no doubt numerous mistakes in how I've gone about this).I've used two reference sources in going about this: this Microsoft article, and Dave McMahons Network Admin for Developers sessions (part 1 part 2) from DDD7.

My setup is as follows:

All servers are running Windows Server 2008 on Virtual PC 2007, and all on fixed IP addresses from 192.168.10.1 upwards. Liam's already blogged about my initial troubles in getting these servers to talk to each other - they currently all have each other's names and IP addresses in their hosts file.

So, building the domain. Step 1 is installing the Active Directory Domain Services role on to SQLSERVER. This allowed me to create my velocity.local domain with SQLSERVER as the domain controller. I then created a pair of users, VelocityAdmin and VelocityUser - my plan is to use VelocityAdmin to install AppFabric onto the CACHESERVERs and then change it to use VelocityUser in normal usage, but we'll get to that in Part 3. I've also created SQL Server logons for those accounts with permissions on my VelocityConfig database.

With the domain and domain controller all set up and running Active Directory and DNS I can now add the other servers to the domain, and this is where I hit a problem. Every time I tried to add CACHESERVER1 to the domain, I got an error:

I tried a number of different things to get round this but eventually I figured it out - when I configured the network settings originally (in a non-domain world), I didn't setup a DNS server. Once I entered the IP address for SQLSERVER, I could join servers to the domain.

So at the end of all that I now have a network of servers all running under a domain. The next piece of the puzzle is to go back and try installing AppFabric Beta again, which will be Part 3 of this short series.

Enabling Hardware Virtualisation On A Toshiba Tecra

I've been doing a bit of playing recently with Virtual PC (and struggling, but that's a subject for a longer post). One of the options in Virtual PC is to selectively enable hardware-assisted virtualisation, however the option was greyed out on my Toshiba Tecra. Until yesterday when a chance comment by a colleague (who's also looking at VirtualPC to enable some work with SQL Server 2000 Analysis Services) let me know how to enable it...

As your laptop boots, hit [Esc] to get into the BIOS setup. You should then get a prompt at the top of the screen that reads 'Check system and press F1' - hit F1 to get into the BIOS. On the first page of the BIOS on the right-hand side is a pane for virtualisation, with a setting for enabling it - it was disabled on mine, I suspect/assume that's how they leave the factory. Highlight the setting, hit [Space] to change it, then hit [End] to save your changes and restart the machine. Let it boot into Windows, fire up Virtual PC, and you should now find that hardware-assisted virtualisation is enabled.

Edit: In my excitement to post this, there was something I forgot to add. I'd saved my running virtual machines, however when I fired them up again after enabling hardware virtualisation they would not run correctly. I needed to clear the saved state and fire them up again from scratch. Not an issue particularly, just something to be aware of.