Troubleshooting a dodgy PSU and finally building the servers

In between ordering the Crucial 2x2Gb mem and it arriving my PSU in the box I'm planning to use as the VM host decided to start acting up - while playing Bioshock the PC powered off completely then powered back on a few seconds later. It continued to run for about a minute them powered off and on again. This continued, with the actual amount of time the PC was running reducing each time to the point where it would power off on the XP loading screen.

My initial thought was that it could be memory related so I swapped this out but the issue continued. One thing that was notable was the fact that the issue would go away if the PC was powered off for 5 minutes +, which made me think it could be something overheating - I checked the CPU and GPU coolers and these were fine. The 'something overheating' analysis also fitted in with the PC powering off after playing Bioshock for a while as this game is pretty demanding on the PC.

In the end I narrowed it down to the PSU - I took out the graphics card and used the onboard VGA to rebuild the PC on a spare HDD and it powered off and on again during the XP setup. I still had the old factory fitted Dell PSU so swapped out the OCZ 600W PSU for this and started XP installing again and it didn't power off again - bingo! Just got to ship the PSU back to Ebuyer for an RMA now.

Back to the original task...

The 2x2Gb mem arrived and I made the schoolboy error of forgetting the 4Gb limit on XP 32bit, so I rebuilt the PC with XP 64bit and it happily recognised the 4Gb and made all of it available. I also installed a second HDD I had spare with the aim of using this as the VM drive. I installed VMware Server 2.0 and built a DC with Windows Server 2008 64bit. The lab at this point consisted of a single server with the following spec:

• Windows Server 2008 64bit SP1


• Active Directory


• DNS (AD integrated)


• 1Gb RAM initially, reduced to 512Mb to free up mem for the other servers


• Single CPU core

I built the DC in the normal way - added the AD role then ran DCPROMO.

I decided that all VMs should only use a single core so to leave some processing power for the OS so the PC is still usable - may be flawed logic so I need to check this out in more detail.

Once the DC was fully updated and activated I started another Server 2008 64bit build - this next VM was to be Exchange 2007. This time however, after applying updates but before setting a static IP and joining to the domain, I shut down the VM and took a copy of the folder containing all the VM files. My plan was to use sysprep to reset the SID, etc on the VM to make provisioning of VMs quicker - I'll talk about this in the next post.