The Realm of the Verbal Processor

SCCM reinstall on Server 2008

What a difference a couple of days makes. Last week my plan was to migrate the other 90% of our headquarters off of SMS 2003 and over to SCCM. Before doing that I wanted to fix a disk issue. Basically when the guy who set up the VM for my SCCM server did so, he set it up wrong…he set it up to use VHDs instead of Raw Device Mapping for the drives. Basically I got slower disks…and SMS/SCCM really needs fast disks. Not a problem in my initial setup…only had 10% of our environment on it. But before migrating the rest, I wanted fast disk.

So…our virtual server guy started the process of moving the four drives from VMDK to RDM. He was running into a lot of problems and finally (as I understand it) figured out that he can’t do what he was trying to do. In the process though, the C: drive (OS installation drive) got corrupted. Because of misunderstandings on both sides, I didn’t have a backup of the OS drive or the VM file. I do have a successful SCCM/SQL backup though.

Time to test that disaster recovery plan!

I’m also taking this opportunity (I’ll call it that) to do another switch. I had originally installed on Server 2003 x64. My new install will be Server 2008 32bit. I’m waiting on the VM guy to finish the OS install so that I can do the other pieces. The nice thing is that I did keep very good notes about all of the configuration that I had done on the original server, so I should be able to rebuild it fairly quickly.

There are reasons for the double switch (2003/2008 and 32/64). The 32/64 issue is related to my friend Tim’s post. The 2008 switch is to be ready to utilize OSD Multicast when SCCM R2 ships.

May 14, 2008 - Posted by Jarvis | ConfigMgr