Where have all the Windows Service Packs gone?

Have you noticed the lack of Service Packs for Windows 7 / Server 2008 R2?

We had Service Pack 1 more than 2 years ago and since then just a constant stream of updates. Windows 7 desktops are going to be around for a very long time replacing XP as the de facto Windows version to use in corporate desktops. By the time they expire in 2020(!) hopefully the newer versions of Windows / Android / IOS + current unknown OSs will provide a new paradigm that is better (I have my doubts).

The number of updates every month has stayed steady meaning there is a myriad of updates for a 'fresh' Windows 7 SP1 install. This was brought home the other week when a newly arrived Dell Laptop installed updates and rebooted for a good half an hour. Keeping baselines of updates is becoming unpractical with this number of updates going on. This is a real problem for servers where you want them all patched to the same level without going through a WSUS high frequency update route.

In the past on internal servers we used to apply Service Packs as the building block of Windows build level. If there was a specific reason to apply a patch we would apply it. More often than not it would more likely be a version of the .Net framework linked to an application like SQL Server. Most internal servers are showing vast lists of individual patches required. When servers can obtain typical uptimes of around a year I don't like putting on non required patches and rebooting them every month or so unless there is a very good reason to do so. Rebooting them once per year for a Service Pack seems ideal to me.

The cadence / patch mechanism of Windows releases has changed dramatically over the years. Remember computer magazines with attached disks of  NT4 SP3, SP4 or SP6a as a mechanism of distributing patches! Since then we had Windows 2000 which had 4 Service Packs, Server 2003 which brought in the R2 OS refresh cycle, 2008, then 2008 R2 and now 2012 / R2.

If you look at the release dates of recent software we have Server 2012 R2 in 2013 just a year after Server 2012. With Google and Apple adding new features and not just patches with almost every update every few months. MS have been forced to follow suit. I am running Windows 8.1 on my laptop and it is more a Service Pack on Windows 8 than it is a new release (I know there are new features, well hidden by the dumbed down GUI), at least the 8.1 gives a clue to the lack of fundamental changes. But with Server 2012 R2 a whole raft of new server features have been added. It could be the new update regime without Service Packs is better suited to Windows Azure with fully automated patching or they just build new base images containing the patches already incorporated for cloning on a schedule. It might be that Windows 7 / 2008 R2 will never see another Service Pack - in which case installing a new Windows 7 machine could install literally hundreds of updates to bring it up to date. Maybe keeping base images with incorporated selected updates will be the way to go. At the moment I would be happy to install a Windows 7 SP1 desktop and let it catch up on updates using WSUS plus a daily reboot over a few days. With mainstream support for Windows 7 ending in 2015 we really could do with Service Pack by then!

SQL Server and Exchange Server do (currently) have a steady and structured release system of updates and Service Packs making patching easier to plan. It is a pity that Exchange updates have been such poor quality of late. I would rather run reliable old software than up to date software with broken features myself.

Maybe the days of Service Packs are gone. Get a 'new' OS every year instead! I have heard little from MS on the subject but it must be discussed frequently. If so it makes life just a little harder for on premise installations...

Network and online backup problems after upgrading Server 2012 to 2012 R2 upgrade

I recently upgraded my Server 2012 'Workstation' to 2012 R2 RTM.

The system is mainly used for testing changes etc and is an old rack mounted Dell 610 - 48gb RAM with a solid state boot disk and filled with as many 7.2K cheap/large capacity disks as it will hold in RAID 6 to give reasonable disk IO and large capacity. It also has a 4 port Intel network card with a couple of the ports teamed together mainly to test that the new MS NIC teaming works as intended. The NIC team has worked flawlessly for a year laying to rest the Server 2003 scalable networking debacle.

Following upgrade from Server 2012 to Server 2012 R2 I couldn't access it via remote desktop so I went in through the Dell Remote Access Card (DRAC) and looked at the console. After a few minutes poking about it I had worked out that the NIC teaming had been removed and the network set to DHCP. I was able to connect to the DHCP IP address and sorted it out from there. I would say this behavior is very unfortunate in enterprise computing. Normally I would have said it was a one off but the same thing happened a few years ago when upgrading some Server 2008 to Server 2008 R2 Dell Servers, which lost their network card settings during upgrade. If the server is remote and you don't have a remote access tool like the DRAC then you could be in a lot of trouble. Worth watching out for.

I was looking to change the Windows Azure Backup Policy on the machine after upgrade but it wouldn't change, and kept coming up with a  generic error after a timeout period. I deleted it and recreated it from scratch and it is now running fine. I cannot imagine how that backup software changed between versions as it was a manual download from the internet but there you go.

Apart from these upgrade errors the Server 2012 R2 release is looking good with many new features.

RDP Remote control deal breaker in Server 2012 fixed in R2

There were many advances in remote desktop in Server 2012, including valiant attempts to make installation simpler. The optimised used of bandwidth is an excellent behind the scenes advantage that you can see working when bandwidth is limited. Very impressive.

However, the initial move to management via Server Manager and PowerShell brought a major casualty - the remote control feature had been removed. When I first could not see the feature I assumed I was doing something wrong! But it dawned on me that it had been removed. A quick search showed that others had the same problem. A few weak workarounds were suggested but this feature is one of the most important features of all out of the feature set! I have lost count of the number of times I have helped out someone by logging in and attaching to their session.

Here is the reason from MS:
Due to the removal of the classic shell and the new architecture of the desktop window manager, in addition, consider to the security, we have removed the Remote Control(Shadow Session) in Windows Server 2012.

This was a deal breaker and Server 2008 R2 is currently in use as I could not use 2012 without this feature. I wondered if it had been removed for good and would be left ultimately looking at higher end solutions with richer feature sets. When 2012 R2 came out recently one of the first things I checked for was remote desktop enhancements and the feature was back under the guise of Session Shadowing. For me this means that Server 2012 R2 will probably be replacing 2008 R2 for terminal services when it is released.
New features in Server 2012 R2:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn283323.aspx

On a related but separate note I think that the move to GUIs based on PowerShell has not been entirely successful, the new GUIs are pretty clunky, and you can almost feel them running the PowerShell commands under the covers. You can see they really hate doing anything other than manual refreshes where they rerun the PowerShell command to get a dataset back. Incremental search never features in any PowerShell backed GUI I have seen recently due to the same limitation. I am hoping they will improve on this in the next version or two.

Upgraded Server 2008 to 2008R2 Hyper-V backup failure

This setup is Server 2008 UPGRADED to Server 2008R2 + SP1 + updates. Backing up perfectly using WSB admin utility.
Hyper-V was installed and the VMs put on their own volume.
Backup started failing only when this volume was backed up. The error initially showed up as:

VSSAdmin list writers showed Hyper-V writer problem.
The source error was one I had never seen before:
No snapshots to revert were found for virtual machine….
After searching around the answer was to enable Automount on new volumes...

After that the backup started working perfectly again…
OS upgrades often leave these gotchas behind so it can be more time effective in the longer run for a fresh install.

Reduce SQL Server 2012 install time on Server 2008R2 by pre-installing .Net4 / patches

If you are running SQL Server without clustering or other failover technologies you will want your SQL Server upgrade to run as quickly as possible so the users can get back the applications as quickly as possible. I always close all client connections, run an SQL back up of both client and system databases, stop SQL Services and set to manual, 'manually' copy the SQL data directories/log etc to a safe place before starting the upgrade. For me the downtime starts as soon as all the users have to come off so I can carry out a clean SQL backup.
Upgrading SQL2008R2 SP1 on Windows 2008R2 SP1 to SQL2012 a large amount of my downtime was SQL Server installing .Net4 and some subsequent .Net4 fixes before the ‘real’ SQL2012 upgrade started.
On subsequent installations I was able to reduce my downtime significantly by pre-installing .Net4 and the appropriate patches ahead of time.
Look in the redist\dotnetframeworks directory of your SQL Server installation media, it should look like the image below.

Run the dotNetFx40_Full_x86_x64 file first (or SC for server core install).
Once complete run NDP40-KB2468871-v2, and then NDP40-KB2544514, then switch to the appropriate x64 or x86 parent directory and run the file in there, eg NDP40-KB2533523. Now run SQL Server install and it should be much quicker. If you have many servers in this position it would be better to script it.
On Windows Server 2012 .Net4 should already be ‘pre-installed’ and this should not be necessary.
Happy upgrading!
Bizarre occurrence!
During one early upgrade I had copied the SQL installation media to the local server and then run the SQL installer from that server itself and SQL setup crashed installing .Net4. On investigation of the (many!) set up logs, the actual dotNetFx40 file was not copied correctly from the master installation media and was corrupted during the copy. Fortunately the crash had no serious consequences and I installed .Net 4 manually as per above after copying new files over, but there was some concern seeing the SQL install crash as a test install on the same server in the lab had installed perfectly! This highlighted the speed advantage of preinstalling .Net 4. When you get a crash in the middle of an install it can be a major problem as various components are at different levels, and fixing the mess can be very time consuming.