Came across a problem the other day with running Windows 2003 Datacenter Edition as a guest on Microsoft Virtual Server. The problem? Windows 2003 Datacenter edition doesn’t have a suitable driver for Virtual Server, meaning that it’s fairly usless as a guest operating system (which negates one of the main benefits of having datacenter edition – unlimited VMs with no additional license cost).

I spoke to Peter Meister at Microsoft who was a great help, and whilst waiting for a solution from them I found some drivers which work. Install these drivers in your datacenter edition guest and your virtual network card will start working again, yay!

Due to seemingly non-existant documentation on moving a WSUS 3.0 database to a new server, I figured i’d write up my experience.

Database configuration is all stored in:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\UpdateServices\Server\Setup
The keys you’re interested in are SqlServerName and SqlInstanceIsRemote. Microsoft only officially support Windows authentication, so that’s what i’ll cover here.

You’ll be able to connect the the Windows Internal Database using Microsoft SQL Server management studio Express (a free download), detach the database and re-attach on your new SQL server.

Once that’s done, add the computer account of the WSUS server as a database login (e.g. nwtraders\LONDON$) and give it the dbowner role on the SUSDB.

The last step is to set the SqlServerName and SqlIsRemote values as mentioned earlier. Once done, restart IIS and the UpdateServices service. Job done.

Since moving our network over to Office 2007 is a lot of work, and requires a fair ammount of user retraining I decided it best to just deploy the File Format Converters Microsoft realeased so that users with Office 2003 can open 2007 format documents.

For reasoning unknown to me, Microsoft released them as an exe as opposed to an MSI so it’s a little work to get them to deploy via group policy (and ZAP is evil).

Extract FileFormatConerters.exe to somewhere useful like so:

FileFormatConverters.exe /extract:\\nwtraders.msft\SoftwareDeployment\FileFormatConverters

Once that’s done setup the software installation as per usual and then use the following WMI filter to restrict the install to systems with Office 2003 (since we don’t want to install it if they have office 2007)

SELECT * FROM Win32_Product WHERE (Caption LIKE .Microsoft Office%2003%.)