How to Change your W2K8 R2 server from Standard to Enterprise

Go to a Command prompt

Dism /online /get-currentedition

Dism /online /get-targeteditions

Dism /online /Set-Edition:ServerEnterprise /ProductKey:xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

If the process fails you will most likely receive an error such as "The specified product key is not valid for the target edition. “ Verify the information is typed correctly. Use this Windows temporary key to get around this error.

489J6-VHDMP-X63PK-3K798-CPX3Y. Reboot is required for the upgrade process.

Enter your actual W2K8 R2 key and reboot again to make sure it took and all is well. You server should now be at the Enterprise level.

You are done!

VMware releases announcement of VSphere 5.0 and other new products and new versions

VMware announcement
http://www.vmware.com/company/news/releases/vmw-cloud-infrastructure-071211.html

Some of the new VMware products and new versions that will be available now or soon.

VSphere 5.0 http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere/overview.html

SRM 5.0 http://www.vmware.com/products/site-recovery-manager/overview.html

Storage Appliance for SMB's http://www.vmware.com/company/news/releases/vmw-cloud-infrastructure-smb-071211.html

What am I up to?

I am currently finishing up a XenApp6 implementaion running Terminal Services 2008 servers for about 300 users. The project also entails installing a new Citrix Acess Gateway VPX model.

I am also finishing up a n SRM implementaion for about 20 VM's.

I will post some things I ran into when I complete the projects.

Follow up to my original post of W2K8 Std R2 Problems using VMware Customization

As a follow up to my earlier post about W2K8 Std R2 with SP1 Problem using VMware Customization it turns out that SP1 is not the problem it is actually a Windows Update that caused the issue.  We fired up another VM without SP1 and well... we thought we found the problem and that we were done becasue when we fired up the VM we tested it with a plain W2K8 R2 install with no SP1 and no Windows Updates.
Well... we quickly found that was not the issue becasue we then patched and the same problem blue scree reboot problem came up. The problem is we don't knwo which one of the 67 updates it is.

OK so here is what we did to get around this problem and back to firing up VM's in minutes rather than hours. We installed W2K8 R2 with no patches at all and no SP1. We created a W2K8 VM template and used the VMware Custimization and all was well -no BSOD's and no reboots. We then patched each machine with no issues. The trick is don't add the Windows updates and you won't beat your head against the wall like I did.

We called VMware support after we found the problem and they told that after testing the fix is to update your ESXi server to 4.1 update. Our server was 4.1.
I have not tested nor verified that Update1 fixes the problem. I hope this info helps someone out and you do not lose all of the time that we did tracking down the problem. 

W2K8 Std R2 with SP1 Problem using VMware Customization

I ran into an interesting problem at a client yesterday with W2K8 Std R2 Server with SP1.
The problem is when using the VMware Customization to sysprep the server you will get a blue screen and the server continues to reboot.
To fix this don't use SP1 and it works fine. I will post a bit more info on this when I get some time, I just wanted to get this out quickly to save someone else from going through this heartache we just did.