Well, another year has passed and I have grown one year wiser. At this somewhat poignant age of 35 I have looked back over my should and can honestly say that I am please with my journey thus far. I would have never guessed in a million years that this is where I would have landed, but I can't complain. So raise your glasses and let's have a toast. To friends, family, and another joyous 35 years.

Happy Birthday to me...and everyone else lucky enough to be born today.

I have completed dozens of P2V migrations for various clients and have to walk down the same path each time. One of these days I will get around to scripting some of this stuff, but wanted to at least highlight the steps I take here. I do all of this work on the new VM, despite that it could be done on the physical server before doing the migration. If you do that though, you lose the ability to roll back to the physical server as a failback. I would rather do the work on the VM knowing I can always simply power up the physical box. Steps below:

Microsoft has a great KB article that lists a number of best practices to consider when virtualizing domain controllers. Most notable of these below:

1. Disable Write Cache on volumes hosting ESE based databases. This was also tossed around on the VMware forums a while back and there doesn't appear to be a conclusive answer how to deal with this suggestion.

Chris Lehr has just posted a handy article that will outline how to get those pesky redirects working on your new Exchange 2007 install on a 2K8 server running IIS7.