Gallery

Hyper-V is not hype

Posted on 3 Mar 2009 at 17:18

Jon Honeyball finds that hyper-v really is all it's cracked up to be, and David Moss gets to grips with installing an open-source cms on windows server 2008.

But I decided to take the plunge over the Christmas break and see if I could at least get it up and running - which means installed, not totally configured - inside a day, and since I like a challenge I decided to try it on Windows Server 2008. Before I could begin, there was the small matter of assembling all the components needed: I already had the server, so the extra components I'd need were Internet Information Server (IIS) 7 installed as a role, PHP and MySQL, plus of course Moodle itself. Their required order of installation is as just written, and there are a few bits and pieces that need to be done before you can start some of the installation processes, so I decided to kick off with one of those - the need to open a port for MySQL through the Windows firewall.

To do this I issued a NETSH command, more specifically NETSH FIREWALL. Rather that's what I was going to do until I discovered that Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista deprecate the use of NETSH FIREWALL, and Microsoft now wants everyone to use NETSH ADVFIREWALL instead.

As you might expect, there's been a change in syntax between the two versions (how could they resist?), and as I needed to add TCP port 3306, by way of example here's the old NETSH FIREWALL command line I would have used:

netsh firewall add portopening TCP 3306 "MySQL"

and here's the new NETSH ADVFIREWALL equivalent that I did in fact use:

netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name="MySQL" dir=in action=allow protocol=TCP localport=3306

Success is indicated by a laconic OK that appears directly beneath the command line after you've hit Enter.

This job actually didn't need to be done first, but I prefer to do things as soon I remember them - of course I employ to-do lists, but they have the lethal flaw that you might leave an item out. If a job can be done straight away, do it first, then add it to the list and tick it off. My next task was more strictly in the proper installation order, namely installing IIS 7, and to do this I fired up the Initial Configuration Tasks dialog by clicking its button on the taskbar. If you're not in the habit of having it run automatically when you start Windows, fire up Server Manager instead from Administrative Tools. Either way, you'll soon be running the Add Roles Wizard, and you should select Web Server (IIS) from the Roles list when you get to the Server Roles page. You'll be prompted to install the Windows Process Activation Service at the same time, which you need to agree to or you can't install IIS 7, so hit Add Required Features and then click on Next. Hit Next once you've finished any reading you think necessary from the proffered list. You'll now find yourself looking at the role services page, which is where you select the services you want to run in your IIS 7 installation. I recommend you spend a while here seeing exactly what's available.

For the setup I needed I left all the defaults and just added the CGI service (adds CGI and FastCGI) as my necessary extra for PHP. I then went to the PHP website to download the non-thread-safe version of PHP, along with the PECL (PHP Extension Community Library) package that accompanies it.

I found that version 5.2.8 is the currently shipping version of PHP, but the PECL packages for it were no longer available for download, with a solution being worked on for sometime in 2009. Fortunately, the version 5.2.6 PECL packages work with PHP 5.2.8, so I grabbed them and set about my installation. I unzipped the PHP files into their default location C:\PHP and then unzipped the PECL package and its extensions into C:\PHP\ext to join the ones already there. Then, I turned to the Moodle documentation that had some specific instructions at this point, and following them required moving two of the extensions from the \ext folder to the root PHP folder. The extensions to move are php5servlet.dll and php5activescript.dll - assuming you can find both of them, that is. I wasn't too bothered when I couldn't find php5servlet.dll, as it's only needed for Tomcat. The php5activescript.dll is a COM server for ASP, but according to the Moodle docs it isn't much used and so isn't necessary.