Running MOC Courseware Virtual Machines on Windows 7 RC

Once you have installed Windows 7 RC and downloaded Microsoft Virtual PC you might have the need to run Microsoft Official Curriculum courseware virtual machines. And therein is a problem.

The virtual machines are built to use Virtual Server 2005, but that cannot install in Windows 7, so you cannot use the Lab Launcher. Though you can install the courseware drives, you will need to run the installer in compatibility mode or the VHD installer will not run.

Once you have the VHD files unzipped you need to configure Microsoft Virtual PC to load them up. This though is a problem if you are not located in the same timezone as the creators of the base disks (PST timezone).

The steps to create a virtual machine when you are in a different timezone are:

1. Start the virtual machine wizard and make a note of the location value. You will need to modify files in this location later on
   
2. Set memory and untick the network connections option
   
3. Browse to the exiting hard disks folder. Enable undo disks at this time as well
   
4. If you are in a different timezone you will get the following cryptic error
   
5. Click OK and modify the file used to point to either any of the “allfiles” disks (as these are not differencing disks) or create your own empty vhd for the time being
   
6. Complete the creation steps and then bring up the settings of the new virtual machine (with the wrong disk attached)
   
7. Modify the network settings to Internal Network and add any additional disks needed (this will be described in the full setup guide for the course) and close the settings dialog.
8. Browse to the folder that contains the actual settings file (the vmc file). This folder is the location value from step 1 (defaults to C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Virtual PC\Virtual Machines).
9. Open the vmc file in Notepad (or an XML editor) and change the settings to that which you require. These changes are for disks. Look for ide_controller 0 and ide_controller 1 (if present) and change the name of the vhd file to the correct disk name.
10. Modify the time sync. settings as per disabling-time-synchronization-under-virtual-pc-2007. The virtual machines from Microsoft for training purposes have a grace period and if you bring them up with the current date/time on them (which Virtual PC 2007 does automatically) then you will need to activate them.
11. Save the file when your changes are completed.
12. Start the virtual machine. You will see this error message - Inconsistency in virtual hard disk time stamp detected - The virtual hard disk's parent appears to have been modified without using the differencing virtual hard disk. Modifying the parent virtual hard disk may result in data corruption. It is strongly recommended that you mark the parent virtual hard disk as read-only to prevent this in the future. If you recently changed timezones on your host operating system, you can safely continue using this virtual hard disk.
    
13. This can occur for a number of reasons, but if the reason is timestamps then click OK. DO NOT click the option not to show the message again, or you will not be able to get past this error without modifying the options.xml file in C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Virtual PC.

The virtual PC will start, and will prompt you about updates to the integration components, but that is only a minor , so that can be ignored when you are presented with that error, unless you want the error to never show again per machine, in which case install (at your own risk and numerous reboots) the integration components.

Finally, you might need to reactivate some machines, as the hardware will have changed.

Create i386 CMAK Profile on x64 Machine

Informing users and clients how to connect their Windows PC to a VPN connection is easy, but could be easier. There are a few questions to answer and having the user type this in might mean wrong answers, and therefore a supsequent support call would be required.

To ease this issue, and reduce the support call costs Microsoft have made available for a number of years the Connection Manager Administration Kit (CMAK). Lots of websites and blogs describe how to make CMAK profiles but to date none that I can find solve the problem of installing CMAK on a x64 version of Windows 2008 (for example Small Business Server 2008, but any x64 bit architecture will do) and attempting to deploy the resulting executable on a i386 XP architecture.

The CMAK program within Windows 2008 (added to the default installation by adding a feature) has options for the creation of a "downlevel" build (i.e. XP, 2003 and 2000) as well as a Vista build (which covers 2008 and Windows 7 as well) but the resulting executable made from the downlevel option is not valid.

The reason for this is many. Firstly the executable is constructed using iexpress.exe on an x64 machine - resulting in a x64 installer that will not run on a i386 machine. Fix this problem (see below for steps) and you find that the installer runs a program to actually create the connection object in the Network settings area of Control Panel, but this program (cmstp.exe) is also x64 architecture and so will not run on an i386 architecture machine.

Before we go into the steps to do this successfully, here (for the benefit of the search engines) are the different errors that you will see:

1. This profile was not built for this processor architecture. Please contact your Administrator to get the appropriate profile for this architecture.
2. profile.exe is not a valid Win32 application.
3. Error creating process <c:\docume~1\user\locals~1\temp\ixp000.tmp\.\cmstp.exe>. Reason: C:\WINDOWS\system32\advpack.dll

To fix this and create an i386 connection profile on an x64 architecture machine involves modifying the file that controls the creation of the executable (the .sed file) and getting two files from either an i386 Windows Server 2003 installation or an i386 XP installation.

First for those extra files. On the Windows 2008 Server that has CMAK installed, and having successfully created a profile (see windowssecurity.com and uksbsguy for profile creation steps) you need to create a folder called i386 inside C:\Program Files\CMAK\Support\en-US (C: and en-US might be different on your installation). This is best done from an elevated command prompt. Inside this folder place advpack.dll and cmstp.exe from an i386 installation of Windows Server 2003 or XP Professional (ensure latest service packs and patches on the source machine as well). Both of these files are found in \windows\system32 on the source installation.

Secondly, also from the elevated command prompt, you need to create a copy of the .sed file for each architecture you want to build for. The .sed file is named after the profile name that you have created and is located in a subfolder of C:\Program Files\CMAK\Profiles\Downlevel where the subfolder is the name of the profile. The default .sed file will work on x64 XP. Therefore to create a .sed file for i386 XP copy profile.sed to profile-i386.sed and then open this file in notepad (by typing notepad profile-i386.sed from the elevated command prompt).

The third step is to edit this .sed file so that the entries that point to the location of cmstp.exe and advpack.dll are to the new files you copied in the first step. Therefore change the line that starts FILE0= and the line that starts FILE1=. These should read something like the following:

• FILE0=C:\Program Files\CMAK\Support\en-US\i386\advpack.dll
• FILE1=C:\Program Files\CMAK\Support\en-US\i386\cmstp.exe

Additionally, but not required, I also change the TargetName= value from profile.exe to profile-i386.exe so that it does not overwrite the x64 executable that has already been created by the CMAK wizard and I edit the InstallPrompt= value to include something that indicates that I am about to install the i386 version of the connection object.

Now close and save the changes made to the new .sed file.

Finally you can build the executable. But the fun does not stop here. You might have noticed from the errors above that one of the errors is that the executable is not a valid win32 executable. This occurs if the x64 version of iexpress.exe is used to create the installation program. You need to use the 32 bit version that is installed on the x64 machine. The 32 bit version of the program is found in c:\windows\syswow64 (this stands for Windows On Windows 64) and so from the elevated command prompt type \windows\syswow64\iexpress /N profile-i386.sed (this is one command on one line if your browser happens to wrap the text over two lines). This will create the executable named after the TargetName value in the .sed file. This can then be copied to your software installation share and deployed to your users.

CRM 4 Fails to Run In Outlook on Terminal Services

If CRM 4 Client is installed on a Citrix/Terminal Services server and the initial installation (done when in CHANGE USER /INSTALL mode) also includes starting Outlook for the first time then a registry key is set in the Terminal Services registry shadow. This means that once you go into CHANGE USER /EXECUTE mode and a new user logs in they get the registry keys set during installation as part of their profile.

This is by design if the registry keys that are set are not needed to be unique per person. And CRM has one registry key that needs to be unique for each user logged into the terminal server. This is the ClientRemotingChannel registry value located at HKCU\Software\Microsoft\MSCRMClient.

If more than one person is connected to the terminal server and running Outlook with CRM configured then behind the scenes the CRM hoster application will be running. The ClientRemotingChannel registry key controls the ability of this application to communicate with Outlook and the CRM server and therefore this registry value must be unique for every logged in user on the terminal server at the same time. If more than one user has the same value (which they will if initial installation is done as above) then the 2nd concurrent user will fail to connect to CRM via Outlook – web access will work fine.

Therefore ensure that the shadow registry value for this (HKLM\SOFTWARE\Windows NT\…\MSCRMClient) is not set and that all users that already have a duplicate value have the registry value deleted. The hoster application will recreate the registry value when it starts with a unique value if the registry setting is missing.

A clue to the existence of this error will be the application event log error "Failed to create an IPC Port: Access is denied".