After moving a few Windows Server Hyper-V hosts recently from one Virtual Machine Manager server to another, a couple of virtual machines started exhibiting some strange behaviour in regards to networking. So I break out trusty “ping” and it doesn’t report any problems. At that point the remote desktop session is working again so I lost interest assuming it to be “one of those things…”. After a couple of days this started happening more and more.

The sysprep automation within Virtual Machine Manger 2008 is a really nice feature which can help you deploy machines quickly and in a “set and forget” manner. If however you are unfortunate enough to not run your servers in the US locale you may have noticed that even if you change all the regional settings on your template target, after the sysprep has completed and produced a template any machine generated from it will be in the US locale.

Message Queues are a great tool for interprocess communication if you need to ensure that a message is processed, regardless of the target process’s connectivity or runtime state. If you are developing with Microsoft’s .Net Framework you can take advantage of Windows Communication Foundations built-in support for Microsoft Message Queues. I have been using WCF with Microsoft Message Queues on a recent project, which as part of a back-end processor, the queues are automatically created in the event that they do not exist.