It was a 'teacher only' day on Friday and as most of the staff were in a PD session I used the time to tidy a few things that had been niggling at me for a while.
One of those things was to increase space for my virtual 'Windows Deployment Services' server so I could store more images on it. In order to do this, I decided to change the VHD file (Virtual Hard Drive file) of my virtual print server from a fixed disk to a dynamic disk, to claw back some of the 64Gb of space from the print server to use on the deployment server. The print server was only using 11Gb of it's drive space anyway, so I figured that space was probably better allocated somewhere else. Although I had never converted from a fixed to dynamic disk before I have gone the other way a number of times and it's always worked well. So I went ahead and did the conversion, but in doing so I ignored the error message regarding the snapshot that I had loaded against my print server telling me that there could be a loss of data. Stupid move. The conversion went well, I booted up the print server, but I couldn't logon to the domain. Strange I thought, but maybe something to do with trust relationships etc. (?). So I logged on as the local administrator, removed the server from the domain, rebooted, rejoined the domain and hey presto that fixed that problem. As far as I was aware that was it all sorted.
I had a days leave planned today and yesterday was a public holiday. I had a text message from a teacher yesterday telling me they were having printing problems and although alarm bells started to ring somewhere in the distance, after logging in from home and running some basic checks I assumed it was just error between keyboard and seat and left it at that. After my technician had texted me this morning in a state of distress that everyone was having print problems, I began to regret ignoring those basic checks. I won't go into everything but it turns out that by ignoring the snapshot error I had basically reset the printer to a state of 6 months ago, when I first set it up. I had used the .vhd file of the print server and ignored the .avhd snapshot file when I had done the conversion. In itself this wasn't so much of an issue but what was screwing things up was that the databases that handle our print cost recovery (Papercut and Monitor Business Machines) had gone back to as they were six months ago too. Nobody had any credit and none of the new printers I had put in since six months ago existed.
Luckily, I had made a manual backup of the original .vhd and .avhd files and after restoring and merging the snapshot back into the .vhd things are back to as they were. Phew. Again, so many lessons learned. The main thing I think is that although living in a Hyper-V world has made SO many improvements to things, it's also made me a little blase about what I do with my servers. I have to remind myself that even though they are virtual servers they can still stuff things up just as well as a real server when I get it wrong ......
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