CheckYourLogs.Net

Free to build Sophos XG firewall at Azure Hyper-V Nested VM #Azure #MVPBUZZ #MVPHOUR #FIREWALL #SOPHOS

Nov 1, 2018 | Azure, Hyper-V, Step-by-Step | 0 |

Have you been followed my previously blog to build up Hyper-V nested virtual machine on Microsoft Azure? If you don’t, you better build it right now, because this is pre-requisites and you will get lots of benefit for your lab or even production environment, you can reference this link and build it. If you did, congratulation! You can create a nested gest virtual machine and install Firewall (e.g. Sophos XG, Fortinet…) for free, why we still need to build firewall at our Azure Hyper-V nested environment? Because it supports lots functions that we cannot get the functions for free from Azure, e.g. server load balance, firewall, SNAT, application filter, IPS…and so on, we also can use it for LAB or simulate issues or POC. I am going to show how to build Sophos XG here.

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How to build Hyper-V nested VMs with multiple IP addresses Port Forwarding at Azure #Azure #MVPBUZZ #MVPHOUR #FIREWALL

Oct 31, 2018 | Azure, Hyper-V | 3 |

Today, I am going to show you how to build Hyper-V nested VM with multiple public IP address, you just need to pay Microsoft for one Hyper-V host with storage space and public IP addresses, you can install firewall, created lots of VMs, load balancer, control routing path, port forwarding and so on, we can use them for LAB test, POC, or even production.

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The Case of Upgrading a Veeam Backup Repository from Windows Server 2016 to 2019 and Enabling Deduplication on ReFS – #ReFS #DeDuplication #WindowsServer2019

Oct 7, 2018 | Hyper-V, S2D, Veeam | 1 |

Hey Checkyourlogs Fans, I was working with a customer today, and we are finally ready to upgrade our primary Veeam Backup Repository that is running Microsoft Storage Spaces on Windows Server 2016. The new Operating System will be Windows Server 2019 LTSC, and the whole point of this upgrade is to allow us to use ReFS + Deduplication. The Deduplication feature is now supported in the LTSC builds of Windows Server and the purpose of this post today is to show you how to upgrade the OS Drives, Install the Deduplication Feature, Enable it and test. Step 1 –...

That case of updating to the latest .WIM for a thin Windows 10 Image using MDT – #deployment #MDT #MVPHour

Oct 5, 2018 | OSD | 0 |

Hey Checkyourlogs Fans, I was on a call with a customer today that we’ve been supporting for a long time. We help them with their Windows Deployment / Imaging solution, and along these lines, we have setup an extremely thin imaging process. What we wanted was when the next version of Windows 10 comes out, ie. 1803 or 1809. We wanted to be able to update the task sequence with a few simple steps. Here is what we do when the new version comes out: Step 1 – Download the new ISO from the Volume Licensing site. Step 2...

The Case of not being able to Migrate between Hyper-V Clusters using SCVMM – #HyperV #SCVMM

Oct 4, 2018 | Hyper-V, HyperConverged, S2D, System Center | 0 |

Hey Checkyourlogs fans, Today I was working a case with a customer of mine that had built out a new Hyper-V Cluster using SCVMM. We had the new cluster built with SCVMM and were at a point that we wanted to use Shared Nothing Live Migration between the two clusters to move VM’s. However, we ran into the error below when we first tried. No Available connection to the selected VM Network can be found. No Connection to the subnet “External Switch” with sufficient resources could be found. The fix for this was pretty easy. Just open the Fabric...

Is Hardware Giant #SuperMicro in trouble over recent hacks to their hardware via the supply chain? – #HackingNews #HyperConvergence #HCI

Oct 4, 2018 | S2D | 0 |

Hey Checkyourlogs fans, As many of you know, I have been an advocate of the HyperConverged solutions on the market for quite some time. During my adventures in this space, I have done a lot of work with Vendors that OEM SuperMicro hardware for their solutions. It makes a lot of sense because SuperMicro makes it quite easy to rebrand and customize the solutions. The unfortunate reality is that with the recent announcements from Bloomberg that came out this morning it could be disastrous for companies that use this hardware. I can’t confirm that the models listed in the...

The Case of figuring out Performance Counters to monitor Storage Spaces Direct – #StorageSpacesDirect #SCOM

Oct 4, 2018 | S2D | 0 |

Hey Checkyourlogs Fans, Tonight I had a call with a customer that was looking for specific counters to monitor for Storage Spaces Direct in Windows Server 2016. I had stumbled across a document a while back that came with the SCOM Management Pack download for Storage Spaces Direct. I reviewed this again and felt it would be a good thing to share with everyone. It’s always a struggle to figure out what the good bad and ugly look like especially with performance counters. You can grab a copy of this document here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=54700 When downloading you are going to...

Finding the Windows 10 1809 Media and Upgrading – #Windows10 #Windows1809

Oct 4, 2018 | Windows 10 | 0 |

Hey Checkyourlogs Fans, Today I was asked by a customer to find the Windows 10 1809 media, and it took me a while, but I did find the link for you. If you go here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10 you can grab your copy today. You can also grab it from your MSDN, Volume License, or Academic sites. Creating your installation media has never been easier. You can use the Create Windows 10 Installation Media Tool to handle building a bootable USB key or grabbing the ISO itself. If you just want to kick off your upgrade right now,...

The Case of Locking down the Hyper-V Host Virtual Adapter in the Management OS with an Access List – #Hyper-V #StorageSpacesDirect

Oct 3, 2018 | Hyper-V, S2D | 0 |

Hey Checkyourlogs Fans, Just a quick post tonight from a case that I was working on today for a customer. They had a special requirement to lock down their Hyper-V (Storage Spaces Direct) hosts on secure networks. These networks are going to have 2 x Node Storage Spaces Direct Clusters built that will contain PCI data (Credit Card Info) for storage terminals. There were several ways that we were looking at locking down this traffic to the host management network. A couple of them were IPSec, Windows Firewall and others. What we were playing around with tonight...

#MSIgnite THR1070 – Go from Zero to Hero using Azure Site Recovery: Surviving a Ransomware Attack – Session Recording now live #Azure #AzureSiteRecovery #Ransomware

Oct 2, 2018 | Azure, Speaking | 0 |

Hey Checkyourlogs Fans, This past week I had the distinct pleasure of presenting an amazing session with Emile Cabot on Azure Site Recovery. This session was a continuation of the Zero to Hero series we had been presenting over the past few years. This time instead of looking at configuration we decided to look at the anatomy of a real-world Ransomware attack and how Azure Site Recovery could be used to save your bacon. During this session, one of the key points to take away is that you have to assume that everything is lost. And when we...

Let’s Take a Look at the MSIX Roadmap #MSIX #MVPHour #Win10

Oct 1, 2018 | Uncategorized, Windows 10 | 0 |

Introduction There are so many announcements to keep up with at Ignite, I’ve been trying to stay within my wheelhouse, which has largely been all things App-V. With over 20 years of experience in application packaging, I instinctively track new technologies such as MSIX like a jumping spider tracks a mayfly. I’m only going to cover the roadmap items below, and in some cases, the details are a little sparse. For a good primer on the MSIX platform, check out my previous post from the Windows Developer Day keynote. I’m confident that if Microsoft can stick to their roadmap,...

Introducing the Intune PowerShell SDK #Intune #PowerShell #MVPHour

Sep 28, 2018 | Cool Tools, Intune | 0 |

Ignite is turning out to be boiling over with new technologies and ideas, and you can really feel the momentum building behind Intune. For those of you that are struggling to customize Intune to suit your organization’s requirements, there is a collection of PowerShell scripts on GitHub maintained by David Falkus (@davefalkus) and others at Microsoft and the community that you need to start using. These scripts have become a great reference for using Graph API, which is the supported method for connecting to Microsoft 365 cloud services. The scripts have also helped with day to day management. I...

Security Baselines, Intune and MDM. Oh My! #Intune #GroupPolicy #MDM #MVPHour

Sep 27, 2018 | Intune, Windows 10 | 2 |

Security should always be at the forefront of our thinking these days and I can tell you that I’m up to my elbows in it on a regular basis. Today, it was announced that Microsoft has finally developed a security baseline for Intune that should help many us of dealing with custom security policies and help standardize our methods for hardening devices. With the traditional desktop, I usually walk through a fairly well-defined process when configuring the Group Policy security baselines: Go to Microsoft and download a baseline Modify it accordingly Test and remediate issues Deploy to production Unfortunately,...

Intune Builds a Bridge #SCCM #Intune #Win32 #MSIX #MVPHour

Sep 25, 2018 | Intune, SCCM | 0 |

Microsoft Ignite 2018, has kicked off and without wasting any time, Brad Anderson made a huge announcement for Intune that finally answers the problem of deploying Win32 applications via the cloud. In its 25th year, the mega-conference brings together the best and brightest in the industry and showcases the bleeding edge in hardware and software within Microsoft’s ecosystem in a sprawling and decadent affair. This is one conference I make a point of attending. Last year at this time, I discussed Microsoft’s introduction of co-management where Windows 10 devices could be managed through both Microsoft Intune and System Center...

The Case of Configuring Forced Tunneling in Azure to route Virtual Machine traffic back through an on Prem Firewall – #Azure #AzureSiteRecovery

Sep 14, 2018 | Azure | 1 |

Hey Checkyourlogs Fans, Today I was working with a customer that has a requirement of keeping internet traffic flowing back through their head office after we migrate VM’s to Azure using Azure Site Recovery. The reason for this is that they have purchased a security appliance that they want to keep on-prem for the foreseeable future. By default when we move a Virtual Machine to Azure using Azure Site Recovery the Route Tables for the Subnet override what is inside the VM. Let’s have a look at the problem at hand. What you see below is a Virtual Machine...

#PowerShell – Reporting on Certificate Templates via #ADSI

Sep 12, 2018 | Scripts | 0 |

All certificate template information is stored in Active Directory. As it’s shared configuration through a forest, it’s stored in the AD Configuration partition. I needed to report which certificate templates and their associated OIDs. Let’s do it with simple code and no external modules.

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iWarp the Movie featuring #Intel and #Microsoft #RDMA – #StorageSpacesDirect #WindowsServer #SMBDirect

Sep 12, 2018 | S2D, Windows Server | 3 |

Hey Checkyourlogs Fans, Here is a quick little post on iWarp as a protocol that can be used to run RDMA for your Storage Spaces Direct deployments. The best part about iWarp is that it doesn’t require Switch or Server configuration it is pretty much plug and play. To this effect, Intel has created a nice little video explaining how it works. NOTE: I haven’t personally setup a Storage Spaces Direct configuration in production using iWarp yet, and I am working with my first customer that is using it this week. Traditionally although more complete the lossless RoCE v2...

Hidden Updates to ReFS.sys Version 2457 in Microsoft KB434884 – #ReFS #Veeam #HyperV #StorageSpacesDirect

Sep 12, 2018 | S2D, Windows Server | 0 |

Hey Checkyourlogs fans, I was recently reading an update from a friend of mine at Veeam – MVP Anton Gostev in his Monthly Veeam Forums digest. In the September 3rd -9th 2019 Digest Email he stated that Veeam has been doing some extensive testing of Hotfix KB434884. This hotfix doesn’t state anything about fixes for ReFS in it. The ReFS.sys driver doesn’t get updated with every Windows Update or Rollup and this August one is supposed to have backported performance and stability improvements that are there in Windows Server 2019 to 2016. In this hotfix, nothing is stated about...

Getting Started with the Azure Site Recovery Deployment Planner Tool for #HyperV – #AzureSiteRecovery

Sep 11, 2018 | Azure, Hyper-V, Windows Server | 0 |

Hey Checkyourlogs Fans, Today I want to have a look at some planning tools that Microsoft provides to help you get started with Microsoft’s Azure Site Recovery. As always with any project planning is an essential part of the equation. Before this tool, all of our work to plan a Disaster Recovery project with Azure Site Recovery was done with spreadsheets in Excel. This tool will help automate the process and help us get a good cost estimate as well and appropriate sizing requirements for the project. First, you should read up on the tool at...

Protecting your Virtual Machines with Azure Site Recovery from Windows Admin Center – #WindowsAdminCenter #AzureSiteRecovery

Sep 9, 2018 | Windows Admin Center, Windows Server | 0 |

Hey Checkyourlogs Fans, In this post, we are going to look at the steps required to protect your infrastructure using Azure Site Recovery integrated into Windows Admin Center. First, let’s have a look at our Windows Admin Center and our source Hyper-V Server. The Virtual Machine that I would like to protect in this post is a VM called TCCALRDS02. There is a Help protect your VMs from disasters by using Azure Site Recovery – Set up Now link. Let’s try that. When clicked it opens Register the gateway with Azure and has three steps. Device...

The Case cleaning Azure Site Recovery and Hyper-V Replica on an older Hyper-V Server – #WindowsAdminCenter #HyperV

Sep 9, 2018 | Windows Admin Center | 0 |

Hey Checkyourlogs fans, In this post, we are going to look at my setup of some lab machines with Azure Site Recovery using only Windows Admin Center 1808. Now, the issue I ran into was with the Hyper-V Server I was trying to use in my lab. This was an older Hyper-V Server that I recently upgraded in the previous blog post to Windows Server 2019. This Server at some point had Azure Site Recovery Agents deploy and was connected to a deprecated recovery vault. Here is the view that I could see from Windows Admin Center: On the...

The Case of the broken network on an Upgrade of Windows Server 2012 R2 to Windows Server 2019 – #HyperV #WindowsadminCenter

Sep 8, 2018 | Hyper-V, Windows Server | 0 |

Hey Checkyourlogs Fans, Today, we are going to have a look at the process of in-place upgrading a Windows 2012 R2 Hyper-V Host Server running production workloads to Windows Server 2019 Insiders Build 17744. We are also going setup Windows Admin Center to manage this environment once the upgrade is complete. This environment houses some Virtual Machines from my lab/production environment. Important Note: You should always make sure you backup important files or VM’s before proceeding with an upgrade like this. The first step to getting the upgrade rolling is to register for the Windows Insiders Program here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windowsinsiderpreviewserver?wa=wsignin1.0...

SCCM – Next Maintenance Window

Sep 6, 2018 | SCCM | 0 |

Figuring out when the next maintenance should be trivial. The Administrators can usually track it down, but sometimes it’s great to empower the users. Teach them to fish and give yourself some time back!

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The Case of the Physical Disk “Lost Communication” – #StorageSpacesDirect #HCI

Aug 28, 2018 | S2D | 0 |

Hey Checkyourlogs fans, Today I was working with a friend that is running a Seven Node Storage Spaces Direct cluster on Lenovo Hardware. Everything has been running great over the past six months until a few of his drives had started to report a “Lost Communication” Warning. Interestingly enough the cluster itself was reporting healthy, and all the associated Virtual Disks and Volumes were also reporting healthy. The reason for this is that Storage Spaces Direct had already removed them from the pool and they were showing up missing from Failover Cluster Manager and in a Lost Communication status...

Session Catalog is live for Microsoft Ignite – .@MS_Ignite #MVPHour #TeamKawula

Aug 22, 2018 | MVP, Speaking | 0 |

Hey Checkyourlogs Fans, Team Kawula will be in full force at Microsoft Ignite coming up in a little over one month from now in Sunny Orlando, FL. This is Microsoft biggest conference of the year, and we are so thrilled to be a big part of it. Make sure you checkout our sessions. https://bit.ly/2w4m6bz So far Cristal and I have these sessions up in the catalog and there are more coming. If you happen to miss our sessions you are more than welcome to come see us at the Microsoft Software Defined booth. Discussions can be anything from...