CheckYourLogs.Net

Configuring Windows Analytics: Part 1 Prerequisites

Mar 29, 2019 | Windows 10 | 2 |

Introduction Welcome, since I’ve been working with a number of clients using Windows Analytics I thought I would share some tips on getting up and running plus make sense of all the ways it can be configured. This blog series reviews the strategy and steps I have used to configure device telemetry for Windows Analytics with various organizations. And to add a twist I’ve decided to break with my tradition of making mega blog articles and break this one up into the following posts. Part 1: Prerequisites Part 2: Configuring Azure Log Analytics Part 3: Configuring Windows Analytics with...

The Case of the Failed Storage (East/West) Switch fabric with #StorageSpacesDirect

Mar 27, 2019 | S2D | 0 |

Hey Checkyourlogs fans, I wanted to write to you today chatting about what happens if you lose your East/West (Storage) Switch Fabric with Storage Spaces Direct. In my design for this customer, they had a Dedicated pair of Mellanox switches for their Storage Network and then different core switches for their North/South (VM & MGMT Networks). We had to do some emergency maintenance on our pair of Mellanox Switches that would require a reboot of both. I let the customer know that when this happens, the RDMA (RoCE) traffic would just fail over to non-RDMA (RoCE) during the outage....

The Case of Troubleshooting a failed Windows 10 Pro In-Place-Upgrade like the Pro’s – #MVPHour

Mar 27, 2019 | OSD | 0 |

Hey Checkyourlogs Fans, With the looming deadline of January 2020 coming up very very fast I know many of you are racing to get your Windows 10 upgrade projects done. With that said I wanted to share an extremely handly little tool that Microsoft has built to help troubleshoot failed upgrades. It is called setupdiag.exe and is a real life saver. You can grab a copy from here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/deployment/upgrade/setupdiag Our situation today was a failed upgrade and this prompt on the end users machine: The Installation failed in the SECOND_BOOT Phase with an error during MIGRATE_DATA operation. This error...

Checking out Windows Admin Center 1903 – DHCP, DNS, and Active Directory Previews #MVPHour

Mar 27, 2019 | Windows Admin Center | 0 |

Hey Checkyourlogs Fans, Tonight, I wanted to checkout some of the brand new previews that are now available inside of Windows Admin Center Insiders Build 1903. I have been waiting for a long time for the ability to manage DHCP, DNS, and Active Directory so let’s see how this goes. Step 1 – You need to Install the new Preview Extensions after you upgrade or install Windows Admin Center 1903. Here is the install in progress. After I installed the extensions, Windows Admin Center reloaded the main page. First up is the Active Directory Extension. It is really responsive....

INSTALL VEEAM BACKUP & REPLICATION 9.5 UPDATE 4a #Azure #VEEAM #WINDOWSSERVER #MVPHOUR

Mar 26, 2019 | Step-by-Step, Veeam | 0 |

Veeam released the Backup & Replication 9.5 service pack 4a today, Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 Update 4a is a cumulative hotfix rollup that addresses issues reported by customers on the original build of Update 4, as well as minor platform support enhancements –
VMware vSphere 6.7 U2 readiness, Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2019, Dell EMC Data Domain DD OS 6.2. In addition, Update 4a addresses over 300 minor bugs reported by customers and found during the internal testing.
The details information you can check from Veeam website https://www.veeam.com/kb2926
The Installation steps are straightforward, but you need to confirm that you are running version 9.5.4.2615 prior to installing this update. You can check this under Help | About in Veeam Backup & Replication console. After upgrade, your build number will be 9.5.4.2753.

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The Case of the Partitioned Network in Failover Cluster Manager when Updating Windows Server 2016 #StorageSpacesDirect

Mar 26, 2019 | S2D, Windows Server | 0 |

Hey Checkyourlogs Fans, Tonight @SifuSun (Cary Sun) and I were doing some routine maintenance of a 2-node Storage Spaces Direct Cluster that was having issues with checkpoints locking up during Veeam Backups. We went through the normal process putting the nodes into maintenance mode, patching, and waiting for storage jobs to complete before moving on to the next node. We found an interesting scenario where after the first node was complete and we patched our second node look at what happened to our cluster. The above screenshot was what we first noticed with the Cluster IP going offline. Even...

HOW to FIX Access Denied Error in Demote DC server #Active Directory #WINDOWSSERVER # #MVPHOUR

Mar 26, 2019 | Windows Server | 0 |

Today, I was trying to remove an old windows 2003 R2 DC server in our domain, when I run DCPROMO command to demote it, I received the following error message:
The operation failed because: The attempt at remote domain controller DC2016 to remove domain controller CN=DC1,CN=Servers,CN=Default-First-Name,CN=Sites….from the forest was unsuccessful. “Access is Denied”

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Performance Tuning Deduplication on Windows Server 2019 ReFS and #StorageSpacesDirect

Mar 24, 2019 | S2D, Scripts, Windows Server | 2 |

Hey Checkyourlogs Fans, In the previous post, we talked about the essential operator’s report for Storage Spaces Direct in Windows Server 2019. Today, I want to talk to you about the performance penalty that is required to run Deduplication on Windows Server 2019. Nothing in life is free, and this is certainly the case for Deduplication. Don’t get me wrong I love this feature and think that it is one of the best in Windows Server 2019; however, you must have an understanding of what it is that you are configuring. The first thing that you need to understand...

Essential Operators Report for #StorageSpacesDirect

Mar 23, 2019 | S2D, Windows Server | 0 |

Hey Checkyourlogs Fans, I know we love Windows Admin Center for pretty much all things Storage Spaces Direct. However, at this time there are a few things that are missing for our wonderful HTML5 UI. The most important thing for Storage Spaces Direct admins is visibility into the ReFS, Deduplication, and Data Integrity logs. There has been much discussion around the Storage Spaces Direct Community surrounding volumes that go offline due to the DRT (Dirty Region Tracking) tables filling up. This normally happens when there is a catastrophic event to the cluster such as a hard power failure. Now,...

Don’t forget to configure your Power Management Settings for #StorageSpacesDirect via Windows Admin Center

Mar 23, 2019 | S2D, Windows Admin Center | 0 |

Hey Checkyourlogs Fans, Just a quick post here and a reminder to always configure your Power Management Settings for your Storage Spaces Direct nodes in both the BIOS and in Windows. Windows Admin Center has a hidden little gem that allows you to do this. It won’t show up in the configuration tabs that you see here: So where is it then? Scroll all the way to the bottom and you will find a settings wheel. Then come over to the Power Configuration tab and change the value to High Performance to match your BIOS Settings. That is it...

Activating DataON MUST via Windows Admin Center for #StorageSpacesDirect

Mar 23, 2019 | S2D, Windows Admin Center | 0 |

Hey Checkyourlogs Fans, Today I’m going to show you how to use the DataON MUST extension for Windows Admin Center. The only step that I have already completed is to register the DataON MUST extension by clicking on Settings, Extensions, and Installing it. As you can see below, it shows up as an installed extension inside of Windows Admin Center. Next, open up your Hyper-Converged Cluster Manager for Storage Spaces Direct. You will notice the new extension now shows up because we indeed are working with DataON hardware. The default view that you see above is make and model...

Automated SDDC Diagnostics via Windows Admin Center for #StorageSpacesDirect

Mar 23, 2019 | S2D, Windows Admin Center, Windows Server | 0 |

Hey Checkyourlogs fans, Today, I’m going to show you a little golden nugget that came with Windows Admin Center 1812+. I’m currently using version 1902, and it has added functionality to run diagnostic reports on Storage Spaces Direct automatically. Inside of Windows Admin Center in the Hyper-Converged section, you will notice a new Diagnostics tab. Just click on the install button to download the SDDC PowerShell Module on each of the nodes. You can see more information about this here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/storage/storage-spaces/data-collection It runs the following on each node: After it has been installed successfully you can just turn on...

The Case of Inventory Gathering using Microsoft MAP #MVPHour

Mar 13, 2019 | Hyper-V, Windows Server | 0 |

Hey Checkyourlogs Fans, I wanted to write to you today because sometimes the good old tools are just what the doctor ordered. I have used the Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit before, but I haven’t tried it out in a few years. I have to say that the latest version from November 2018 9.9.13.0 is pretty awesome. It is quite literally a Next,Next,Finish install. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=7826 Just download it onto a Management Server, have your Domain Admin rights ready, and scan the network. I needed some information for this client on 4 projects: Windows 2003/2008 EOL Exchange 2010 Migration to...

The Case of Excluding Microsoft Teams from #Office365 Installer #MVPHour

Mar 12, 2019 | Office365 | 0 |

Hey Checkyourlogs Fans, Just a quick post for you today. I was asked by a client this week to prevent the installation of Microsoft Teams from the Office 365 Click to Run Installer package. This customer exclusively uses Skype for Business and isn’t ready for Teams yet. Luckily this article from Microsoft came out this week: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/DeployOffice/teams-install#how-to-exclude-microsoft-teams-from-being-installed-by-default-on-devices-running-windows <Configuration> <Add OfficeClientEdition="64" Channel="Monthly"> <Product ID="O365ProPlusRetail"> <Language ID="en-us" /> <ExcludeApp ID="Teams" /> </Product> </Add> </Configuration> As it turns out it is quite easy to do. Just edit the configuration.xml file with the above settings, and you are in business. Currently, Microsoft Teams...

The Case of the Missing Deduplication Scheduled Tasks in Windows Server 2019 #StorageSpacesDirect #HyperV #MVPHour

Mar 9, 2019 | Hyper-V, S2D, Windows Server | 0 |

Hey Checkyourlogs Fans, Recently I have been deploying a lot of Storage Spaces Direct Configurations on Windows Server 2019. As many of you know, one of my favourite features of Windows Server 2019 is ReFS + Deduplication. Now, normally I will just go to the Task Schedule under Deduplication and kick off the 1st Pass Dedup jobs once I get things setup and some data moved over. To my horror, my scheduled tasks were gone on the last cluster I setup. I could go in via PowerShell and manually run them? start-dedupjob -volume 'c:\clusterstorage\csv01' -type optimization -verbose ...

Migrating VM’s with Passthrough and ISCSI disks to #StorageSpacesDirect using #Veeam Agent for Windows #MVPHour

Mar 9, 2019 | Hyper-V, S2D, Veeam | 0 |

Hey Checkyourlogs fans, Today I wanted to talk about moving non-standard workloads to your new Storage Spaces Direct Clusters. We recently ran into a real issue with some older Hyper-V Hosts that had been built using ISCSI from a Dell/EMC VNX SAN. The setup included a variety of directly presented ISCSI disks inside of the VM’s as well as pass-through disks. Well, this is where the rubber was about to come off the road for our project. Here was a quick list of the VM’s that needed to be migrated as part of this project. Our...

Ping Sweep Using PowerShell – Turning Into A Function – #PowerShell #MVPHour #PingSweep

Mar 6, 2019 | Cool Tools, Scripts, Windows 10, Windows Server | 0 |

Hey there checkyourlogs.net fans! In my last post, I described a quick bit of PowerShell code for pinging an IP range. Paste this code into VSCode or the ISE, run, and watch the results. Quick and dirty. Once I had this working, I wanted more. For instance, I want to run the code from a PowerShell command-line, passing parameters to change how it performs. To reach this end, I need to transform the code into a function complete with parameters. Don’t let the word function freak you out. Basic PowerShell functions don’t require 20 years of programming experience to...

How to use Veeam to archive on-premises data to Azure Blob #Veeam #Azure #Azure Blob #MVPHOUR

Feb 20, 2019 | Azure, Step-by-Step, Veeam | 10 |

Veeam released the Backup & Replication 9.5 Update 4 on January, also with this release, Veeam now also have support for Cloud based Object Storage, such as Azure Blob Storage which means that we can have the last 30 days of data stored on a local repository and then move the archive or later up to a Azure Blob but Azure Blob is capacity tier storage, you cannot use it as local backup repository and backup data to it directly. Let’s follow steps to configure it.

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Ping Sweep Using PowerShell -Quick and Dirty – #PowerShell #MVPHour

Feb 18, 2019 | Cool Tools, Scripts, Windows 10, Windows Server | 2 |

Hey there checkyourlogs.net fans! Today I needed to ping sweep an entire subnet from a Windows Server 2012 box. Simple, right? There are plenty of free and paid tools out there ready to perform this task. My dilemma was, and is, I don’t want to install additional software, no matter how small and tight, on servers. Especially anything requiring additional licensing or support software such as, GASP, JAVA. Nope, nada, not on my watch. Keep server configurations clean and concise is my motto. What to do? My need still existed, and oh, by the way was fairly urgent. PowerShell...

The Case of MMC.exe being blocked on Server 2019 – #WindowServer #MVPHour

Feb 17, 2019 | Hyper-V, Windows Admin Center, Windows Server | 0 |

Hey Checkyourlogs Fans, I had a customer call me this weekend with a weird issue. They would logon to a Hyper-V Server and would get the following error message stating the mmc.exe was blocked and basically anything that required this: Services.msc, devmgmt.msc, virtmgmt.msc wouldn’t run. Here is how I reproduced the error: Would return this: It turns out the customer was running an Insiders Build of Windows Server 2019 and it had expired a few months back. The Hyper-V Host and Virtual Machines were still running and thus why were not notified of this earlier. This looks like it...

Microsoft’s Mixed Messages Could Derail Windows Servicing Best Practices #Windows10 #WaaS

Feb 13, 2019 | Uncategorized, Windows 10 | 0 |

Background During the tepid Summer of 2018, Microsoft announced that it would be extending Windows 10 support for Education and Enterprise customers from 18 months to 30 months. In conjunction with that extension, they also announced that Windows 7 would receive additional support options for a hefty monthly fee. On the surface, I’m sure Microsoft’s marketing department thought these updates would generate goodwill and cheers of celebration. At a deeper level of analysis, the decisions by Microsoft are worthy of a facepalm because they fly in the face of how organizations should approach managing their Windows 10 ecosystem. I’ve...

BUG Reports – Windows Server 2019 Storage Spaces Direct Field Notes – January 2019 Edition – Not what we expected #StorageSpacesDirect

Feb 7, 2019 | S2D, Windows Server | 14 |

Hey Checkyourlogs Fans, I am writing to you here tonight after having some not so fun nights dealing with persisting issues with Windows Server 2019 and Storage Spaces Direct this month. Let me preface this with the fact that we are early adopters and all of my clients so far understand this and are willing to working Microsoft and the Vendors to improve the experience. WSSD is slated to come out with full certifications starting in March of 2019. My customer has decided to purchase a brand new Hyper-Converged Cluster running all NVME SSD flash drives. We have seen...

MVPDays Online January 2019 – Live Stream #Azure #MVPHour #Office365 #DevOps #MVPBuzz

Jan 30, 2019 | MVP, MVPDays | 0 |

Hey MVPDays Fans, MVPDays January was another smashing success. This marked the 2nd time we have used Youtube with as our platform which included live Chat for Q/A with attendees and our experts. You can view it live and on demand here: Direct link is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YghmTspPHSw For the schedule of speakers see below: Cristal and I hope you enjoyed the show and look forward to seeing you again soon. Cristal and Dave Co-Founders of MVPDays...

STEP BY STEP INSTALL VEEAM ONE 9.5 UPDATE 4 #VEEAM #WINDOWSSERVER #MVPHOUR #STEP BY STEP

Jan 30, 2019 | Step-by-Step, Veeam | 0 |

As you know, Veeam released the service pack 4 on January 2019, it’s not fix bugs only, it also includes a lot of new features –
Support for Microsoft Windows Server 2019,
Application-level monitoring,
Dedicated view for job and disk-based alarms, Veeam Agents support, Enhanced Cloud Gateway view, Enhanced “Cloud Connect Inventory” report, Microsoft Hyper-V 2019 Support…
The details information you can check from Veeam website https://www.veeam.com/veeam_one_9_5_whats_new_wn.pdf and https://www.veeam.com/veeam_one_9_5_u4_release_notes_rn.pdf.
The steps are straightforward, but you still need to be careful about one thing, the first one is “If you use Veeam ONE to monitor Veeam Backup & Replication or Veeam Cloud Connect, be sure to install Update 4 for Veeam ONE 9.5 first” and the second is “If you are a tenant of a cloud provider, please contact your provider before upgrading to ensure the provider has applied Update 4 on their end”.

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The Case of: Windows Server 2019 Hyper-V Checkpoint stuck at 9% after Veeam 9.5 UR 4 Upgrade – #Veeam #Hyper-V

Jan 29, 2019 | Veeam, Windows Server | 14 |

Hey Checkyourlogs Fans, Today I had an interesting case where a customer called in to let us know that Checkpoints were stuck on their Windows Server 2019 Hyper-V Host. Everything had been working great on this host since it was upgraded from Windows Server 2016 back in November. The only change was we upgraded to Veeam 9.5 Update Rollup 4, and then we started experiencing these issues with Checkpoints and Disk Locks. How we noticed this was the failing Veeam Backup and Replica Jobs to and from this host. You can see that it is stuck with Creating Checkpoint...