CheckYourLogs.Net

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 | 6 |

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.

Advertisements

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”.

Advertisements

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 | 8 |

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...

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

Jan 28, 2019 | Step-by-Step, Veeam | 0 |

Veeam released the service pack 4 on January, it includes to fix some support issues and it also support some current platforms – Microsoft Windows Server 2019, Microsoft Windows Server Hyper-V 2019, Microsoft Active Directory 2019, Exchange 2019 and SharePoint 2019, Microsoft Windows 10 October 2018 Update, Oracle Database 18c, VMware vSphere 6.7 U1 ESXi, vCenter Server and vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) , VMware vCloud Director 9.5 …. and Expanded restore options to AWS and Azure Stack with Veeam Cloud Mobility, Native Object Storage Support with Veeam Cloud Tier, Improved Security and Compliance with Veeam DataLabs.

Advertisements

BUG Alert – Windows Server 2019 Hyper-V Triple Fault Bug Workaround – #Hyper-v #StorageSpacesDirect #Veeam

Jan 18, 2019 | Hyper-V, S2D, Veeam, Windows Server | 7 |

Hey Checkyourlogsfans, We have been experiencing an issue in the field for a while now with Server 2019 where when a VM that is migrated to 2019 it fails with a Triple Fault: Critical 03/01/2019 16:13:49 Hyper-V-Worker 18560 None ‘Test VM 1’ was reset because an unrecoverable error occurred on a virtual processor that caused a triple fault. If the problem persists, contact Product Support. (Virtual machine ID 90B45891-E0EB-4842-8070-F30FF25C663A) Right now, Microsoft does not have a fix for this issue and today came up with the following workaround. Quote: Ben Armstrong – Microsoft “In the meantime, it is possible...

BUG Alert – SDDC Management Resource (Windows Admin Center) is Impacting Storage Spaces Direct Virtual Machines on Server 2019 – #StorageSpacesDirect #S2D #WindowsAdminCenter

Jan 14, 2019 | S2D, Windows Admin Center | 1 |

Hey Checkyourlogs fans, I had the pleasure over the past few weeks to work with a customer that had recently deployed Windows Server 2019 and Storage Spaces Direct. With any early deployment, we expect to hit some bumps in the road, and we found a good one this week. Microsoft has identified a bug that relates to the SDDC Management Resource inside of Failover Clustering. Basically what happens is that this resource times out via calls from Windows Admin Center and causes the RHS process to terminate causing running Highly Available Virtual Machines in the Cluster to crash and...

Join us for the first ever MVPDays Microsoft Flow Conference – #MSFLowConf #MicrosoftFlow #MVPHour

Dec 11, 2018 | MVPDays, Office365 | 0 |

Hey Checkyourlogs Fans, Today, I’m writing to you with some exciting news. We have over 5000 people registered all ready for our Microsoft Flow online event tomorrow. It is at capacity, and we have even gone beyond what Goto Webinar can even handle. Good news for you though is that we have a live Simulcast running on youtube with unlimited capacity. http://aka.ms/flowconf Please join us in celebrating what could be the largest online community event in history. If you want to checkout the speakers and schedule go to www.mvpdays.com You can also still register there for the waitlist and...

Script for port range forwarding in Azure #Azure #NAT #Microsoft #MVPhours

Nov 10, 2018 | Azure | 1 |

Today I will be talking about a script which Angus @FrostedFright has made for port range forwarding. If you don’t already know about setting up NAT and port forwarding via Routing and Remote Access tool then you should check out my previously blog that is called, “How to build Hyper-V nested VMs with multiple IP addresses Port Forwarding at Azure” and you can come back to this blog so you can understand this subject clearer than if you didn’t check out my previously blog. You should think that it is now easy to make multiple port forwarding, but it is a lot harder to use port range forwarding instead. Let’s get started with this tutorial!

Advertisements

How to Create Azure account with $250 credit for free #Azure #MVPHOUR #Cloud #FREE

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

As we know, there are lots of features on Microsoft Azure cloud, in order to use those features, you need to create a Microsoft Azure account, it’s very easy to create, also you will get $200 credits at the first month.
If you are a newcomer on Microsoft Azure, no worry, I am going to show you how to create Azure free account with $200 credits today, just follow the steps as below.

Advertisements

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.

Advertisements

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.

Advertisements

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...