Jason Yoder, MCT

Pass Through disks are ideal in situations in which you need to exceed the 2 TB capacity limitation of the .VHD format.  In using a Pass Through disk, you will not have the ability to use snapshots.  The maximum size for a Pass Thru disk is????  Unfortunately after a long Google and Bing session, I could not find this answer.  I did find an article about an organization that linked (6) 2 TB hard drives and created a 12 TB pass-through disk that was functional.  I also saw that during some maintenance, they had a problem getting the VM back online. As always, test before putting a new configuration into production. Please post your maximum Pass Through disks sizes here and tell us how successful your implementation has been.

The Capture image in Windows Deployment Service allows you to capture an image without having to create a WindowsPE boot disk.  This process will automatically transfer the captured image to the image storage location that you created when you set up WDS. First you need to have the WDS server setup correctly. Once you have installed your images from an installation DVD, click Boot Images . Right click the boot image and click Create Capture Image . Enter the Image name and a description for it. Click Browse . You now need to go to the Sources folder on your installation media and find the file called boot.wim . Click Next Once the image loads, check Add image to the Windows Deployment Server now and click Next . Click Next three times. Click Finish Next you need to boot your client to LAN.  You may have to reconfigure your BIOS settings or press a function key to get to your boot menu. Take note that depending on your configuration, you may have a...

If you recently made a change to the Boot Configuration Data store, you may see this error when starting a VM in Hyper-V First, verify that virtualization support is turned on in your BIOS.  If it is and a power cycle of the server does not resolve the problem, you may not have the Hypervisor loading during the boot sequence.  To check for this problem, open a command prompt with administrative privileges. Type bcdedit and press Enter .  Tyhe output in red is the currently loaded boot configuration The output in blue is a boot configuration that will allow Hyper-V to run. Notice the data in green is missing from the current boot configuration. Type bcdedit /set {current} hypervisorlaunchtype auto and press Enter .  You should get a response The operation completed successfully . Type bcdedit to see the new results. Now, restart the server and give it a try.

One of PowerShell V2’s strongest assets is its remote management capability.  When you enable remote management, a few actions are taken.   Enables the WinRM service Starts the WinRM service. Set’s the WinRM Service to start automaticlly. A modification is made to the Windows Firewall to permit incoming WinRM connections.  (Outgoing connections are allowed by default.) Windows PowerShell is registered as a WinRM endpoint.  Both the 32 and 64 bit versions are registered.  This allows the WinRM service to be able to send and received back commands and information to applications on your remote clients. You will be prompted (if manually doing this) to confirm your decision.  This is because this action has an impact level of “high".   You can manually enable PowerShell Remoting by opening a PowerShell session with local administrative rights and entering the cmdlet Enable-PSRemoting .  You will be prompted to conf...

For VMM implementations of over 150 hosts, Microsoft advises you to enable Server Optimized Garbage Collection (GC).  Workstation GC is the default and is only available on single processor systems.  Server GC is available for multiprocessor computers. This method, according to Microsoft, starts to provide benefits of computers with 4 or more processors.  Below are the instructions to implement Server Optimized GC from Microsoft. To accomplish this, simply create a new filed named vmmservice.exe.config and place this file in the same location as vmmservice.exe (VMMservice.exe is located in the bin directory of the VMM server role installation) This link:  http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=102219 , will show you what the contents of this file need to be. Reference: http://blogs.technet.com/b/m2/archive/2009/02/04/how-to-enable-server-optimized-garbage-collector-for-vmm.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc165011(office.11).aspx

Virtualizing your servers is a good way to reduce your expenses through hardware reduction.  You simply take several underutilized servers and move their activities to a single server.  This does create the obvious issue of single point of failure. This set of instructions will help you set up a test lab for Hyper-V failover.  In a production failover environment, you would utilize at least 2 servers for the fail over cluster.  It is best to use two identical servers for this purpose. Also, you need to check to make sure all the hardware in the servers is supported by Windows Server 2008 R2.  It increases the chances of a successful failover.  You should also have 2 NICs in these servers.  One for the public network, and one for the storage network.  The final element will be a highly available storage system.  This storage system will hold the virtual machine.  A simple diagram of this setup looks like this: In this test, we will u...

In System Center Virtual Machine Manager, you can create a quota point system to restrict how many VMs your self service users can run at any one time.  By using the quota points, you can prevent your users from accidentally, or intentionally creating a Denial-of-Service attack on your host servers. We all know that virtual machines do not have to be created equally.  In other words, they may consume more or less resources than other VMs.  For this reason, you can assign a different quota point value to different virtual machines.  That way a single user, or group of users will not fire up resource intensive VMs and bring your hosts to their knees. To do this, open System Center Virtual Machine Manager. On the menu bar, click Go \ Virtual Machines Right click the VM that you want to change the default quota point value for. Click Properties Click the Settings tab. Notice the default value for the Quota is 1.  For VMs that are resource intensive, you ...

For those of use who need to have a server that can boot into multiple Operating systems, we may have an issue on the boot menu where we have different bootable operating systems with the same name.  Take a look below.   I got to this by clicking Start and then right clicking Computer and selecting Properties . In the upper left, I clicked  Advanced System Properties . On the System Properties window, I clicked the Advanced tab. In the Startup and Recovery box, I clicked Settings… You can see in the Default Operating System dropdown, I have two Windows Server 2008 R2 configurations listed, Which one do I want to use?  Here is how to fix that. Open an command prompt with Administrative level permissions. Type bcdedit /enum and press Enter We are interested in the Description and the Identifier .  Since the OS that I want to change the description is the current default boot, I simply need to look for an ID of {current}. Now type bcd...

  On occasion, you may have misplaced your documentation on which ports AD LDS is listening on.  We have all “misplaced” our documentation before.  Open a command prompt with administrative privileges on the server hosting the AD LDS instance. Type dsdbutil “li I” q and press Enter In the above image, you can see both the LDAP port and the secure LDAP port being used by the AD LDS instance.

You may not have an error at all.  Take a look at the drive mapping below. The red triangle is what threw us off.  It is not an error.  It is simply a color representation of the Replace option of the Action field in the properties of the drive mappings. Create action This give you a green triangle. The Create action creates a new mapped drive for users. Replace Action The Replace action gives you a red triangle.  This action will delete and recreate mapped drives for users. The net result of the Replace action is to overwrite all existing settings associated with the mapped drive. If the drive mapping does not exist, then the Replace action creates a new drive mapping. Update Action The Update action will have a yellow triangle. Update will modify settings of an existing mapped drive for users. This action differs from Replace in that it only updates settings defined within the preference item. All other settings remain as configured on the ma...

Like all OS components and software from Microsoft that you want to manage with PowerShell, you need to import the proper module.  To get a list of all available modules, open a PowerShell session. Type Get-module –ListAvailable and press Enter . Since the installed server roles, features and software determine the returned list, your list will be different then mine.  To ensure that I am able to import the module that I need, make sure the role, feature, or software is installed.  Once it is installed, you can import the appropriate module. Import-Module RemoteDesktopServices This will import the cmdlets associate with the role service of  Remote Desktop Session Host .  As you add additional role services, additional cmdlets will be available to you. 

The Active Directory Recycle Bin is available for: Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter The AD Recycle Bin is not available on: Windows Server 2008 R2 for Itanium-Based Systems Windows Web Server 2008 R2 Just remember that you must be at Windows Server 2008 R2 Forest functional level before AD Recycle Bin is available.

When you are in the PowerShell shell environment, executing a script can be a bit of a pain.  Normally you need to type the entire path to get the script to execute.  For example, you may need to type C:\Users\JohnDoe\Scripts\Myscript.ps1 .  You do not have to do this.  If you are in the directory that the script resides, simple type .\MyScript.ps1 and it will execute Reference: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee176949.aspx

Exchange CALs (Client Access License) can be expensive and you may not want to manage an email account for an external contact such as a contractor. You can still provide that contact data in your Exchange GAL (Global Address List) for your users to easily access without purchasing a CAL. On the Exchange server, open the Exchange Management Console . Expand Microsoft Exchange On-Premises (domain name) / Recipient Group . Right click Mail Contact and select New Mail Contact . At this point you have a choice of configuring an existing contact from Active Directory, our creating that contact in Active Directory from the Exchange Management Console. From this article, select New Contact and click Next . You can now select the OU to store this contact by checking Specify the Organizational Unit rather than using the default one and clicking Browse The default container will be the Users container, unless you have redirected it. Choose the OU to store the contacts. In the ...

Once you have your shared folders correctly configured, you can use Group Policy Preferences to configure the drive mappings on your clients.  This is a nice improvement from the days of using VBScript to map drives on your clients and it also saves us a lot of time in customizing the drive mappings. In your Group Policy Management Console, either use an existing GPO, or create a new one.  In this case, I created a GPO called DriveMappings. Expand User Configuration \ Preferences \ Drive Maps Right click Drive Maps and select New \ Mapped Drive In the New Drive Properties window, fill in the information below In the Action: field, select Create In the Location field, select the UNC path to your share. In the Label as: field, provide a name. In the Drive Letter: area, choose what is appropriate Click OK . If you want to designate a mapped drive for different users, you can use security groups to determine which users get which location m...

In smaller environments, you will from time to time need to move user accounts from one Organizational unit to another.  Active Directory Users and Computers will work fine for this task. In larger environments, you may need to move hundreds at a time.  Using AD Users and Computers for a task like this is inefficient and will greatly increase the labor cost of the project.  The labor being yours of course. This question came from one of my Windows 2008 Server classes.  It actually came as a question from a lab as to whether or not PowerShell could do this.  Not only can it do this, bit it can do it much faster and in a more robust way then the manual method. To set this problem up, I created the OU structure below: I have 3 users each in the Indianapolis, Denver, and Tampa OU.  I want to move 6 of those nine users into the Dallas OU.  This is a very small move.  Scale this problem out to 9,000 total users with 6,000 of them needing to be m...