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Category Archives: Private cloud

Microsoft – Introduction to Hyper-V Jump Start videos and Q&A transcript

The videos of the “Introduction to Hyper-V Jump Start” have been posted to Microsoft Virtual Academy:
https://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/tracks/introduction-to-hyper-v-jump-start

Unfortunately however, the link to the Q&A transcript has only been sent by mail to participants. The Q&A has very valuable information in it as well, so be sure to take a look at it here.

[EDIT] I mailed the MVA people and they added the Q&A to the MVA website as well. Love the MVA [EDIT]

 

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VMware – The VMware virtualcenter server service terminated with service specific error code 2

A friend of mine who is still a student has been building his own VMware lab environment for some time now. Yesterday he contacted me that he couldn’t get the “VMware VirtualCenter Server service” to start anymore.

The log showed: EventID 7021 “The VMware VirtualCenter Server service terminated with service-specific error 2 (0×2).”

A quick google search however showed that many things could be causing this error. Because it was a lab environment, I wanted to upgrade the virtual center to the latest version. Before doing so, I took a look at the VMware blog post covering the latest update 5.1.0B. In the readme it said:

SSO service dependency on MS SQL
When SSO is installed with local Microsoft SQL Server, the services must start in a specific order.
SSO must start after SQL Server starts. If SSO starts before SQL Server starts, restart the SSO
server after SQL server starts.”

Doing so resolved the issue. To prevent the issue from re-occurring, I made the SSO service dependent on the SQL service.

I don’t understand why this is not part of the automated installation process though 😦

 

 

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VDI – Free Train Signal video series : “Intro To Desktop Virtualization”

For those who are unfamiliar with Desktop Virtualization, Train Signal is providing a free video series “Intro To Desktop Virtualization on YouTube.

Be sure to check out these websites and twitter accounts as well if you want to keep track of what Train Signal is doing:

http://www.trainsignal.com
@TrainSignal
@davidmdavis

 

 

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Office 365 – Exchange Online mailbox Default MRM Policy might result in unwanted loss of mail

While I was studying for the 74-324 exam, I was reminded that by default the “Default MRM Policy” will be applied to a new mailbox (when you enable archiving)..

Very simply put, some items will be deleted or archived after a specific period of time. By example, files in your deleted folder will be removed after 30 days. This is unexpected for most people who are used to be able to browse their “deleted items” indefinitely.

Personally, I don’t want this to be automated because I want to be completely in control of my mail items. Especially considering the very large mailbox sizes with Office 365 (and even unlimited size for some subscription plans) I have disabled this “Default MRM Policy”.

You can set/disable the retention policy either using PowerShell or using the web interface by going to the mailbox, details, retention policy and selecting no policy.

Also if you want to know more about archiving, take a look at a couple of blog posts created on Techdom.nl by my colleague Dominique Hermans.

PS:Also take a look at this great post discussing backups, recovering deleted items and why you might want to enable litigation hold: http://www.spaceage.co.za/blog/technical/office-365-backup-data/. Also take a look at this article covering single instance recovery: http://help.outlook.com/en-us/140/hh125820.aspx.

 

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Home LAB – How to use Windows 8 Client Hyper-V and VMware Workstation on the same machine

In yesterday’s post I described that for my purposes it was still necessary to run VMware Workstation sometimes despite having Client Hyper-V installed on my Windows 8 machine.

What you have to keep in mind though, is that you’re already running a hypervisor when you have Client Hyper-V installed in Windows 8. Installing and running VMware Workstation might cause problems. So unfortunately you cannot run them at the same time. This is also true for other virtualization products like by example virtualbox.

As a workaround you can either uninstall or (temporarily) disable Hyper-V. When you want to switch between Hyper-V and VMware Workstation it is ofcourse best to just temporarily disable Hyper-V.

In this forum post, a couple of methods are described to (temporarily) disable Hyper-V. It includes creating a seperate boot menu entry to boot with Hyper-V disabled and modifying the setting either through registry or a command. All methods do require a reboot however.

PS:

  • This kind of configuration is ofcourse not supported and should only be used for testing purposes in non production environments.
  • Depending on both your hardware and what your planning to do, you might also want to consider:
    • Running VMware ESXi from a USB stick
    • Running Windows 8 from a USB stick with Windows To Go (WTG).
  • It should also work on Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 and up, but I haven’t tested it.
 

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Event – Free Microsoft IT Camps

On a regular basis Microsoft and its partners host Free IT Camps. In the past I’ve blogged about them because I really think they’re a good way to quickly get up-to-date on products and technologies. Besides that it’s also a good way to get to know other people.

On the Microsoft Events website you can see which future events are available and not just IT Camps events.

Also should you not be able to attend an IT Camp, for Server 2012 you can also use IT Camps On-Demand.

 

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Powershell – Get Percentage of Pysical and Virtual Servers from your VMware and Cisco UCS combined for each location

In a previous blog post I’ve already shown this script that use PowerCLI to get the percentage of physical and virtual servers from your VMware environment for each Virtual Center server. This script however only took into account ESX hosts and VM’s in each Virtual Center server separately.

This means that:

  • The UCS blades weren’t taken into account as physical servers.
  • No percentage was being calculated for each physical location.

This new script automates determining for each location the number of physical and virtual servers in VMware vSphere and Cisco UCS.

PS: You can get more detailed information from the script, but it has been disabled using comments by default.

 

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PowerShell – Get UCS Blade Count

PowerShell has been adopted by many companies already including VMware and Cisco with its Unified Computing System (UCS).

This simple script will use the Cisco UCS PowerTool to connect to UCS and determine the blade count for each UCS server you’ve defined.

 

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PowerShell – Get the percentage of physical and virtual servers from your VMware environment

With the current focus on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) including Green IT, it might be important to know what percentage of servers has been virtualized.

This script I made will use PowerCLI to get the percentage of physical and virtual servers from your VMware environment for each Virtual Center server. You can specify multiple Virtual Center servers if desired.

 

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Home LAB – Virtualization and how to enable nested ESXi and other hypervisors in VMware vSphere 5.1

As a passionate ICT person, I work with multiple virtualization products including Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware vSphere.

At home I’m running Server 2012 with Hyper-V in my home lab and even though it works perfectly, I miss the option to be able to run multiple other hypervisors beneath it like by example multiple Hyper-V, VMware ESXi or Citrix XenServer instances.

With VMware products like VMware Fusion, VMware Workstation you can enable this with only a couple of minor adjustments as described in these great articles:

For me personally, I’ll stay with my Hyper-V based home server and my Windows 8 Client with Client Hyper-V installed. For testing purposes however, I’ll have to use VMware Workstation 9 on my Windows 8 machine.  (even though I have Client Hyper-V installed). This way I can still run other hypervisors when needed.

I still hope though that Microsoft will add a similar feature to Hyper-V in the future.

 

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