Microsoft Ignite Session Catalog

By Tomica Kaniski in Other 0 Comment

It’s here! Smile

Microsoft finally published a session catalog of the upcoming Ignite conference.

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Look at the session catalog and pick your sessions (or if you are not coming, just take a look and see what you’re missing Smile). From what I’ve seen, there are so many great sessions – I hope to hear them all!

Also, participate in the official #IgniteJam on Twitter on Februray 3rd (9:00AM PT).

More info is available at the official blog post and on the official conference website.

Cheers!

New Hyper-V books

By Tomica Kaniski in Other 0 Comment

If you are in search for something to read – there are two new Hyper-V books, written by my MVP colleagues, that I can recommend.

The first one is called Hyper-V Best Practices, written by Benedict Berger (Microsoft MVP), and it covers… well… best practices with Hyper-V. Smile

By reading this book, you’ll learn:

  • Install Hyper-V and virtual machines automated through PowerShell
  • Create High Availability solutions with failover clustering
  • Protect from disasters with Hyper-V Replica
  • Utilize the performance and scalability of storage virtualization
  • Build a flexible network infrastructure without physical boundaries
  • Design performance measurement and tuning action plans
  • Manage your Hyper-V stack with System Center
  • Move existing virtualization workloads to Hyper-V

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You can find more about this book (and purchase it) here.

The second book is called Hyper-V Security, written by Eric Siron and Andy Syrewicze (Microsoft MVP).

By reading this one, you’ll learn:

  • Defend the network and disk resources that Hyper-V relies on
  • Control access to Hyper-V, both locally and remotely
  • Automate security policies using Group Policy
  • Leverage Hyper-V’s isolation features to protect services while still providing necessary access to resources
  • Combine Hyper-V with external technologies to provide a strong defense-in-depth system
  • Identify and explain security needs to organization officials reluctant to provide proper funding
  • Protect your virtual infrastructure when System Center VMM is present
  • Make management of multiple on-premise private clouds and Azure-based public clouds more secure with App Controller

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You can find more about this book and purchase it here.

Happy reading!

Hyper-V reporting script

By Tomica Kaniski in Other 5 Comments

There’s something nice for all you Hyper-V admins out there – don’t know if you’ve seen it already, but Serhat Akinci (my MVP colleague) made a great script for reporting the health of your Hyper-V hosts, called Get-HyperVReport.

You can use it on local or remote Hyper-V hosts and clusters, schedule and e-mail the reports (something to read while enjoying the morning coffee… or tea Smile), and they look like this:

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Highlights (from TechNet page):

  • More than 2600+ lines of PowerShell, HTML and CSS code examples
  • Creates a plain but detailed and user-friendly HTML report which is compatible with all modern browsers
  • Provides more detailed information via tooltips in the HTML report. (cells with asteriks and highlighted)
  • Checks and installs required runtime environment prerequisites like Hyper-V and Clustering PowerShell
  • Collects information by using standard Hyper-V and Clustering PowerShell cmdlets and custom WMI queries
  • Shows alerts in the report for certain situations (utilizations, VM checkpoints, replication status, etc.)
  • Can be used directly from command-line or as a scheduled Windows task
  • Supports report delivery via e-mail with advanced options. (authentication, TLS/SSL, multiple recipients)
  • Includes a mode that reports only alerts in the Hyper-V environment. (aka HighlightsOnly mode)
  • Advanced error handling and logging. (Console messages and log file)

Download of this script, and more information about it, is available at TechNet Gallery. And remember – don’t let your Hyper-V hosts run all by themselves! Smile

Cheers!

Internet sharing & MikroTik saved the day(s)!

By Tomica Kaniski in Other 0 Comment

This week I was with a customer, assisting them with moving the office to another location. As the whole “migration” was done in a hurry, some things were not prepared on time – there was no Internet access on the second location. This was quite a problem, because people had to work during the move (they had to generate and send reports, invoices, respond to e-mails, etc.).

However, the good thing was that the networking was already done and servers were moved relatively fast. So… we had servers and networking up and running in no time, and we got even some “spare parts” – couple of MikroTik routers.

As I’ve said already – without Internet, people couldn’t do much, so I’ve had an idea to use someone’s phone and one of the “spare” routers to provide temporary Internet access for the whole network. I’ve connected one router to a network switch, grabbed someone’s iPhone, enabled Internet sharing on it, and then connected my notebook to the wired network, so that I could configure the router.

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As you can see on the previous picture, I’ve set my SSID and password to “blog.kaniski.eu”, and I’ll use this later in my router configuration.

Note: I don’t have an iPhone near me right now, so I’m using my Lumia 930 and MikroTik RB751U-2HnD router to “emulate” this scenario… sorry about that. Smile

Router’s configuration that was used is actually very simple – here’s the whole script (note that I’ve changed the ranges, names, etc. for privacy reasons):

And… voilà – my network should have Internet access now! As you can see, my Lumia shows one client connected, and now I can access the Internet from behind my MikroTik router. Pretty cool! Smile

internet_sharing_connected

If you, by any chance, don’t have a DHCP server in you network, your router can help you with that as well. All you need to do is following:

You can check if your router (and the rest of your network) is connected to phone’s wireless (and Internet), by opening the router’s admin page in your favorite web browser (http://10.10.10.254/ in our case):

wifi_connected

Although things didn’t go exactly like planned, this little trick enabled people to work while waiting for the “real Internet access”. Right now is three days from implementing this temporary solution and still no “real Internet” in sight… maybe next week. Sad smile

Thanks for reading and have a great weekend!