Other | Tom's Notes

Missed the Microsoft Ignite 2016?

By Tomica Kaniski in Other 05/10/2016 0 Comment

Don’t be sad! Smile

In case you’ve missed the Microsoft Ignite conference this year (like me Smile ), all of its content is available online! You can visite the conference homepage (https://ignite.microsoft.com/) and catch video streams and…

… even better – there is a PowerShell script that can help you download the videos and slides of about 570 Ignite sessions!!! How cool is that???

Script was made by Michel de Rooij and Mattias Fors, and can be found here (read the “help” section to figure out what you need and how to use it).

When launched (properly), it looks something like this:

Happy downloading, watching and learning! Smile

Cheers!

P.S. With the script alone, you’ll need the YouTube downloader utility available here (it actually says so in the script’s “help”, but who reads the documentation, right? Smile ).

Microsoft MVP… times 7!

By Tomica Kaniski in Other 04/10/2016 0 Comment

A couple of days ago, another achievement was unlocked – Microsoft rewarded me with another MVP award (7th in a row, actually Smile ), again for my contributions to the Cloud and Datacenter Management community.

Thank you, Microsoft! (and also a big “thank you” to all of you who were with me during this wonderful 7 years… thank you for all your support!)

And for the year ahead, I wish myself many “challenging” situations in the cloud and datacenter area… where so many interesting things take place. Smile

Cheers!

MobilityDay 2016

By Tomica Kaniski in Other 01/10/2016 0 Comment

As mentioned before, I was at the MobilityDay 2016 conference on Thursday, where I’ve had an honor to deliver a session about Citrix XenMobile & NetScaler solutions (yup, I know… it’s not Hyper-V… go figure… but my demo environment was still runnning on top of Hyper-V, so…).

Session was actually a short introduction to what Citrix XenMobile solution offers and how to set it all up, combined with NetScaler, for a complete management of mobile devices and mobile applications.

Conference was great, as always – so much old (and new) faces, with lots of fun. This time it was actually a 10th birthday of MobilityDay!

(photo by Romeo)

Happy birthday, MobilityDay! (and congrats to the organizers) Smile

Slides are available at my SlideShare:

XenMobile: Enterprise mobility management solution from Tomica Kaniski

Cheers!

The backup destination is not writable…

By Tomica Kaniski in Other 21/09/2016 2 Comments

So… you decided to finally configure backup for your servers, and just when you’ve chosen the “backup solution”, troubles start.

What do we need for doing Windows Server backups?

Nothing too fancy – we can use the built-in Windows Server Backup (feature that needs to be installed through Server Manager, PowerShell, …) combined with some location (network share, disk, volume) with enough free space. (yes, we can also use some other backup software, but this is not the topic here)

Let’s say that we have installed Windows Server Backup feature and chosen a network share for our backup location. The one other thing we need on this share are the right permissions for our service account (an account under which the backups will be done – for example, BackupAccount).

So, we go to this share (\\BackupLocation\MyBackups\) and check if our service account has the required permissions:

Everything looks fine (our service account has permissions, folder is shared and accessible from the source server – yes, Windows Firewall is also configured properly ).

We go back to our source server where we configure our backup schedule as a Full Computer backup, once a day, to the backup location previously mentioned, using the service account previously specified for this backup job. Everything goes fine.

Then, just for fun, we try to run our backup schedule (just to see if everything works as it should). We click on the Backup Once option (with Using the previously scheduled… option), and just at the end of this wizard, we receive the following error, saying that our backup destination is not writable (yes, it’s the good old Windows Server 2008 R2, but it really doesn’t matter… the same happens on newer/older versions as well ):

What happened???

We’ve checked (and double-checked) everything – our share, permissions, Windows Firewall, and “who knows what”, and this wizard still says we cannot write to the backup destination! This must be an issue with the free, out-of-the-box backup solution.

Not really.

The issue here is that I’m running the Windows Server Backup console as “myself” (i.e. my user, for example, SERVER\tomica) and I don’t really have the required permissions on the backup share (I’m not a member of the local Administrators group on the backup destination and, as you may remember, only our BackupAccount has the required permissions set).

So, is this an issue?

No, not really because our scheduled backup will complete successfully (it will be running under the user account with correct permissions on a backup share).

And, if we really want to make this first backup right now, we can run it from the Task Scheduler console (by checking the “Allow task to be run on demand” checkbox first, for the backup task).

Hope this helps someone with similar problems (it’s kind of a dumb “issue”, but…).

Cheers!

Hyper-V best practices at KulenDayz 2016

By Tomica Kaniski in Other 17/09/2016 0 Comment

It’s that time of the year again – conference time! Smile

First of the conferences I was at was the KulenDayz 2016 conference. I love KulenDayz! So many nice people, friends, colleagues, MVPs and kids gathering at awesome (and relaxed) sessions, enjoying wonderful nature (and food). Smile

This year I’ve had the honor to speak about Hyper-V best practices – I’ve tried to gather the most of best practices around Hyper-V deployments that I’ve seen/learned/done over the years in an easy 50-minute session. Considering the reactions from the attendees and other speakers, it was a great session! (thank you all!)

As every one of us has hers/his best practices around Hyper-V, I’m expecting your comments, thoughts and corrections… we are all learning from each other!

Session slides have been uploaded to SlideShare:

Hyper-V: Best Practices from Tomica Kaniski

Big thanks to the organizers for another great KulenDayz experience!!!

Next conference is Mobility Day 2016, which is in about two weeks. I’ll be speaking about something completely different – Citrix XenMobile and NetScaler. Fun times!

Cheers!

Playing with folders and permissions

By Tomica Kaniski in Other 11/01/2016 0 Comment

This one will be short and sweet. Smiješak

Imagine you have an Active Directory full of users. You also have a file server in your environment. And, as it happens, each of your users needs to have a folder created just for himself, on this file server. Each folder should have inheritance disabled and each user should get full permissions on his folder.

What do you do?

Well, we can manually create the required folders, or we can use a PowerShell script which will do it for us. Obviously, I’ve chosen PowerShell (maybe not the nicest script in the world, but it does the job), or this post would be… lame. Smiješak

So, the interesting part of this script goes like this (I’ve added a few empty lines to make comments more visible):

# get user/folder names from Active Directory (SamAccountName property)
$users = Get-ADUser -Filter * | Select SamAccountName

foreach($user in $users)
{
    $folder = "D:\Share\$user"
    
    # create a (sub)folder for each user
    New-Item -Path $folder -Type Directory
    
    # read the current access rules applied to a folder
    $acl = Get-Acl -Path $folder

    # disable the inheritance, but leave the inherited access rules in place
    $acl.SetAccessRuleProtection($True, $True)
    
    # add Full access rule for a specific user
    $rule = New-Object System.Security.AccessControl.FileSystemAccessRule("$user","FullControl", "ContainerInherit, ObjectInherit", "None", "Allow")

    # add this rule to existing ruleset
    $acl.AddAccessRule($rule)

    # and finally, apply the new ruleset to a folder
    Set-Acl -Path $folder -AclObject $acl
}

# get user/folder names from Active Directory (SamAccountName property)

$users = Get-ADUser -Filter * | Select SamAccountName

foreach($user in $users)

{

$folder = "D:\Share\$user"

# create a (sub)folder for each user

New-Item -Path $folder -Type Directory

# read the current access rules applied to a folder

$acl = Get-Acl -Path $folder

# disable the inheritance, but leave the inherited access rules in place

$acl.SetAccessRuleProtection($True, $True)

# add Full access rule for a specific user

$rule = New-Object System.Security.AccessControl.FileSystemAccessRule("$user","FullControl", "ContainerInherit, ObjectInherit", "None", "Allow")

# add this rule to existing ruleset

$acl.AddAccessRule($rule)

# and finally, apply the new ruleset to a folder

Set-Acl -Path $folder -AclObject $acl

}

Cheers!

Inside the Microsoft OMS

By Tomica Kaniski in Other 06/01/2016 0 Comment

Are you looking for some great Operations Management Suite (OMS) resources?

Earlier today something great got published – a preview version of a new free e-book on OMS! Book, which is called Inside the Microsoft Operations Management Suite, was authored by four OMS experts – Tao Yang, Stanislav Zhelyazkov, Pete Zerger and Anders Bengtsson.

Haven’t had a chance to read it just yet, but it looks great (total of 430 pages, split in 12 chapters), and can’t wait to start reading it! Smiješak

Contents:

Introduction and Onboarding
Searching and Presenting OMS Data
Alert Management
Configuration Assessment and Change Tracking
Working with Performance Data
Process Automation and Desired State Configuration
Backup and Disaster Recovery
Security Configuration and Event Analysis
Analyzing Network Data
Accessing OMS Data Programmatically
Custom Management Pack Authoring
Cross-Platform Management and Automation

You can download this book for free from TechNet Gallery, and if you liked it, don’t forget to leave the 5-star rating (and a comment).

Now I have something to read in this cold winter days (and nights). Smiješak

Cheers!

One step closer to Microsoft Azure Stack

By Tomica Kaniski in Other 23/12/2015 2 Comments

Great news coming from Microsoft – we are so close to finally getting the Microsoft Azure Stack preview! But… not this calendar year, unfortunately.

Azure Stack will be a combination of Windows Server 2016, Azure Pack and Azure Service Fabric. Combined together, these components will deliver the new “private cloud” solution (or more precisely hybrid solution because you will be able to expand with “public cloud” resources, if needed), which looks and feels like the “big Azure”. Bottom line is that the experience using Azure Stack or Azure will be identical (i.e. Microsoft brings it’s Azure to our on-premises datacenter). Sounds cool! Smiješak

Microsoft released a “teaser” with hardware requirements for its Azure Stack, and who better to explain them than Jeffrey Snover himself. Enjoy this short video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_PnxD-H17A

And the best thing of the whole video is that you’ll need only ONE standard server to host the Azure Stack. One to rule them all. Smiješak

Don’t forget to take a look at the official announcement here (and to purchase additional server if needed, so that you can play with Azure Stack Preview once it gets available).

Cheers!

Important – removal of the kaniski.info domain

By Tomica Kaniski in Other 08/09/2015 0 Comment

Dear all,

As the "transition period" from kaniski.info to kaniski.eu slowly comes to its end, I’ve decided that I will no longer host this blog at *.kaniski.info (and, with that, my @kaniski.info e-mail address will cease to exist).

Note that this blog will remain hosted only at https://blog.kaniski.eu/, and you can still contact me using my @kaniski.eu e-mail address. Smiješak

Cheers!

Open Cloud BBQ – Nano Server

By Tomica Kaniski in Other 18/06/2015 0 Comment

There was a barbecue today… on the roof… of the Microsoft office! How cool is that??? Smiješak

I’ve had an honor to join my colleagues and friends, and contribute to this great event with a presentation called “Nano Server – budućnost je tu!”, which was actually inspired by Jeffrey Snover’s Ignite speech about Nano Server – the new installation option in Windows Server 2016.

The whole Nano Server idea is very simple – let’s remove all the “unnecessary” roles and features (especially the famous GUI), and leave only the parts that we really need for whatever purpose (i.e. we’re getting the “purpose built servers”). All the purposes/roles that are supported in this preview version are Hyper-V, File Server and Failover Clustering, and they are working great on this “nano-sized” server operating system (even in this early preview).

I’m really excited about Nano Server, and I’m so glad that I’ve had a chance to talk about it at such great event. Because there were so many questions about it during the day/evening, I’ve noticed that Nano Server is a very cool subject for attendees also. Nice!

The presentation is available on SlideShare – check it, install the Nano Server and start rocking your datacenters! Smiješak

Open Cloud BBQ – Nano Server from Tomica Kaniski

Cheers!