Register to attend the Microsoft MVP Virtual Conference

By Tomica Kaniski in Other 0 Comment

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Hi All – I wanted to let you know about a great free event that Microsoft and the MVPs are putting on, May 14th & 15th.  Join Microsoft MVPs from the Americas’ region as they share their knowledge and real-world expertise during a free event, the MVP Virtual Conference.

The MVP Virtual Conference will showcase 95 sessions of content for IT Pros, Developers and Consumer experts designed to help you navigate life in a mobile-first, cloud-first world.  Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President of Developer Platform, Steve Guggenheimer, will be on hand to deliver the opening Key Note Address.

Why attend MVP V-Conf? The conference will have 5 tracks, IT Pro English, Dev English, Consumer English, Portuguese mixed sessions & Spanish mixed sessions, there is something for everyone! Learn from the best and brightest MVPs in the tech world today and develop some great skills!

Be sure to register quickly to hold your spot and tell your friends & colleagues.

The conference will be widely covered on social media, you can join the conversation by following @MVPAward and using the hashtag #MVPvConf.

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Register now and feel the power of community!

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Cheers!

Continue using Windows Server vNext Technical Preview

By Tomica Kaniski in Other 1 Comment

If you have Windows Server vNext Technical Preview installations that are expiring in a day or so, you’ll be pleased to know that Microsoft yesterday addressed this issue and released a patch (as promised). Patch will extend the evaluation period of those installations until the October, 2015.

With the next build just around the corner, maybe you won’t need this patch to last for that long, but… it’s fixed.

You can find the patch on Microsoft Download Center, and find the official announcement here. Just remember to read the install instructions coming with it.

Some of us in the MVP community noticed (and finally resolved it, with support from Microsoft people) that the installation of this update on some machines (Hyper-V hosts, in my case) requires that you also (re)activate your Windows installation. If you don’t do it, it may seem that the patch wasn’t applied. Also, remember that this patch needs a reboot or two to be actually “installed”.

My colleague Nirmal also blogged about, and even recorded the installation process, so check it out.

WSvNext

Voilà… enjoy your “renewed” Technical Preview (1) machines! Smile

Cheers!

Altaro Hyper-V Backup v5 just released

By Tomica Kaniski in Other 0 Comment

New version of my favorite Hyper-V backup tool just got officially released! Smile

Altaro released the long-awaited next version of their Hyper-V backup software, Altaro Hyper-V Backup v5 – it features a completely new look, centralized configuration and management of multiple hosts with greater flexibility and improved performance. Do I have to mention that it has a free version as well? Smile

FREE version offers free backup of two virtual machines… forever! (there is also a 30-day trial available for more than two virtual machines)

I like it because it’s simple and not too expensive (in more than one aspect), fast, does the job, and does it pretty good! I’ve also installed the new version on one of my hosts, and it looks just great (can’t wait to run the first backup and restore of my virtual machines)!

Altaro Hyper-V Backup v5

 Altaro Hyper-V Backup v5

You can find more info and official announcement here.
Download is available here.

Cheers!

UPDATE: Please, don’t remove your own host from the console (until the next week’s release goes public) – in the current public release (5.0.75.0), you won’t be able to add it back!

Workaround:
1. stop all Altaro services
2. go to %ProgramData%\Altaro
3. rename the AltaroBackupProfile folder to AltaroBackupProfile.old
4. start all Altaro services

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 7 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!

Windows Server 2012 R2 installation media issues (OEM)

By Tomica Kaniski in Other 2 Comments

Here’s an easy one – you may have encountered and solved it already, but let this be here… as a reminder. Smile

If you ever tried to install the Windows Server 2012 R2 into a Hyper-V virtual machine by using the provided OEM installation media (in my case, from IBM), your installation may fail even before it started because the hardware you’re using (i.e. “virtual” hardware) is not the one the installation expects (which is “imprinted in the media itself”).

So, you get an error like this:

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Solution here is kind of simple – IBM provided the little utility (just 5 KB) called Hyper-V-OEM-BIOS-V2.exe, which makes the virtual machine “produced by IBM” (actually, virtual machine BIOS gets updated to contain the IBM specific information, that the Windows installation is looking for, and which is the cause of this error).

After you run the utility (on your Hyper-V host), Windows installation using the OEM media proceeds as it should.

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Other solution (actually a workaround) is to use the retail media for the virtual machine installation. In this case, you won’t get the error, and installation proceeds as it should right from the beginning.

IBM published a document explaining this issue, and the possible resolution/workaround, you can view it here.

As I’ve said – quick & easy (hope it helps)! Smile

Cheers!

The “One ring”

By Tomica Kaniski in Other 0 Comment

It’s here! Finally!

As I’ve got the Microsoft MVP award for another year (beginning October), today I’ve received the (special) “blue ring” – my fifth year of being an MVP.

It has been a long road… full of excitements, events, friendships, travels, real-world issues… but it was fun!

Once again, I want to thank my girlfriend, my family, my fellow MVPs, my mentors, my colleagues (past and present), wonderful Microsoft people and everyone else who backed me up along this path – THANK YOU, you are the real MVPs, and this award is yours as well!

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Now… let’s face the new “challenges”! Smile

Cheers!