PowerShell Direct over Hyper-V VMBus

Today I learnt a little about an awesome feature which I think isn’t that well known – or at least when I speak to colleagues past and present they are not familiar with it. The feature in question is leveraging PowerShell on a Hyper-V host down the VMBus to a guest virtual machine. What exactly … Read more

HPE CLX Error – Socket connection timed out to port 2550

This week I came across an interesting problem on one of our Microsoft Failover Clusters (FOC) which utilises the HPE Cluster Extensions (CLX) software to  provide failover support with our HPE 3PAR arrays. A couple of roles within one FOC showed the CLX resource as failed with everything else still showing as online. We were … Read more

Microsoft Cluster Shared Volume Caching

I recently learned of a feature which had previously been unknown to me – Microsoft Cluster Shared Volume (CSV) caching. I use both Hyper-V and VMware at work though typically I focus on VMware as that is where the majority of our environment runs. I am deploying more systems to Hyper-V every day and the … Read more

PowerShell Cryptographic Hash Checker

I decided to build a little cryptographic hash checker in PowerShell leveraging some built-in cmdlets and other functions. While there are lots of tools that already do this, many with very nice GUIs I decided it would be fun to build one of my own. The newly made cmdlet is very simple. You select what cryptographic … Read more

Microsoft Unified Access Gateway (UAG) HTTP to HTTPS Redirect Configuration

If you are running the Microsoft Unified Access Gateway (UAG) to present websites to the Internet you are likely using HTTPS for each portal. If you haven’t setup a redirect from HTTP to HTTPS then users will encounter issues if they do not specify HTTPS in the URL. The solution to this is very simple, … Read more

Microsoft Failover Cluster Fails With Error Code: 0x80071398

Today I spent quite some time building SQL server instances on a Microsoft Failover Cluster. Everything appeared to go as expected with no errors or alerts generated during or after install. Unfortunately at the end I encountered an unexpected error. Once I had completed deployment to all nodes I tried to move my newly created … Read more

Microsoft Lync Edge Servers Certificate Expiration Issue

Today I had an interesting problem to fix, I’m not a Microsoft Lync expert and to be honest haven’t had much if any dealing with our Lync infrastructure. Unfortunately our Lync guy is away on holiday so the task fell to me.   What was the problem? Users reported that Microsoft Lync or Skype for … Read more

Microsoft Failover Cluster–Unable to remove a CSV due to dependency

We have a Microsoft 2012 R2 Failover Cluster (FOC) with disk resources presented from our HP 3PAR SAN. At some point two of the volumes were removed on the 3PAR however they had not been removed as Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV) on the FOC. When we attempted to remove the disks as CSV resources and … Read more

Changing Microsoft Failover Cluster File Share Witness

I need to migrate my Microsoft Failover Clusters (FOCs) from one file share witness (FSW) quorum to another. Currently they point to a virtual machine (VM) running from an old site with a single rack mount server. This isn’t ideal and was only ever a temporary solution and now we are ready to move the … Read more

HP 3PAR Cluster Extension (CLX) License Issue

I had to troubleshoot a Microsoft Failover Cluster with a SQL instance recently and it proved an interesting one. This cluster uses the HP 3PAR Cluster Extension software (CLX) to interact with the 3PAR arrays in our datacenters and facilitate the movement of the SQL instance between sites. Note – the HP 3PAR CLI (command … Read more