Unexpected Large Page File Troubleshooting

This week one of my colleagues has been performing updates on our hypervisor hosts including those running Hyper-V. During this work we received alerts from our monitoring system to indicate two of the hosts had essentially run out of disk space, obviously a little worrying. We stopped the update process while troubleshooting was carried out … Read more

Windows Server Core Expand Volume

I am trying to run as many of my Windows server home lab virtual machines (VM) as Core installs. This reduces the resource requirement for each VM in terms of drive space, memory and CPU – obviously a good thing in any environment. It also forces me to learn more ways of dealing with situations, … Read more

Hyper-V Enhanced Session Mode

Hyper-V Enhanced Session Mode (ESM) is a configurable option which enhances the Hyper-V virtual machine console providing options and features similar to an RDP client session. Configuring ESM can be achieved either via the Hyper-V Manager GUI or through PowerShell – obviously if you have many hosts to configure PowerShell is the way to go. Some … 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

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