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

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

HP Smart Storage Administrator Cache Settings

I recently came across a few blade servers which, for whatever reason did not have their HP Smart Array controller configured for caching. These particular servers are HP StoreEasy blades with a Smart Array P220i controller. I’ll quickly run through the steps carried out to configure the Smart Array cache. Configuration I logged onto 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

List Windows Server Roles and Features with PowerShell

I’m sure for anyone who administers Microsoft Windows Server the Server Manager console is an all too familiar place. It does make it easy to add/remove roles and features however PowerShell is another great option that can really speed things up at times. So – what can we do with PowerShell to list the roles and … Read more

Recycle IIS App Pools

We have a system which regularly requires the IIS app pools to be recycled, I haven’t yet gotten round to writing this in PowerShell or scripting with some form of orchestration software. For now it’s just a good old batch script. I’m going to remove most of the script and just leave the important lines … Read more