Upgrade to Windows Server 2016 TP5 – Live migrate from TP4

So the day have come when finally the new TP5 bits have been released! And I of course downloaded and wanted to test to upgrade one of my hyper-v servers in my home lab.

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Once installed I tried to migrate a VM from the hyper-v manager at the new TP5 node, I had of course set up kerberos and delegation before but still it gave me an error. To see if it was just in the GUI or also in PowerShell I tried the same move and got the same issue

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So powershell remoting to the rescue to test that I could live migrate my VM´s from the TP4 to the TP5 and that worked nicely. I will dig some more into if there is an issue with the AD objects or what causes this and do an update if I find anything…

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happy testing!

 

Add Chocolatey to my PackageManagement in Windows 10

I wanted to install the different browsers and also ChefDK on an new Windows 10 client and that with PowerShell. There is of course a way to just run Chocolatey command line but I wanted to use the PackageManagement so I had to add that provider and source so I could just use the Install-Package cmdlet.

I have a Windows 10 1511 with latest patches and I run the following commands to enable the chocolatey repository:

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As you can see, when I enter Find-PackageProvider I find the Chocolatey provider and just run the Install-PackageProvider -Name Chocolatey

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Then I need to open a new PowerShell window and can see that the PackageProvider and PackageSource have the Chocolatey records and thus I can now add software from this,

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First I add Firefox and as you can see my PackageSource is not trusted and I get an warning, that can be configured with the Set-PackageSource -Name chocolatey -Trusted

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Have fun with your package management 🙂

Preview of Azure Site Recovery in the new Azure Portal

Finally the Azure Site Recovery service can be reached from the new Azure Portal and the ARM way of doing things! It has been possible to use ASR with PowerShell and the new ARM way for some months but only for a subset of the site recovery services (VMM/Hyper-V).

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Not a day to soon! I have a customer that we have engaged in the CSP program and as that is based on the new, the old ASR was not possible to use with that subscription and use another subscription just for ASR sucks..

As you can see on the following screendump I go into the “Getting Started” to select scenario and then follow the guide to complete and in the case with physical and VMware I need to install a process/configuration server on-premise.

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Once installed on a Windows 2012 R2 server I connect it to the ASR with the registration file,

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One thing to think about using this service is that the process server will if you do not go in and configure the bandwidth settings eat all available internet capacity as my customer so nicely explained…

Configure this to something that works for both you and the company, and with the enhanced ASR where you do not need additional servers in Azure you find this setting in the backup properties.

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It is quite easy to start and protecting your workloads and remember that the first 30 days are free 🙂

 

updated AzureRM PowerShell Module with Export of Resource Group

Today the version 1.3.0 of AzureRM module was released and in that there was a new cmdlet Export-AzureRMResourceGroup that can be used on an resource group and get a json file from that!

updating your AzureRM is quite easy with the powershell gallery repository

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And then you can run the Export cmdlet and get the json file from that deployment and start playing in Visual Studio or VS Code 🙂

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Have fun automating and deploying with Azure Resource Manager!

powershell env:PSModulepath duplicate records Winserv 2016 TP4

I was testing some xAzure DSC configuration stuff on my Windows Server 2016 TP4 and noticed that when I was trying to use the resource it said that duplicate modules was found but I could not find any in the powershell module libraries and thus it ought to be something else,

I found the tweet that Ben Gelens sent pointing me to the $env:psmodulepath

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So looking in my psmodulepath I could see that I had two records that was the same and that had to be fixed,

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So to remove the duplicate I first remove both and then add the one again:

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$env:PSModulePath = $env:PSModulePath –replace “;C:\\Program Files\\WindowsPowerShell\\Modules”

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$env:PSModulePath = $env:PSModulePath + “;C:\Program Files\WindowsPowerShell\Modules”

Happy automating 🙂

SC VMM bare metal deploy with UEFI enabled host

During last week I was working on some bare metal deployment on some Hyper-V hosts with System Center VMM. We had deployed them before using legacy boot but now we had updated the BIOS to latest version and got into some trouble.. Maybe it was because of the HPE instead of the HP 😉

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During the deployment the WinPE got an error and could not connect to the VMM server,

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We tried to update NIC drivers and stuff on the WinPE image but that did not help. During the testing we started the server and configured it to boot with EFI instead of legacy boot and olala it worked to connect to the VMM server but thus as the Hyper-V VHD was MBR we got the following error:

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The easiest way I could think of right there and then was to create my new GPT based VHD to boot the Hyper-V host with a powershell convert script from the original MBR vhd. The script required to be run on a Hyper-V host so I connected to one of the Hyper-V nodes in the test cluster and ran the script on a patched VM that was sysprepped:

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And once that was done I had to update the Physical profile to set the disk to GPT instead of MBR:

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And now the deployment worked nicely all the way!

 

install-service during bootstrap a windows node with chef knife

I was exploring last week how I could add a managed windows node in my internal test environment where I have a chef server.

Bootstrap a windows node has been possible quite a while but not so long ago the knife windows added the parameter for also setting up the client as a service. This was part of the Knife Windows 1.0 release as you can read on the Chef site.

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Another great parameter now available is the –msi_url that gives the possibility to set the chef client msi path to something local if the servers cannot speak to the mighty Internet

happy chef-ing!