Posts

The Hyper-V Portal 2014 Year in Review

by Eric Siron

Like any creative work, a blog post is never really done; it’s just abandoned. Unlike many other mediums, blogs do allow us to easily refresh those older articles, but we so rarely ever do it. To close out this year, a few of us on the editorial team got together and selected a few highlights from the past year.

Our 14 selections from 2014 (in no particular order):

( http://www.altaro.com/hyper-v/hyper-v-portal-2014-year-review)

 

 

Repairing Corrupt File Systems on VMs with Repair-Volume

by Luke Orellana

The other day I ran into one of the most common issues IT pros have to face, file corruption. Out of the blue, one of our clients called in reporting issues printing from their Windows Server 2008 terminal server.

This was a VM, which was being hosted on a Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V Cluster. Users were not receiving their redirected printers at logon. It turned out multiple remote desktop services were repeatedly crashing. A read only Check Disk on the system volume reported evidence of corrupt system files. In order to repair the corrupt files, a Check Disk repair had to be run on the system volume which required the server to be offline. This process ended up taking over 6 hours to fully complete the repair resulting in unwanted downtime and lost productivity for the client.

Read the full article

 

 

Hyper-V and PowerShell: A Deep Dive into Get-VM

by Eric Siron

In the introductory article of this series, we talked about objects in PowerShell and how the large and grandiose uses of PowerShell are difficult to explain. While reflecting on that article, I realized that out of all the programming languages that I know, PowerShell’s verb-noun convention is probably the best way there is. This article will revisit that subject along with an investigation of the Get-VM cmdlet. If you’ve already got a good understanding of PowerShell objects and just want to learn about Get-VM, skip to the second half.

Read the full article

Original post link: Hyper-V and PowerShell: A Deep Dive into Get-VM

 

Monthly Round-Up: November 2014

Our monthly commentary and link round-up for November 2014.

Don’t Underestimate the Sniff Test

If you read very much of what I write, you’ll know that I don’t put a lot of stock in fancy titles or credentials and I certainly pay little attention to self-anointed experts, regardless of how many popularity contests they’ve won. The only thing I pay attention to is what really, truly works, and it doesn’t matter at all to me who says it. This has been my only principle ever since the first time I was at the mercy of a support “technician” that had no idea what to do and whose only goal was to get me off the phone. Over the course of the past decade and a half, I’ve gotten fairly good at quickly determining who the fraud in the room is.

Read more: http://www.altaro.com/hyper-v/monthly-hyper-v-round-november-2014/

Paragon Software scores 1st Place in Disk Imaging Software Review

Top10review site lists Paragon Hard Disk Manager as their #1 Disk Imaging Software product for 2015.

 

 

Paragon Hard Disk Manager Suite

The all-round solution to completely protect, maintain and manage your PC!

  • Every essential solution to manage today’s hard drives
  • Full range of backup, recovery and partitioning solutions
  • Fast migration to new HDDs, SSDs and virtual machines
  • NEW Secure data wiping on SSDs
  • NEW Embedded Recovery Media Builder 3.0
  • Free Update* for Windows 10 Support!

 Here are the various product skews for Hard Disk Manager (HDM)

 

 

Archiware Newsletter – December 2014

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Newsletter December 2014

Contents include:

  • P5 Version 5.1.7 – Yosemite compatible
  • Thanks for visiting us at CCW & SATIS
  • iBook updated with new content
  • Helpful Knowledge
  • It’s a match! P5 Synchronize & WingFS
  • Dedicated P5 pages by our resellers
  • Upcoming events – 2015

Read the entire Newsletter here

Paragon Software releases new NTFS for Mac 12

Paragon Software Group releases new NTFS for Mac 12 – high-speed access to Windows NTFS drives from OS

November 2014
First with full support for OS X 10.10 Yosemite!  Users of Paragon NTFS for Mac OS X 11 get a free upgrade!

FREIBURG, Germany, November 10, 2014 – NTFS for Mac 12 from Paragon Software Group is the first product to deliver full read and write support for NTFS-formatted drives to OS X 10.10 Yosemite. Eliminating boundaries between Mac and Windows operating systems, Paragon NTFS for Mac 12 achieves the speed of native drivers with test results 120 MB/sec during read and write operations on USB3.0 external media, and is the industry’s fastest solution for Mac users who want to share data between Mac and Windows systems, so that the user doesn’t even notice on which platform their files are.

You can read the full article here

 

 

NEW Webinar & eBook : Microsoft Licensing for Virtual Environments

NEW Webinar & eBook : Microsoft Licensing for Virtual Environments

Microsoft licensing for virtual environments can be tricky and there are a lot of misconceptions out there on how to ensure you comply, but also special benefits some may be unaware of.

Are you looking to get to grips with Microsoft licensing for virtual environments?

We’ve got something special for you!

We asked our very own Hyper-V guru Eric Siron, and Hyper-V MVP Thomas Maurer to take you through the theory and a dozen or so example scenarios to help you gain a solid understanding of Microsoft licensing for virtual environments.

We’re offering you two formats:

  1. An Altaro webinar, hosted by Hyper-V MVPs Thomas Maurer and Andrew Syrewicze on Thursday, 4th December 2014 at 10am EST / 4pm CET (30-45 mins + live Q&A!)
  2. A brand new eBook by Eric, which is available right now!

What we’ll be covering:

  • The concept of Microsoft licensing in a virtual environment
  • Windows Server, Hyper-V Server 2012 & 2012 R2 licensing
  • Difference between keys & licenses
  • Understand license transfers, stacking & implications for a cluster
  • Mapped example diagrams of common virtual licensing environments

 

Sign up for the webinar here

 

 

 

Download your copy of the eBook here

 

 

 

 

Free Script: Find Orphaned Hyper-V VM Files

by Eric Siron

If you’ve had very much virtual machine churn in your environment, it’s almost inevitable that you’ve wound up with a few disconnected virtual machine files here and there. This free script will help you to locate orphaned Hyper-V VM files. For fellow infrastructure scripters, there is a special bonus script included as well.

The worst thing about my testing environment is that I often wind up with files that look legitimate, but are no longer part of any virtual machine. Even in live environments, some virtual machine moves and operations leave a trail of unwanted files. Errors and failures can produce more.

Original post link: Free Script: Find Orphaned Hyper-V VM Files

How to Reset A Forgotten Hyper-V Admin Password

by Luke Orellana

As an IT Professional, you might find yourself blessed with the unfortunate scenario of working on a Hyper-V server that is not able to authenticate to the domain and the cached domain credentials are no longer working. In addition to this predicament, you learn that there is no documentation for the local administrator password. Either the client who you’re working for doesn’t know the local administrator password or the previous engineer who built the server is no longer working for your company and the standard passwords aren’t working.

A 3rd party password cracker application will allow you to reset the local administrator password. The drawback is you have to pay for it and in my experience they don’t always work.

Follow the steps below and use the Ease of Access Exploit to change the local administrator password.

Read the full blog post here.