Cloud | Server | Virtualization

This blog post assumes you have a working vCenter server with at least one host, datastore, network etc...requirements are listed below:  What is required:  Admin access to a running vCenter environment, preferably a lab! Powershell v5 and PowerCLI 6.5. A premade template, EG Windows Server 2016. A vCenter custom spec for the configuration of guest operating systems. Details of my lab are below. I am fortunate to have access to real servers where I work but a computer with enough disk space and maybe 16gb of ram will suffice. You may not be able to run as much simultaneously. My Lab: Dell PowerEdge server 128GB RAM VMware Workstation Pro 12 3 Virtual Machines located inside VMware Workstation.  2 ESXi Servers, 1 Active Directory domain controller. My vCenter server appliance (VCSA.contoso.com) is running on one of my virtual ESXi servers. The Environment: Active Directory and DNS: 10.1.1.1 DHCP provided by VMware workstation network manager. vCenter Se

Today I had a problem deploying some virtual machines and applying a custom spec to them in vCenter server 6.5. It turns out the virtual machine hardware on the VM I cloned as a template, was OLD and needed updating. Check to make sure your VM Tools installation is also upto date!

I found an interesting blog post by a guy named Ben R.N. who solved an issue I was having whilst attempting to load a Windows 10 image to Windows SIM in order to create a new customised install.wim. His post goes as follows: "When the Windows System Image Manager fails catalog creation with 0xC1420127 or 0xC1420117 I am currently in the process of setting up an unattended installation of Windows 10. Therefore, I'm using the System Image Manager to create the Unattend.xml file, and to do that, I need a catalog file that corresponds to the WIM I'm deploying. The SIM can generate a catalog from a WIM, but in my case, it failed with codes 0xC1420127 or 0xC1420117, depending on what I tried. Eventually, I discovered that for the SIM to create a catalog, you need to satisfy three conditions: Use install.wim from the \sources folder on the original installation media. A captured WIM does not work because, evidently, it doesn't actually contain the stuff that go

Server Core has been around in Microsoft's toolkit for sometime now, since Server 2008 I believe. Here is how you configure a Server Core Installation with PowerShell Upon logging into the server, start PowerShell by typing PowerShell. 1. Rename the server 2. Change the resolution, timezone and date For some reason I entered the command for Timezone in twice :S 3. View current network settings This command shows us the interface 'Ethernet' and it's currently assigned IPv4 address. We have an APIPA address assigned which is no use to us, lets configure an IP in the next step. 4. Configure an IP address Where Ethernet is the name of the adaptor you want to configure. 5. Configure DNS Servers My domain controller and DNS server is 10.1.1.1 6 Verify DNS server is configured correctly 7. Allow traffic inbound, through the firewall. For our lab purposes, I will open the firewall to all inbound traffic. When in production

In this short blog I'll take you through the process of managing a remote server that is not yet in your domain and therefore not under your scope of management. Verify the server is on the network and accessible with a ping command. The first step is to edit the trusted hosts list on the server we are working from, to say we want to allow commands and operations to be sent and received from the server that is NON-Domain joined, in this case a server called 'MyServer01'. Edit the trusted hosts list: Verify the trusted hosts list change using the Get-Item commandlet: Connect to our server: I use a variable to provide credentials using $Cred = Get-Credential. I typed the 10.1.1.4\Administrator and then my password to confirm the credential. We can now enter a remote powershell session using the Enter-PSSession commandlet, providing the computername and the credential, using the credential variable we created above. We can now manage our server, lets a