Get-SysadminBlog

Category: Windows Server

  • Building a highly available iSCSI Target utilizing S2D

    Over the last couple years I’ve had customers ask me how to build a HA iSCSI target to support Microsoft failover clustering service for SQL or classic HA file shares. As Datrium doesn’t have a way to do this natively we needed a way to do it utilizing a virtual machine and have somewhat of…

  • Windows Server Deduplication vs Datrium Data Reduction for DFS-R

    I recently had a customer ask if it was better to use Datrium Data reduction only, or Datrium with a combination of Microsoft Windows Deduplication. Theoretically there should be no difference between using one or both on the VMware datastore, but let’s see for sure! Datrium Data Reduction reduces data at a block level, across all…

  • Installing Datrium VSS Writer using Powershell.

    With Datrium’s DVX 3.0 release we included a VSS writer into the mix. The idea being that not only would you be able to have storage based snapshots on a per VM basis, but now it can be application consistent! The one drawback is that you have to manually install the MSI. This is changing…

  • VMware Paravirtual SCSI adapter: Is it really that much faster?

    I asked the same question myself after reading a best practice guide from Datrium that suggested using the VMware PVSCSI controller instead of the default recommendation of the LSI SAS controller that VMware makes when you create a Windows VM. Out of curiosity I spun up a new server 2016 VM. 4 Cores 8GB of…

  • Windows Server Backup using Powershell.

    I needed a script to be able to do an on demand backup of a windows server without installing 3rd party software on it. The idea is that physical or virtual, if I needed a quick backup of a box, including a log for auditing, I could have a click to run solution. Here is…

  • PowerShell script to fix VSS errors.

    We’ve all had vss writer issues during backups. And many of us have all used the MS technet article to re-register those VSS writers. Well I had to do that today, and figured I would build a PS script to take care of that so I don’t have to go googling for that article in…

  • Automatically clean up VMware snapshots using PowerCLI.

    Something that every VMware admin who also uses Veeam has had to deal with once if not multiple times is Veeam not cleaning up snapshots properly which then leads to broken snapshot chains, leading to VMDK corruption, and finally leading to an admin crying into his / her bourbon realizing that “no the VM isn’t…

  • Create AES secure passwords for use in PowerShell scripting.

    Something that I’ve always wanted to get away from in my scripting is leaving passwords in plain text. It fails audits and is just generally insecure and needs to be avoided at all costs. A solution I’ve come up to deal with this so far is to generate a secure key and password hash using…

  • Cleaning up Lync ADSI attributes for all users in Active Directory for Office 365 migration using PowerShell.

    Working through the same migration as my last blog post I ran into a second issue. The client is currently running an on premise Lync 2010 server and they want to migrate all of their users to Skype for Business in Office 365. The users are just using Lync for basic IM, and aren’t using any of…

  • Diagnosing and fixing slow migration times to Office 365 from Exchange 2010.

    I’m currently working on an Office 365 migration for a client and have been seeing extremely long migration times for mailboxes. We are talking 30+ hours to move a single 20GB mailbox. The client has a 100Mbps symmetrical fiber pipe, so we know that isn’t the issue, and while their hypervisor and SAN setup aren’t…