Moved away from Subtext (sorry guys!) to Wordpress if you're wondering why all my posts have the same date on now (and why you're being re-directed to this new URL!)

Microsoft EMEA Hosting Club (Berlin)

Attended the EMEA Hosting Club in Berlin at the end of last week. Had a really great time, Microsoft put on a good event! Met some really nice people in the Hosting industry from across Europe too.

Breakdancers during the meal	The Hotel Fishtank
Powerpoint 2010 Failing Again	East Side Gallery
Checkpoint Charlie	The Reichstag
Xmas Tree nr Brandenburg Gate

Membership & Search

The most interesting and helpful one line I’ve found so far this week..

enableSearchMethods="true"

This goes inside the membership section of a web.config when you want to search your membership provider. Needed for the GetAllUsers method for example. Even works for the Active Directory membership provider, which is what I’m using for various projects.

Quick PowerShell

I needed to create a random password today for some VM’s I’m creating with PowerShell. Two lines later and we’re good to go !

$objRandom = New-Object System.Random
$password = "Server"+$objRandom.Next(10000,99999)

 

IIS 7.0 Smooth Streaming

Now this is something very exciting.. smooth streaming video via IIS7 and Silverlight 3. I’ve spent a good few weeks looking at this now and here are some of the useful links over at Microsoft.com.

IIS Smooth Streaming Technical Overview

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=03D22583-3ED6-44DA-8464-B1B4B5CA7520&displaylang=en

IIS Smooth Streaming Deployment Guide

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=B3752C16-B213-4A30-A54D-1A0491D45EA7&displaylang=en

IIS Media Site

http://www.iis.net/media

The IIS Media site has a VERY cool video at full HD resolution.

Clio Cup Racing

Non techie post, but still very cool ! Matthew (aka my boss) in his first Clio Cup Race at Rockingham!

PowerShell Modules

Learnt something new today!

I didn’t know that if you went to Administrative Tools | Powershell Modules that it loaded a Powershell window and a whole bunch of pre-defined modules that you can use to interface with Server Manager, Remote Desktop Services, etc. I’m wondering if this is new to R2/Powershell v2.0.

Means I can do cool stuff now like cd rds:RemoteApp\RemoteAppPrograms and get access to RDS Remote Applications via Powershell. Cool.

My Microsoft Video

Fame at last.. well, kind of

Partners talk about the Dynamic Datacenter

I’m a few minutes in, so you’ll just have to listen to the others.

Poundhost Hyper-V Case Study

A little while ago myself and Matthew were interviewed about the cost savings Hyper-V has brought to Poundhost (part of Blue Square Data Group).

The nice people at Microsof then produced a case study on it, here : http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Case_Study_Detail.aspx?casestudyid=4000004741

Change the owner of all VMs in SCVMM

Nice little bit of Powershell script to change the Owner value in SCVMM 2008 for all VMs that have it set to UNKNOWN.

Get-VM -VMMServer “SCVMM Server FQDN” | where {$_.Owner -eq “Unknown”} | Set-VM -Owner “domain\account”

You will get an Unknown user if you move between SCVMM servers, which is highly annoying!

Windows Server 2008 Template under SCVMM 2008 R2

I keep having to do this but never remember the steps, and if you don’t do all this then you’ll get failures when you deploy the Template and spend hours trying to figure out why!

So here we go:

• Create a new VM with required hardware profile
• Install Windows Server 2008 onto the new VM
• Enable Remote Desktop
• Load up GPEDIT.MSC and disable “Password must meet complexity requirements” under Computer Configuration | Windows Settings | Security Settings | Account Policies | Password Policy
• Disable “Display Shutdown Event Tracker” under Computer Configuration | Administrative Templates | System
• Set the Administrator password to BLANK/ZIP/NOTHING/NADA (a blank password basically!)
• Install any required roles or software
• Shutdown Windows
• Ensure you remove any media that is attached to the virtual DVD
• Clone your new VM in SCVMM just in case you’ve forgotten something, as creating a Template will destroy the VM
• Create a new Template for your VM, accepting default values for the Hardware Profile and Guest OS Profile (you will ideally use a Guest OS Profile at deployment time)

That’s it for creating your Template. Next we’ll need to create some Guest OS Profiles so we can deploy the Template.

Select  the Library View of SCVMM and under the Library Actions menu heading click the “New guest OS profile” link. Give this profile a meaningful name (i.e. Windows Server 2008 – Standard) and configure the guest OS options. Make sure you give this a default password and a product key at the very least. I’ve seen 2008 ignore the product key so we can also pass this via Powershell when we deploy. Create a guest OS profile for each OS type/version required.

Normally you would create some hardware profiles too, but it’s much easier to create these via Powershell and deploy your Template via Powershell too.

I’ll do the deployment stuff later on