When Software Attacks!

Migrating to SCVMM 2012 R2 in a TFS Lab Scenario

Last week I moved our SCVMM from 2012 with service pack 1 to 2012 R2. Whilst the actual process was much simpler than I expected, we had a pretty big constraint imposed upon us by Lab Manager that largely dictated our approach.

Our SCVMM 2012 deployment was running on an aging Dell server. It had a pair of large hard drives that were software mirrored by the OS an we were using NIC teaming in Server 2012 to improve network throughput. It wasn’t performing that well, however. Transfers from the VMM library hosted on the server to our VM hosts were limited by the speed of the ageing SATA connectors and incoming transfers were further slowed by the software mirroring. We also had issues where Lab manager would timeout jobs whilst SCVMM was still diligently working on them.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Thursday, March 20, 2014

Creating Azure Virtual Networks using Powershell and XML Part 4: Local networks and site-site connectivity

This is part 4 of a series of posts building powershell functions to create and modify Azure Virtual Networks. Previous posts have covered functions to create virtual networks and then delete them. In this part, I’m going to show you functions that will define local networks and configure site-site VPN connectivity between a local and virtual network.

Next on my list is to create functions to delete the local networks and remove the site-site connections. Then I really must look at functions to edit the configuration.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Sunday, March 9, 2014

Gary Lapointe to the rescue: Using his Office 365 powershell tools to recover from a corrupted masterpage

I also need to give credit to the Office 365 support team over this. They were very quick in their response to my support incident, but I was quicker!

Whilst working on an Office 365 site for a customer today I had a moment of blind panic. The site is using custom branding and I was uploading a new version of the master page to the site when things went badly wrong. The upload appeared to finish OK but the dialog that was shown post upload was not the usual content type/fill in the fields form, but a plain white box. I left it for a few minutes but nothing changed. Unperturbed, I returned to the mater page gallery… Except I couldn’t. All I got was a white page. No errors, nothing. No pages worked at all – no settings pages, no content pages, nothing at all.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Friday, March 7, 2014

Creating Azure Virtual Networks using Powershell and XML Part 2: Powershell functions

In my previous post I talked about what was involved in creating an Azure network configuration using Powershell. In this post I’ll cover where I’ve got so so far, which is a series of functions that do the following:

Contact Azure and get the current network configuration. Convert that to sensible XML and if it’s empty, create the basic structure.
Create a new virtual network, checking to see if one with the same name already exists.
Add a subnet to a virtual network, checking to see one with the same address prefix or name doesn’t already exist.
Add a DNS reference to a virtual network, making sure the DNS is defined first.
Create a DNS.
Put the configuration back into Azure to be applied.

Still on my to-do list are removing networks and other elements, and modifying existing networks.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Tuesday, March 4, 2014

Creating Azure Virtual Networks using Powershell and XML Part 3: Powershell functions for deletion

This is part three of a series of posts about using powershell to script the creation, deletion and (hopefully) modification of Azure Virtual Networks. In part 1 I went through the key steps with some rough code. Part 2 showed the much tidier functions I’ve now written to create virtual network elements. This is part 3, and I will present functions to remove elements. Hopefully I will manage to get the modification functions to work which be a fourth installment!