When Software Attacks!

Notes from the field on our SCVMM/Lab Manager environment upgrade

Richard has posted a group effort article on his blog about our System Center 2008 R2/Lab Manager upgrade to System Center 2012 SP1/Lab Manager. All did not go swimmingly… I have more helpful notes that I am writing up myself and will post over the next few days around the steps to fix virtual machines that are part of an environment and tips on building complex multi-machine rigs for lab manager.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Monday, March 4, 2013

A Virtual Ice Cream Sandwich: Android 4 x86 in a Hyper-V VM

More and more of our projects include a stipulation from the client that any web sites must work on the tablet devices of senior management. Up until recently that was exclusively iPads, but we are now seeing more Android devices out there. I wanted to find a straightforward way for us to test on such devices, preferably without needing to build up a collection of expensive physical kit. I read with interest Ben Armstrong’s post about running Android 2.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Monday, June 18, 2012

IT Camp Leeds Roundup

WP_000140 Yesterday was great fun and I was really pleased to see so many Black Marble event regulars at the IT Camp. It was great to hear so many requests for more events like it in Leeds. We’re all keen to run more, but we need people to attend and give us feedback in order to be able to do that. I hope those of you who were there took away useful knowledge from the event.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Server Core, Hyper-V and VLANs: An Odyssey

A sensible plan This is a torrid tale of frustration and annoyance, tempered by the fun of digging through system commands and registry entries to try and get things working. We’ve been restructuring our network at Black Marble. The old single subnet was creaking and we were short of addresses so we decided to subnet with network subnets for physical, virtual internal and virtual development servers, desktops, wifi etc. We don’t have a huge amount of network equipment, and we needed to put virtual servers hosted on hyper-v on separate networks so we decided to use VLANs.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Monday, December 6, 2010

Unable to remote control Hyper-V VM after installing SharePoint 2010 on Windows 7

True to form, you only discover something isn’t working when you’re in a desperate hurry. We use lots of Hyper-V VMs here at Black Marble and they are mostly running on our four node cluster. I use Failover Cluster Manager and this morning I couldn’t connect remotely to any of the Hyper-V VMs. I kept getting an error: Virtual Machine Connection: A connection will not be made because credentials may not be sent to the remote computer.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Friday, April 30, 2010