When Software Attacks!

Unblocking a stuck Lab Manager Environment (the hard way)

This is a post so I don’t forget how I fixed access to one of our environments yesterday, and hopefully it will be useful to some of you.

We have a good many pretty complex environments deployed to our lab hyper-V servers, controlled by Lab manager. Operations such as starting, stopping or repairing those environments can take a long, long time, but this time we had one that was quite definitely stuck. The lab view showed the many servers in the lab with green progress bars about halfway across but after many hours we saw no progress. The trouble is, at this point you can’t issue any other commands to the environment from within the Lab Manager console – it’s impossible to cancel the operation and regain access to the environment.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Thursday, March 17, 2016

Installing Windows 10 RSAT Tools on EN-GB Media-Installed Systems

This post is an aide memoir so I don’t have to suffer the same annoyance and frustration at what should be an easy task.

I’ve now switched to my Surface Pro 3 as my only system, thanks to the lovely new Pro 4 Type Cover and Surface Dock. That meant that I needed the Remote Server Administration Tools installing. Doing that turned out to be much more of an odyssey that it should have been and I’m writing this in the hope that it will allow others to quickly find the information I struggled to.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Friday, November 13, 2015

Optimising IaaS deployments in Azure Resource Templates

Unlike most of my recent posts this one won’t have code in it. Instead I want to talk about concepts and how you should look long and hard at your templates to optimise deployment.

In my previous articles I’ve talked about how nested deployments can help apply sensible structure to your deployments. I’ve also talked about things I’ve learned around what will successfully deploy and what will give errors. Nested deployments are still key, but the continuous cycle of improvements in Azure means I can change my information somewhat around what works well and what is likely to fail. Importantly, that change allows us to drastically improve our deployment time if we have lots of virtual machines.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Sunday, November 1, 2015

Automating TFS Build Server deployment with SCVMM and PowerShell

Richard and I have been busy this week. It started with a conversation about automating the installation of new build servers. Richard was looking at writing PowerShell to install and configure the TFS build agent, along with all the various SDKs that we use across all out projects. Our current array of build servers have all been built by hand and each has a different set of SDKs to build specific project types. Richard’s aim is to make a single, homogenous build server configuration so we can then scale out for capacity much more quickly than before.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Thursday, July 17, 2014

SharePoint 2013: Creating Managed Metadata Columns that allow Fill-In Choices

This is a relatively quick post. There’s a fair bunch of stuff written about creating columns in SharePoint 2013 that use Managed Metadata termsets. However, some of it is a pain to find and then some. I have had to deal with two frustrating issues lately, both of which boil down to poor sharepoint documentation.

Wictor Wilén wrote the post I point people at for most stuff on managed metadata columns, but this time the internet couldn’t help.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Thursday, July 17, 2014

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Rik is CEO and Co-founder of Zure in the UK. He is a recipient of the Microsoft MVP Award and a Microsoft Regional Director. He is a member of the admin team for the Global Azure worldwide community event.

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