Remove a VPN connection in Windows 7

Posted on August 30, 2011 by Thomas Maurer

In Windows 7 you an create VPN connections for PPTP, L2TP or SSTP. To delete a connection you can not just right click and press delete. But it’s still very simple, but a lot of people can’t find where you can remove VPN connections, because it is a kind of hidden .

First open Network and Sharing Center
Click Change Adpater Settings on the left side
Now you can see all connections and you can remove the VPN connection

Native Boot To VHD (Boot2VHD) – Everything You Need To Know…

Posted on August 29, 2011 by Thomas Maurer

Some time ago I made a post about how you can boot from a VHD. Now some days ago I found a very cool series of blog post from Dan Stolts (Microsoft Sr. IT Pro Evangelist) about booting from VHD. He has also created some video tutorials which are great if you are just getting started with VHD boot.

Part 1: Overview of Native Boot To VHD
Part 2: Load OS to VHD On Bare Metal
Part 3: Load OS on VHD with OS already Installed on Metal
Part 4: BCDEdit is the Magic – Deep Dive Boot Configuration Manager

Don’t get stuck in the IT past

Posted on August 29, 2011 by Thomas Maurer

Watch what happens when you try to buy a cloud solution from the wrong company.

Microsoft pokes fun at VMware with “VMlimited man“.

Enable SSH on ESXi 5 via vSphere Client

Posted on August 27, 2011 by Thomas Maurer

In the first post I wrote how you can enable SSH on the ESXi 5.0 host. In this post I show you how you can enable or activate SSH on the ESXi 5.0 hosts via the vSphere Client.

First start the vSphere Client
Select the ESXi host in the configurations tab
Select Security Profile
Click on Properties in the upper right corner and you will get the a popup with all the services on this ESXi 5.0 hosts. Select the SSH service and press the Options button.
Now you can start the services and set the startup options
press okay and you are done..

Activate SSH on VMware ESXi 5.0

Posted on August 25, 2011 by Thomas Maurer

As in VMware ESXi 4.1 you can enable or activate SSH on VMware ESXi 5.0 very simple. VMware ESXi 5.0 is also known as VMware vSphere Hypervisor.

On the start screen press F2 for “Customize System”
Login with the local password
Select and enter Troubleshooting Options
Click on Enable SSH to activate SSH on your VMware ESXi 5.0 host
After you have pressed the ENTER key you will now see that SSH is enabled

Extending a Microsoft Hyper-V R2 Cluster Shared Volume

Posted on August 25, 2011 by Thomas Maurer

This quick blog post shows you how you can simply extend a Hyper-V R2 or Windows Server 2008 R2 Cluster Shared Volume without any downtime. First you expand your LUN in your OEM SAN management software. This is mostly of the time nothing special. But after that you have to expand the Cluster Shared Volume.

In your OEM SAN Management Software expand the size of the LUN or disk
Open the Microsoft Failover Cluster Manager and check the CSV coordinator for the disk or LUN you have expanded. The CSV coordinator is the disk owner in the cluster
Login to the CSV coordinator machine
If you are using the GUI version you can use the Disk Management under Storage in the Server Manager. You can now rescan for disks and then expand the Disk or LUN.
If you are using Hyper-V or Windows Server Core you can use diskpart
First start the cmd and open diskpart
type rescan
now type list volume, to list all volumes
Use select volume IDNumber, the IDNumber is the number you could see with list volume in the previous step.
now you can type extend
with list volume you can see the results

In some environments sometimes if you need to expand a Cluster Shared volume it makes more sense to create a new one and move the Virtual Machines with Storage Migration but this cannot be done without downtime.