Tag Archives: Microsoft

News from MMS 2012

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Yesterday there was the first Keynote at MMS2012 (Microsoft Management Summit). Microsoft made some really amazing announcements.

Microsoft System Center Logo

First Microsoft announced the General Global Availability (RTM) of System Center 2012. You can now download it here: http://aka.ms/syscntr

Windows Server 8

 

Second Microsoft announced the new Name of the next Server Version with the Codename Windows Server 8. It is Windows Server 2012. You can get the beta Version of Windows Server 2012 here: http://aka.ms/win8server

Windows 8 Logo

 

Microsoft also announced on the Windows Blog which Version will of Windows 8 will be available. There will be 4 Versions:

  • Windows 8
  • Windows 8 Pro
  • Windows RT
  • Windows Enterprise

You can check out more on the Windows Blog.

Yesterday Microsoft also released the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) 2012. You can get it here: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=25175&WT.mc_id=rss_windows_allproducts

Ah and by the way HALO4 is comming!

Thanks to John Weston for  getting all the Information together.

Replace netsh with Windows PowerShell – Basic network cmdlets

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Some days ago I made a blog post about how you can replace diskpart.exe with the new cmdlets in Windows PowerShell v3. Now my next goal was to replace netsh with PowerShell.

Microsoft offers a lot of new cmdlets for networking tasks lets see what we have here. We got a lot of new PowerShell modules which are related to networking.

get-module

Now the two modules which sound really interesting are

NetAdapter
NetTCPIP

lets check which cmdlets are included

Get-Command -Module NetAdapter

net-adpater module

 Get-Command -Module NetTCPIP

Now lets start with NetAdpater.

List all Network Adapters

 Get-NetAdapter

get-netadapter

Just list Wireless Network Adapters

 Get-NetAdapter -Name *Wireless* 

get-netadapter wireless

Get more information VLAN ID, Speed, Connection status

 Get-NetAdapter | ft Name, Status, Linkspeed, VlanID 

get-netadapter information

Get driver information

 Get-NetAdapter | ft Name, DriverName, DriverVersion, DriverInformation, DriverFileName 

get-netadapter driver

Get adapter hardware information. This can be really usefull when you need to know the PCI slot of the NIC.

 Get-NetAdapterHardwareInfo 

get-netadapterhardwareinfo

Disable and Enable a Network Adapter

 Disable-NetAdapter -Name "Wireless Network Connection"
Enable-NetAdapter -Name "Wireless Network Connection" 

disable enable network adapter

Rename a Network Adapter

 Rename-NetAdapter -Name "Wireless Network Connection" -NewName "Wireless" 

rename network adapter

Now with the NetTCPIP PowerShell module we can work with IP settings

Get IP and DNS address information

 Get-NetAdapter -Name "Local Area Connection" | Get-NetIPAddress 

get-ipaddress

Get IP address only

 (Get-NetAdapter -Name "Local Area Connection" | Get-NetIPAddress).IPv4Address 

get-ipaddress only

Get DNS Server Address information

 Get-NetAdapter -Name "Local Area Connection" | Get-DnsClientServerAddress 

get-dnsserver

Set IP Address

 New-NetIPAddress -InterfaceAlias "Wireless" -IPv4Address 10.0.1.95 -PrefixLength "24" -DefaultGateway 10.0.1.1 

or if you want to change a existing IP Address

 Set-NetIPAddress -InterfaceAlias "Wireless" -IPv4Address 192.168.12.25 -PrefixLength "24"

Remove IP Address

 Get-NetAdapter -Name "Wireless" | Remove-NetIPAddress 

Set DNS Server

 Set-DnsClientServerAddress -InterfaceAlias "Wireless" -ServerAddresses "10.10.20.1","10.10.20.2"

Set interface to DHCP

 Set-NetIPInterface -InterfaceAlias "Wireless" -Dhcp Enabled

Now with this basic knowledge we can replace some of the basic netsh commands and ipconfig

netsh

ipconfig
netsh interface set interface "Local Area Connection" newname="Management"
netsh interface ipv4 set address "Management" static 192.168.10.101 255.255.255.0 192.168.10.1

Windows PowerShell

Get-NetAdapter
Rename-NetAdapter -Name "Local Area Connection" -NewName "Management"
New-NetIPAddress -InterfaceAlias "Management" -IPv4Address 192.168.10.101 -PrefixLength "24" -DefaultGateway 192.168.10.1

Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter Solution Accelerator Beta

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Hyper-V R2 SP1

Microsoft released a beta of a new Solution Accelerator called “Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter”. The Converter helps you to migrate Virtual Machines from VMware vSphere to Microsoft Hyper-V.

About the Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter Solution Accelerator

The Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter (MVMC) provides a Microsoft-supported, freely available, standalone solution for converting VMware virtual machines (VMs) and VMware virtual disks (VMDKs) to Hyper-V virtual machines and Hyper-V virtual hard disks (VHDs). MVMC supports converting virtual machines using the following guest operating systems:

  • Windows Server 2003 with Service Pack 2
  • Windows Server 2003 R2 with Service Pack 2
  • Windows Server 2008 R2
  • Windows 7

The Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter converts VMware virtual machines created with:

  • VMware vSphere 4.1
  • VMware vSphere 5.0

To virtual machines for:

  • Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 Hyper-V
  • Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 SP1

The Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter:

  • Provides a quick, low-risk option for VMware customers to evaluate Hyper-V
  • Converts the virtual disks and the VMware VMs configuration, such as memory, virtual processor, and other machine settings from the source
  • Uninstalls the VMware tools on the source VM and installs the Hyper-V Integration Services as appropriate
  • Includes an easy-to-use wizard-driven GUI simplifying VM conversion
    Supports offline conversions of VMware virtual hard disks (VMDK) to a Hyper-V based virtual hard disk file format (VHD)
  • Includes a scriptable Command Line Interfaces (CLI) for performing machine conversion and offline disk conversion which integrates with datacenter automation workflows, such as those authored and executed within System Center Orchestrator. The command line can also be invoked through PowerShell.

 

Check it out on Microsoft Connect: https://connect.microsoft.com/site14/MVMC

Windows Server 8: CSV Cache Benchmark

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Windows Server 8

Some days ago I wrote a blog post about how you can enable CSV Cache on the new Windows Server 8 beta. Now a lot of people asked me about some benchmarks.

Here a test inside the Virtual Machine:

Without CSV Cache:

CSV Cache disabled

With CSV Cache enabled:

CSV Cache enabled

As you can see CSV Cache does work really well. In some cases you can get 4-5 times the read performance.

Replace Diskpart with Windows PowerShell – Basic Storage cmdlets

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Windows Server 8

Last week I made a blog post about how you can create a USB drive for Windows To Go. In my post I used diskpart.exe to format the USB drive. Now we don’t live in the stone age anymore, so I did the same with the new version of Windows PowerShell coming in Windows 8 and Windows Server 8.

Now here some basic cmdlets to do some simple storage operations, like clean a disk, create a partition and so on.

Lets start simple

List all disks

Get-Disk

get-disk

Now get all partitions

Get-Partition

get-partition

Now get all partitions of disk 0

Get-Partition -DiskNumber 0

get-partitiondisk

Clear a Disk

Get-Disk 1 | Clear-Disk -RemoveData

clear-disk

Create a new partition

New-Partition -DiskNumber 1 -UseMaximumSize

new-partition

Format this volume

Get-Partition -DiskNumber 1 -PartitionNumber 1 | Format-Volume -FileSystem NTFS

format-volume

Create new partition and format it with the label “USB”:

New-Partition -DiskNumber 1 -UseMaximumSize | Format-Volume -FileSystem NTFS -NewFileSystemLabel USB

format-volume1

Change driveletter

Set-Partition -DriveLetter E -NewDriveLetter T

set-partition

Set a partition active

Set-Partition -DriveLetter T -IsActive $ture

set-partition1

Remove a partition

Remove-Partition -DriveLetter T

remove-partition

Bring a disk online

 Set-Disk 1 -isOffline $false 

Remove Readonly flag

 Set-Disk 1 -isReadOnly $false

Initialize Disk with GPT

 Initialize-Disk 1 -PartitionStyle GPT

online disk

This is some basic knowledge about the storage module in PowerShell v3. Lets see how we can change the commands from using diskpart to Windows PowerShell.

Diskpart.exe

select disk 1
clean
create partition primary
format fs=ntfs quick
active
assign letter=e

PowerShell:

Get-Disk 1 | Clear-Disk -RemoveData
New-Partition -DiskNumber 1 -UseMaximumSize -IsActive -DriveLetter E | Format-Volume -FileSystem NTFS -NewFileSystemLabel USB

replace-diskpart