Change Office 365 password expiration policy

Posted on October 14, 2011 by Thomas Maurer

office365

The default password expiration policy of Office 365 is set to 90 days. That means that users have to change their password every 90 days. I think basicly this is a good and secure policy but maybe your company has other security policy or for some other reason you have to deactivate this. We can change this setting through PowerShell with the MicrosoftOnline PowerShell Module.

First connect to Office 365 via PowerShell more on this here

Now you can use the following cmdlet

Set-MsolUser -UserPrincipalName user@contoso.com –PasswordNeverExpires $true

Quick note on PowerShell 3.0

Posted on September 28, 2011 by Thomas Maurer

Powershell

Today I had some time to test some of the new Windows PowerShell 3.0 feature and changes. And after playing a while with the Windows PowerShell 3.0 CTP I have to say Microsoft did besides the big new features, like workflows, a lot of small but really important improvements.

First I will show you two very small but very cool things which make working with PowerShell a lot easier.

New help view, which I really like. Here quick PowerShell 2.0 versus PowerShell 3.0:

Second I would like you to show how they simplified PowerShell for daily use. Here Get-Childitem for an example:

In PowerShell 2.0:

Get-Childitem | Where {$_.name -eq "Desktop"}

In PowerShell 3.0 you can do this now much friendlier:

Get-Childitem | where name -eq Desktop

Windows Management Framework 3.0 Community Technology Preview

Posted on September 26, 2011 by Thomas Maurer

Powershell

Some days ago the Microsoft Powershell Team released the Community Technology Preview of the Windows Management Framework 3.0 which includes Windows PowerShell v3. You can download the the CTP1 here and it requires Windows 7 SP1 or Windows Server 2008 R2 with SP1.

You can use very easy both PowerShell versions sie by site.

powershell.exe -Version 3.0

powershell.exe -Version 2.0

But the Windows Management Framework 3.0 CTP1 does not only includes PowerShell 3, it also contains new versions of WMI, WinRM and the new Windows PowerShell Webservice.

Windows PowerShell 3.0

Workflows
Workflows that run long-running activities (in sequence or in parallel) to perform complex, larger management tasks, such as multi-machine application provisioning. Using the Windows Workflow Foundation at the command line, Windows PowerShell workflows are repeatable, parallelizable, interruptible, and recoverable.
Robust Sessions
Robust sessions that automatically recover from network failures and interruptions and allow you to disconnect from the session, shut down the computer, and reconnect from a different computer without interrupting the task.
Scheduled Jobs
Scheduled jobs that run regularly or in response to an event.
Delegated Administration
Commands that can be executed with a delegated set of credentials so users with limited permissions can run critical jobs
Simplified Language Syntax
Simplified language syntax that make commands and scripts look a lot less like code and a lot more like natural language.
Cmdlet Discovery
Improved cmdlet discovery and automatic module loading that make it easier to find and run any of the cmdlets installed on your computer.
Show-Command
Show-Command, a cmdlet and ISE Add-On that helps users find the right cmdlet, view its parameters in a dialog box, and run it.

WMI

A new provider development model
This new model brings down the cost of provider development and removes the dependency on COM.
A new MI Client API to perform standard CIM operations.
The API can be used to interact with any standard WsMan + CIMOM implementation, allowing management applications on Windows to manage non-Windows computers.
The ability to write Windows PowerShell cmdlets in native code
The new WMI Provider APIs supports an extended Windows PowerShell semantics API allowing you to provide rich Windows PowerShell semantics. e.g., Verbose, Error, Warning, WhatIf, Confirm, Progress

WinRM

Connections are more robust
Session disconnect and reconnect, with or without client session reconstruction, allows long-running tasks to continue even when the session in which they were started is closed and the client computer is shut down. This feature also allows administrators to reconnect from different computers to check the status of remote running tasks and get results.
Connections are more resilient
In Windows PowerShell 3.0 CTP1, connections can survive short-term network failures; the client-server connection is not severed at the first sign of trouble. If network problems persist, the client is safely disconnected and can reconnect by using the Connect-PSSession or Receive-PSSession cmdlets.

Windows PowerShell Web Service

Windows PowerShell Web Service enables an administrator to expose a set of PowerShell cmdlets as a RESTful web endpoint accessible via the Open Data Protocol (OData). This provides remote access to invoke cmdlets from both Windows and non-Windows clients.

You can get more Information about the Windows Management Framework 3.0 Community Technology Preview on the Windows PowerShell Team Blog.

Hyper-V 3: Attach multiple VHDs via PowerShell

Posted on September 22, 2011 by Thomas Maurer

We are already testing some Windows Server 8 installations and to test some of the new storage features I needed to attach a lot of VHDs to a Virtual Machine. Now with this Windows PowerShell script its very easy and fast.

Important:

Needs Windows Server 8 (Developer Preview)
Needs Hyper-V 3 (Inculded in Windows Server 8 )
Needs PowerShell v3 (Also included in Windows Server 8 )

$filePath = "\\storage01\VHDStorage\Virtual Hard Disks\"
$fileName = "server03-disk" # Your VHD will be called yourvhdnameX.vhdx (X = Number)
$serverName = "server03"
$controllerNumber = "0"
[int64]$vHDSizeGB = "100" # in GB
$vHDFormat = "vhdx" # vhdx or vhd
$vHDType = "Dynamic"
$numberofVHDs = "8"

for ($i=1;$i -le $numberofVHDs; $i++){

    $vHDPath = $filePath + $fileName + $i + "." + $vHDFormat
    New-VHD -Path $vHDPath -SizeBytes ($vHDSizeGB * 1073741824) -VHDFormat $vHDFormat -VHDType $vHDType
    Add-VMHardDiskDrive -VMName $serverName -ControllerType SCSI -ControllerNumber $controllerNumber -Path $vHDPath

}

The best thing overall is how you fast you can create such scripts with PowerShell v3. It took me like 10-12 minutes to get this thing done, and if you think how I would have to create and attach all of those VHDs with the wizard, I saved myself a lot of time.

Windows 8: Client Hyper-V and boot from VHD

Posted on September 20, 2011 by Thomas Maurer

Some days before the BUILD conference, Microsoft released a video about Hyper-V in Windows 8. Now after some days of testing I am already a big fan of the client Hyper-V. It lets me create a perfect lab at work or a development VM and Linux VM’s for KTSI.

It’s a great solution for me. Sure there were other solutions like Virtual PC, Virtual Box and VMware Workstation before, but using the built-in Hyper-V has some advantages which make my life a little easier.

PowerShell support – it lets me start up a whole lab environment within seconds. I can really quick import Virtual Machines and start them up. And also do some other cool scripted solutions.
Performance – it offers great performance.
VHD and VHDX – it’s great to work with one virtual disk format and not have to convert virtual disks. It’s also great together with the boot from VHD feature.
Dynamic Memory
Remote Management for Hyper-V Servers (like the RSAT)
Live Storage Migration – Move a running Virtual Machine from local disk to another local disk, USB or network share and back

Microsoft made also the boot from VHD feature a little simpler.

First Mount the VHD you want to boot. (right click on the VHD and “Mount”)
Now check the new drive letter of the VHD in my case this is G:
Open the command prompt and type bcdboot G:\windows
Now your VHD will appear in the boot menu. You can check that by typing bcdedit
and as you can see no sysprep or generalize needed

Here a small list of Hyper-V client features:

32 Virtual CPUs
NUMA in VM
512 GB RAM
Sleep, Hibernate
Management console
Manage Hyper-V Server from this console
Snapshots
Up to 1024 running VM’s
VHD, and VHDX (up to 16TB)
Dynamic disks, Differencing disks, pass through disks, fixedsize disks
4K sector size
DMTF comliant WMI
Networking offloads
Live Storage Migration
Native VHD boot
Dynamic Memory
Remote Management
PowerShell
Export snapshots
Resource Pools
External, Internal and Private Networks
Bi-Direction audio
Enlightened IDE & SCSI controllers
Hyper-V on SMB
up to256 virtual drives
up to 12 virtual NICs
VLAN support
3D Graphics (Software)
Mutli Touch
USB redirection (with RDP)
Wireless NICs
Export & Import VMs
Hyper-V Extensible Switch
VHDX Resiliency

Supported Operating Systems:

Windows XP SP3
Windows Server 2003 SP2
Windows Server 2003 R2 SP2
Windows Vista
Windows Server 2008
Windows 7
Windows Server 2008 R2
Windows Storage Server 2008 R2
Windows Home Server 2011
Windows SBS 2011
Windows 8
Windows Server 8
CentOS 5.2-5.6
CentOS 6.0
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2-5.6, 6.0, 6.1
SUSE Linux Enterprise 10, 11

In my opinion Client Hyper-V is a great solution and lab to go for Developers, IT Pros, Testers, Sales people and a lot more.

Hyper-V: “Version 3 kills them all”

Posted on September 19, 2011 by Thomas Maurer

Microsoft showed the latest version of Hyper-V at build conference together with Windows 8 and Windows Server 8. Microsoft showed a lot of new Hyper-V features which turn Hyper-V in really powerful hypervisor.

Some days ago I posted a blog post about new features which Microsoft showed before the build conference, now it’s time to extend the list of new features. There are a lot of even more powerful features than the once I posted back then.

Windows Server 8 as Cloud OS

First let’s start with Windows Server 8 as the base of Microsoft Cloud strategy. Microsofts focus in Windows Server 8 was to make it easy for all to build public and private cloud solutions. There are a lot of improvements to manageability, security, scalability, extensibility, predictability and reliability which will also improve the possibilities with Hyper-V. In technical terms Microsoft made a lot of improvements how you can manage a lot of servers and services, Storage, Networking and Powershell. Of course there is a lot more, but this are the parts I think are the most important. And here are some keywords to the improvements in Windows Server 8:

Storage improvements – SMB 2.2, SMB transparent Failover, Data deduplication, Storage Spaces, online filesystem repairs, 64TB NTFS volume etc.
NIC Teaming
Powershell v3 – You can now just do everything in Powershell and even more with 23000 PowerShell cmdlets.
Server Dashboard – The new Dashboard lets you manage all servers, or even better, all Services from one place.
Multi-tenant – everything seems to be made for that
Performance Counters

Hyper-V Host improvements

Hyper-V gets not only a lot of improvements to Virtual Machine, also the Hyper-V Hosts get some new limit improvements.

up to 160 logical CPUs
supports up to 2TB RAM
no more vCPU:pCPU ration limit

Hyper-V Virtual Machine improvements

Microsoft did a lot to extend the existing Virtual Machine hardware to support even high workload Virtual Machines. I will not write a lot about this because the facts here will tell more that a lot of words.

VHDX Format – supports up to 16TB Virtual Disks
32 CPUs per VM
512GB RAM per VM
Support for Fibre Channel Adapters
Supporting Virtual Active Directory Servers

Hyper-V Networking improvements

Hyper-V got a lot of improvements in terms of networking. Microsoft realized that networking features are really important if you start to create private and public cloud scenarios and now even create a mix of public and private cloud scenarios without creating a lot of work for the IT teams to reconfigure Virtual Machines.

QoS and flexible bandwidth allocation
Support for SR-IOV (Direct Access to the physical Network adapter)
Network Virtualization
PVLAN support
Dynamic Virtual Machine Queue (D-VMQ)
Receive Side Coalescing (RSC)
DHCP Guard
Extensible virtual switch
IPsec Task offload

Hyper-V Clustering improvements

Hyper-V gets also a lot of Cluster improvements. But you have to be aware that Clusters are for really high availability and this adds a lot of costs to projects and solutions. Microsoft is working on Cloud solutions which will give great availability to low cost. For example Hyper-V Replica or Live Migration to another host over the Ethernet without the need for a shared storage. But if you need real HA you will need the Failover Cluster.

supporting up to 4000 VMs per cluster
supporting up to 63 Cluster nodes
improved Cluster Manager Console
VM Monitoring – Application health detection inside the virtual machine
New Placement policies – Virtual Machine Priority and enhanced placement
Storage Live Migration
Hyper-V Replica supporting clustering
No need for Block Storage – you can use SMB Shares
Support for Storage Spaces
Automated Node Draining – like Maintenance mode in SCVMM
Cluster Aware Updating
Cluster Shared Volume Improvements – BitLocker support, a lot of performance improvements, Self-Healing
Live Migration Queing
Migrate multiple Virtual Machine at the same time

Hyper-V Storage improvements

A I mentioned earlier Microsoft made a lot of improvements in terms of storage in Windows Server 8 and Hyper-V can take advantage of those which are quiet impressive. For example with the new features in SMB 2.2 you can now use SMB file shares to store your Virtual Machines.

VHDX
ODX
RDMA
SMB 2.2 – Transparent Failover
4K native disk support
Data Deduplication
Virtual Fiber Channel
VM boot from SAN

Hyper-V Management Improvements

As everywhere in Windows Server 8 PowerShell is the key. And the new Server Manager Dashboard Microsoft enable to create Server Groups to manage multiple servers from a single console.

Powershell for Hyper-V
Powershell Workflows – Commands and Tasks across servers
Hyper-V Extensible Switch – lets vendors to create “plugins”. Could be very interesting for Cisco UCS installations.
Server Manager Dashboard – lets you manage multiple Hyper-V host from a single console.
SCVMM 2012 – not a part of Windows Server 8 but will add great management solutions

Hyper-V HA and Data Protection

Now I think this is maybe the greatest new feature. You can now live migrate a Virtual Machine from one Hyper-V Host to another without Shared Storage or Cluster configuration. And with this option Microsoft also included a new feature called Hyper-V Replica which includes the option to replicate Virtual Machine to another host which can be hosted in the same network or even in the cloud.

Live Migration
Live Storage Migration
Live Migration to another Hosts (Not clustered) over the Ethernet
Hyper-V Replica – Replicated Virtual Machines to another Hyper-V host on-premise or public cloud
BitLocker support for CSV

This are not all of the new features Windows Server 8 Hyper-V has to offer but I tried to list the important ones. And if Microsoft sticks with their licensing model, it will be a really strong competitor to the VMWare vShpere 5.

Thomas Maurer ™

Just another private cloud weblog

Tag Archives: PowerShell