Tag: Windows 8

Feb142017February 14, 2017January 12, 20193 Commentsby Thomas Maurer

Open website from PowerShell

Posted in Cloud, Internet Explorer, Microsoft, Microsoft Edge, PowerShell, Web, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows Server, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server 2016, Work

If you want to directly open a website from the PowerShell console, you can use the Start-Process cmdlet. This will open the website in the default browser:

 
Start-Process "https://www.thomasmaurer.ch"

You can also use “Start” which is an alias for Start-Process:

 
Start "https://www.thomasmaurer.ch"

Yes this is a very short post, but I hope this was helpful and you can now open a website from PowerShell.

May312016May 31, 2016January 28, 20197 Commentsby Thomas Maurer

Windows Sysprep for Virtual Machines

Posted in Cloud, Hyper-V, Microsoft, PowerShell, Server Core, Virtualization, VMware, Web, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows Server, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server 2016, Work

For using the same system image for different virtual machines or physical computer, Microsoft created a tool called sysprep.exe. This blog post covers Most people should be already familiar with that tool. If not here is the description:

Sysprep prepares a Windows installation (Windows client and Windows Server) for imaging, allowing you to capture a customized installation. Sysprep removes PC-specific information from a Windows installation, “generalizing” the installation so it can be reused on different PCs. With Sysprep you can configre the PC to boot to audit mode, where you can make additional changes or updates to your image. Or, you can configure Windows to boot to the Out-of-Box Experience (OOBE).

This is great so you can sysprep a virtual machine copy the VHD or VHDX file and use it for the first boot of different VMs. In Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8, Microsoft added an addition to sysprep called the mode switch “/mode:vm”. The mode:vm switch allows you to identify the Windows as a Virtual Machine and sysprep.exe will generalize a Virtual Hard Disk (VHD or VHDX) so that you can deploy the VHD as a VHD on the same Virtual Machine (VM) or hypervisor. You must deploy the VHD on a Virtual Machine (VM) or hypervisor with the same hardware profile. For example, if you created VHD in Microsoft Hyper-V, you can only deploy your VHD to Microsoft Hyper-V VMs with a matching hardware profile, and you can only run VM mode from inside a VM.

This will boost the performance and time for the virtual machine for the first startup and installation. This also work of course with virtual machines running on other hypervisors such as VMware or Xen.

Run the following command inside the Virtual Machine (You find sysprep.exe in the C:\Windows\System32\Sysprep folder):

 
sysprep.exe /oobe /generalize /shutdown /mode:vm

Now you can copy the VHD or VHDX file from that virtual machine and use it for other VMs. Also check out my post about automating VM creation using an unattend.xml file.

Feb162016February 16, 2016January 23, 201910 Commentsby Thomas Maurer

Basic Networking PowerShell cmdlets cheatsheet to replace netsh, ipconfig, nslookup and more

Posted in Cloud, Containers, Hyper-V, Microsoft, Microsoft Azure, Nano Server, PowerShell, Private Cloud, Virtualization, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows Server, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server 2016, Work

Around 4 years ago I wrote a blog post about how to Replace netsh with Windows PowerShell which includes basic powershell networking cmdlets. After working with Microsoft Azure, Nano Server and Containers, PowerShell together with networking becomes more and more important. I created this little cheat sheet so it becomes easy for people to get started.

Basic Networking PowerShell cmdlets

Get the IP Configuration (ipconfig with PowerShell)

Get-NetIPConfiguration

List all Network Adapters

Get-NetAdapter

Get a spesific network adapter by name

Get-NetAdapter -Name *Ethernet*

Get more information VLAN ID, Speed, Connection status

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

Get driver information

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

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

Get-NetAdapterHardwareInfo

Disable and Enable a Network Adapter

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

Rename a Network Adapter

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

IP Configuration using PowerShell

Get IP and DNS address information

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

Get IP address only

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

Get DNS Server Address information

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

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

Clear DNS Cache with PowerShell

You can also manage your DNS cache with PowerShell.

List DNS Cache:

 
Get-DnsClientCache

Clear DNS Cache

 
Clear-DnsClientCache

Ping with PowerShell

How to Ping with PowerShell. For a simple ping command with PowerShell, you can use the Test-Connection cmdlet:

 
Test-Connection thomasmaurer.ch

There is an advanced way to test connection using PowerShell

Test-NetConnection -ComputerName www.thomasmaurer.ch

Get some more details from the Test-NetConnection

Test-NetConnection -ComputerName www.thomasmaurer.ch -InformationLevel Detailed

Ping multiple IP using PowerShell

1..99 | % { Test-NetConnection -ComputerName x.x.x.$_ } | FT -AutoSize

Tracert

Tracert with PowerShell

Test-NetConnection www.thomasmaurer.ch –TraceRoute

Portscan with PowerShell

Use PowerShell to check for open port

Test-NetConnection -ComputerName www.thomasmaurer.ch -Port 80
Test-NetConnection -ComputerName www.thomasmaurer.ch -CommonTCPPort HTTP

NSlookup in PowerShell

NSlookup using PowerShell:

Resolve-DnsName www.thomasmaurer.ch
Resolve-DnsName www.thomasmaurer.ch -Type MX -Server 8.8.8.8

Route in PowerShell

How to replace Route command with PowerShell

Get-NetRoute -Protocol Local -DestinationPrefix 192.168*
Get-NetRoute -InterfaceAlias Wi-Fi
 
New-NetRoute –DestinationPrefix "10.0.0.0/24" –InterfaceAlias "Ethernet" –NextHop 192.168.192.1

NETSTAT in PowerShell

How to replace NETSTAT with PowerShell

Get-NetTCPConnection
Get-NetTCPConnection –State Established

NIC Teaming PowerShell commands

Create a new NIC Teaming (Network Adapter Team)

New-NetLbfoTeam -Name NICTEAM01 -TeamMembers Ethernet, Ethernet2 -TeamingMode SwitchIndependent -TeamNicName NICTEAM01 -LoadBalancingAlgorithm Dynamic

SMB Related PowerShell commands

Get SMB Client Configuration

Get-SmbClientConfiguration

Get SMB Connections

Get-SmbConnection

Get SMB Mutlichannel Connections

Get-SmbMutlichannelConnection

Get SMB open files

Get-SmbOpenFile

Get SMB Direct (RDMA) adapters

Get-NetAdapterRdma

Hyper-V Networking cmdlets

Get and set Network Adapter VMQ settings

Get-NetAdapterVmq
# Disable VMQ
Set-NetAdapterVmq -Enabled $false
# Enable VMQ
Set-NetAdapterVmq -Enabled $true

Get VM Network Adapter

Get-VMNetworkAdapter -VMName Server01

Get VM Network Adapter IP Addresses

(Get-VMNetworkAdapter -VMName NanoConHost01).IPAddresses

Get VM Network Adapter Mac Addresses

(Get-VMNetworkAdapter -VMName NanoConHost01).MacAddress

I hope you enjoyed it and the post was helpful, if you think something important is missing, please add it in the comments.

Dec152015December 15, 2015April 25, 20194 Commentsby Thomas Maurer

How to create Windows Server bootable USB media for deployment on UEFI based systems

Posted in Cloud, Hardware, Hyper-V, Microsoft, Surface, Virtualization, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows Server, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server 2016, Work

When you were create a USB media for PCs, notebooks and servers which were using BIOS you could use several tools to do this. Now most of the tools do not really create a USB media drive which can be used to boot and install Windows or Windows Server on a UEFI based system such a new servers and for example the Surface Pro line. But it is very simple to do this now, just follow this steps:

The USB drive has to be formatted in FAT32
The USB needs to be GPT and not MBR
Copy all files from the ISO to the USB drive

PowerShell to create a Windows Server USB drive

This is it, and here is how you do it:

First plugin your USB drive to your computer. The USB drive should be bigger than 4GB.

Open a CMD prompt or PowerShell using the Run as Administrator option and open diskpart. Now you can do list all this by using

 
list disk

Select the USB disk, in my case this was disk 1

 
select disk 1

Clean the disk. Be careful this will remove all files and partitions on the USB media.

 
clean

Now convert it to GPT

 
convert gpt

Create a new primary partition. But make sure the partition is not greater than 16GB otherwise it can be formatted with FAT32.

 
create partition primary
 
# If your USB drive is bigger than 16GB use the following command
 
create partition primary size=16000

Format the partition with FAT32

 
format fs=FAT32 quick

Assign a drive letter to the volume

 
assign letter=k

now you can exit the diskpart and copy all files from the Windows or Windows Server to the USB drive and boot it. This works with Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows 10, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 R2 and Windows Server 2016 or even Hyper-V Server in the same editions.

May192015May 19, 2015May 19, 20150 Commentby Thomas Maurer

Windows 10 Editions and upgrade paths

Posted in Cloud, Hardware, Microsoft, Surface, Web, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows RT, Work

Last week Microsoft announced the different editions of Windows 10. As in the past Microsoft offers Windows in different editions that are tailored for various different use cases and scenarios. Windows 10 will power an broad range of devices – everything from PCs, tablets, phones, Xbox One, Microsoft HoloLens and Surface Hub. It will also power the world around us, core to devices making up the Internet of Things, everything from elevators to ATMs to heart rate monitors to wearables.

Editions

The different Windows 10 editions address specific needs of our various customer groups, from consumers to small businesses to the largest enterprises.

Windows 10 Home – Windows 10 Home is the consumer-focused desktop edition.
Windows 10 Mobile – Windows 10 Mobile is designed to deliver the best user experience on smaller, mobile, touch-centric devices like smartphones and small tablets.
Windows 10 Pro – Windows 10 Pro is a desktop edition for PCs, tablets and 2-in-1s. Building upon both the familiar and innovative features of Windows 10 Home, it has many extra features to meet the diverse needs of small businesses. Windows 10 Pro will add some management capabilities to the Windows 10 and also adds Windows Update for Business.
Windows 10 Enterprise – Windows 10 Enterprise builds on Windows 10 Pro, adding advanced features designed to meet the demands of medium and large sized organizations. Windows 10 Enterprise will be available to Volume Licensing customers and adds some features such as Direct Access, Branch Cache and Windows Update for Business. With Windows 10 Enterprise customers will also get access to the Long Term Servicing Branch to better control deployment options for future updates.
Windows 10 Education – Windows 10 Education builds on Windows 10 Enterprise, and is designed to meet the needs of schools – staff, administrators, teachers and students. This edition will be available through academic Volume Licensing, and there will be paths for schools and students using Windows 10 Home and Windows 10 Pro devices to upgrade to Windows 10 Education.
Windows 10 Mobile Enterprise – Windows 10 Mobile Enterprise is designed to deliver the best customer experience to business customers on smartphones and small tablets. It will be available to our Volume Licensing customers. Windows 10 Mobile Enterprise will adds a flexible ways for businesses to manage updates.
Windows 10 IoT – Windows 10 will also be avaialble for different industry devices like ATMs, rteail point of sale, handheld terminals and industrial robotics and as well for IoT (Internet of Things) devices with a Windows 10 IoT Core edition.

Upgrade

As Microsoft announced in January this year, for the first time ever, Microsoft is offering the full versions of Windows 10 Home, Windows 10 Mobile and Windows 10 Pro as a free and easy upgrade for qualifying Windows 7, Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone 8.1 devices that upgrade in the first year after launch. Once you upgrade, you have Windows 10 for free on that device. In the Microsoft Partner Network Microsoft published some more information about the upgrade paths.

Microsoft will offer a free upgrade to Windows 10 for qualified Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8.1 devices in the first year. After the first year, upgrades will be paid via boxed product and VL Upgrades.

Windows 8/8.1 and Windows 7 Home Basic and Home Premium devices upgrade to Windows 10 Home
Windows 8/8.1 Pro and Windows 7 Professional and Ultimate devices upgrade to Windows 10 Pro
If upgraded within the first 12 months following launch, the device will receive ongoing Windows 10 updates for free for the life of that device
Excludes Windows Enterprise and RT devices
The free Windows 10 upgrade is delivered through Windows Update; domain-joined machines can manually get the update via Windows Update. The upgrade cannot be deployed through WSUS.

Windows Update for Business

At Ignite, Microsoft announced the free Windows Update for Business service, available for all Windows Pro and Windows Enterprise devices, designed to help organisations keep their Windows devices always up to date with the latest security and features. In case you missed it, check out the blog, Announcing Windows Update for Business for what the service will provide.

Jan122015January 12, 2015January 12, 20152 Commentsby Thomas Maurer

Troubleshoot Windows InstantGo (Connected Standby)

Posted in Hardware, Hardware, Hyper-V, Microsoft, Surface, Virtualization, Web, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows RT, Work

In Windows 8 Microsoft released a feature called InstantGo (formerly know as Connected Standby) which should bring smartphone like Power Management features to your Windows tablet or notebook. Devices such as the Surface Pro 3 do offer this feature. This post should help you troubleshoot issues with InstantGo or Connected Standby.

InstantGo requires the following:

Windows 8.1 Operating System (In Windows 8 this is called Connected Standby)
A firmware flag indicating support for the standard
The boot volume must run on a SSD disk
Support for NDIS 6.30 by all network devices
Passive cooling on standby
Secure Boot
Memory to be soldered to the motherboard
The Hyper-V Hypervisor role must be disabled on Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 systems. Windows 10 Hyper-V will allow you to use Hyper-V and InstantGo at the same time.

Check if the hardware supports InstantGo

To check if your hardware supports InstantGo you can run the following command:

 
powercfg /a

InstantGo Issues / Connected Standby Issues

In some case you can run in some issues where you have your battery draining more than expected during the InstantGo or Connected Standby time. This could be of the following reasons:

Drivers – Make sure you have the latest drivers installed
Firmware – Make sure you have the latest Firmware (BIOS) installed
Mails – The Windows communication app keeps the broker infrastructure (BI) system active. BI, in turn, keeps the WLAN network up so that the system stays up-to-date with emails. If you get a lot of emails this can end up in a higher power drain.
Software – Some installed legacy Software which does not let you go into the InstantGo modus.
VPN Clients – Some older VPN Clients can also cause issues with InstantGo
Network Activity – The WLAN device might have a challenging radio environment and the Windows system might not be able to establish a reliable Internet connection. We see how these events affect the WLAN device, which, in turn, impacts the battery.
Hyper-V – If you run Hyper-V in Windows 8 or Windows 8.1 you can not run InstantGo, this is solved in Windows 10.

Troubleshooting InstantGo / Troubleshooting Connected Standby

To get some more information about your device and InstantGo or Connected Standby you can use the following tools and reports.

powercfg /SleepStudy

The maybe best way to Troubleshoot Connected Standby or InstantGo issues, is to use the powercfg /SleepStudy command. This will generate a Sleep Study report which allows you to analyze different things about Conncted Standby:

Connected Standby / InstantGo Overview

Connected Standby Transitions

Connected Standby Sessions

Here you can analyze which application or driver did use battery resources during the Connected Standby session.

powercfg /batteryreport

With powercfg /batteryreport you can generate a report about how your battery is used.

And you can also see what kind of state drained your battery, if this was an active session or a Connected Standby session.

powercfg /energy

With powercfg /engery you can see not only InstantGo or Connected Standby issues, you can see what other applications, drivers and more does could drain your battery.

I hope this helps you to troubleshoot Connected Standby issues.

Sources

Mar262014March 26, 2014September 2, 20182 Commentsby Thomas Maurer

Save PowerShell Object to file for Remote Troubleshooting

Posted in Cloud, Hyper-V, Microsoft, PowerShell, Virtual Machine Manager, Virtualization, Web, Windows, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows Server, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 R2, Work

This is not something new to the most of you PowerShell guys out there, but still there are a lot of IT Pros which do not know about this. Sometimes we have to do some remote troubleshooting without having access to the system itself. The thing you can do is to let the customer send you some screenshots but that doesn’t really show everything and maybe you have to contact the customer like 100 times to get the right information. A better solution is to let the customer to run a PowerShell command or script and send you the output. But even a text file or screenshot of the PowerShell output is not the best solution. If you get a lot of text in a TXT file it is hard to sort it and maybe there are some information missing because the txt output does not include all information of the PowerShell object.

I have started to use a simple method to export PowerShell objects to a XML file and import the object on another system. This can be done by the PowerShell cmdlets Export-Clixml and Import-Clixml.

What I do is, I tell the customer to run the following command to generate a XML with the PowerShell objects about his disks for example.

 
Get-Disk | Export-Clixml C:\temp\Servername_disks.xml

After I got this XML file, I can import it here on my local system and can work with it as I would be in front of the customer system.

 
$disks = Import-Clixml C:\mylocaltemp\Servername_disks.xml

As I said, this is nothing new but this can save you and your customer some time. Of course this works with other objects not just disks 😉 For example you can get Cluster Configurations, Hyper-V Virtual Switch Configurations and much more.

Update:

Jeffrey P Snover (Microsoft Technical Fellow and Lead Architect of Windows Server) commented on my blog post and had some great input. If you want to troubleshoot sometimes you often need more information than just one information. To save multiple PowerShell objects into a single file you can use a hashtable to do this:

 
$info = @{
host = hostname
date = get-date
Disks = Get-disk;
Services = get-service;
Processes = get-process
}
$info | export-clixml c:\temp\info.xml

You can see more information on this topic in Jeffery Snovers comment on this blog.

Tag: Windows 8

Open website from PowerShell

Windows Sysprep for Virtual Machines

Basic Networking PowerShell cmdlets cheatsheet to replace netsh, ipconfig, nslookup and more

Basic Networking PowerShell cmdlets

IP Configuration using PowerShell

Ping with PowerShell

Tracert

Portscan with PowerShell

NSlookup in PowerShell

Route in PowerShell

NETSTAT in PowerShell

NIC Teaming PowerShell commands

SMB Related PowerShell commands

Hyper-V Networking cmdlets

How to create Windows Server bootable USB media for deployment on UEFI based systems

PowerShell to create a Windows Server USB drive

Windows 10 Editions and upgrade paths

Editions

Upgrade

Windows Update for Business

Troubleshoot Windows InstantGo (Connected Standby)

InstantGo requires the following:

Check if the hardware supports InstantGo

InstantGo Issues / Connected Standby Issues

Troubleshooting InstantGo / Troubleshooting Connected Standby

powercfg /SleepStudy

powercfg /batteryreport

powercfg /energy

Save PowerShell Object to file for Remote Troubleshooting

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