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I was lucky enough to spend the previous week in New Orleans, LA at Microsoft TechEd. I had a great time checking out the latest and greatest that our Redmond buddies are about to throw our way or has already tossed.

I spent the majority of my time focusing on Sharepoint 2013 and Exchange 2013, but I was able to spend some time focusing on the client side of things as well. One thing in particular that stood out to me in this area is how Microsoft is putting a lot of time and development into making their clients “Cloud Friendly”.  Office 2013 is the first version that fully supports cloud storage providers.

Microsoft has graciously strategically provided us with built in compatibility with Skydrive. While this makes things easy to get things up and running, it makes any IT Admin experience a combination of nausea, anger, and anxiety.  If you’re fortunate enough to have a sponsored, approved, supported cloud storage solution, you’ll undoubtedly want to use it.

I’ll show you how to accomplish just that in this post.

Over the past few months I’ve been doing a lot of work that’s required me to get into the Services control panel on Windows Server.  While it’s fairly easy to get in and change the status of one service using the windows services control panel (WIN+R, Services.msc), it gets annoying when you need to do this multiple times, and even worse if you need to take action on multiple services.

Fortunately, powershell gives us the ability to do this very easily.

Here’s how:

I encountered a challenge today that was fun to fix.  There’s an Organizational Unit in my AD setup that has historically been used to store disabled AD objects instead of deleting them.

When an employee leaves the organization, our standard procedure  is as followed:

1. Disable User Object
2. Move to separate OU (IE AD://internal.msd/disabled/users)
3. Update Description field with something like: Disabled by [username] on [date]
4. Retain user object for x amount of days, then tombstone it.

Best laid plans of mice and men… yada yada…

In a new installation of vCenter 5.1, when trying to access the vSphere Web Client for the first time, you will encounter the following message:

[text]
In order for this direct link to work, you must first log in to the
vSphere Web Client at least once from https://{webclient
-host}:{webclient-https-port}.
[/text]

You can resolve this error and fix the issue using the following steps:

I came across this error when a NDMP backup of a large volume failed.

To isolate the exact error and resolve the issue, I ran the following commands:

I’ll admit – I’ve done this once or twice. Each time causes me some grief while trying to get things set up correctly.

Here’s how to fix this issue as long as you have access to the Direct Console UI or ESXi Shell.

So yesterday I talked about using a Powershell script with in Solarwinds to monitor volume sizes. Using the NetApp Data ONTAP Toolkit, we have the ability to do monitor a lot of different things, and track the information using Solarwinds. In this post I will show how to monitor SnapMirror relationships using Solarwinds.

I was unable to find any examples for how to do this online, so I came up with my own solution using the NetApp Data ONTAP toolkit as well as a slight modification of your powershell profile.

The title of this post has bothered me since… forever. I really don’t like to take extra steps for things I do on a regular basis…

I received the following message today on one of my production VM’s.

You can use these steps to resolve this issue.