Windows Server 2012 Archives

Microsoft Server Posterpedia Windows 8.1 App

Microsoft released an update in the Windows App Store for their Server Posterpedia App, including the new Hyper-V 2012 R2 posters and some design changes.

Server Posterpedia is an interactive app that uses technical posters as a reference for understanding Microsoft technologies. This app includes all the reference posters from different Microsoft Server Technologies such as Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V, Exchange or Windows Azure. The great thing about this App, you can not only checkout the different posters and zoom in, if you click on a specific topic for you get directly linked to the right TechNet article. This can help find some TechNet references really easy and fast.

Download the Posterpedia App in the Windows Store.

Hyper-V 2012 R2 connect with enhanced session to a Gen2 VM

A great new feature within Hyper-V 2012 R2 is the enhanced session connection. With this new feature you are able to connect to a Gen2 VM through the VM Bus. This will bring a lot of new possibilities and capabilities. One of the missing things in Hyper-V 2008 R2 is copy and paste from the parent to the child VM. With the new Generation2 (Gen2) VM’s, this is also possible!! 🙂

Now you can copy and paste items like, ISO’s, textfiles, folders, etc. to your child VM. How cool is that! In this example I’m copy and paste a simple folder, but here you can see how powerfull it is.

How to: Enable data deduplication in Windows Server 2012

A very cool new feature within Windows Server 2012 is Data Deduplication. Windows will look on block level to duplicate files and removes this files with pointers to the duplicate files. This can save you a lot of diskspace! Data Deduplication can be enabled on all the volumes of your server, except the boot volume!

By default, Data Deduplication will only deduplicate data that is not changed over the last 30 days. You can change this value to any numbers of days you want. Lets enable Data Deduplication. After enabling Data Deduplication, there are three scheduled tasks available (only vissible through PowerShell).

In my example I’ve copied the Windows Server 2012 ISO three times to my ISO partition. So there are three folder called ISO1, ISO2 and ISO3. All the folder contains exact the same data. So three times the ISO files are around the 10 GB of storage on my disk. Watch the result after enabling this great new feature….do you have any idea?? 😉

1.) Open the Server Manager and enable Data Deduplication on the File and Storage Services server role.
2.) Or open PowerShell and enable this rol
Import-Module ServerManager
Add-WindowsFeature -name FS-Data-Deduplication
3.) Enable Deduplication on the specific volume or volumes
Import-Module Deduplication
Enable-DedupVolume E:
4.) View the new scheduled Deduplication jobs
Get-DedupSchedule
5.) Change the MinimumFileAgeDays value to 0
Set-DedupVolume E: -MinimumFileAgeDays 0
6.) Start the Deduplication jobs manualy
Start-DedupJob E: -Type Optimazation
Start-DedupJob E: -Type GarbageCollection
Start-DedupJob E: -Type Scrubbing
7.) After a few minutes, watch the result!
Get-DedupStatus
How cool is that. Are you also going to enable Data Deduplication? 😉

New eBook – Building a Hyper-V Cluster for under $2000

Altaro released a new eBook this week. In this eBook, Eric Siron talks about his new labenvironment he build. The big challange is to build a Hyper-V cluster for the lowest cost. If you can see, the title of this eBook is “Building a Hyper-V Cluster for under $2000“. Sounds great?!

You can download the eBook from the Altaro website. Click here.

How to: Building the ultimate lab environment using Windows 8 Client Hyper-V

When you have to create an testlab environment with multiple servers, it is a big job to install all the servers. Even when you are using Hyper-V in this environment. You manually have to install all the servers or make clones of another virtual machine. In this scenario it is very usefull to make use of Differencing Disks within Hyper-V. A Differencing Disks are linked to an master VHD or VHDX file. This master VHD or VHDX file is a virtual machine that has been sysprepped, for example Windows Server 2012.

Basically, all of the main reads for the VMs created with a differencing disk come from the master VHD or VHDX, while any changes (writes) are written to the differencing disk. The differencing disk will remain fairly small, because the amount of change should be minimal. You’re probably looking at around a couple of GBs per differencing disk. With a differencing disk you can build multiple machines with the same parent sysprep image.

My laptop contains Windows 8 with the Hyper-V role enabled, so basically my virtual environment is on my laptop. Because I have only 500 GB on storage available, it is very usefull for me to use differencing disks. A lot of virtual machines with a little need of storage.

You can build this environment by following the next steps;

1.) Create a new virtual machine within Hyper-V
2.) Install the Operating System with the specific updates
3.) Optionally you can install some base applications
4.) Sysprep the virtual machine. You can use the following command:
%windir%\system32\sysprep\sysprep.exe /generalize /shutdown
5.) Now the virtual machine is sysprepped and power off
6.) Create a new virtual machine (or multiple)
7.) Create a new VHDX file using differencing disk
8.) Navigate to the base VHDX file you’ve just created (the sysprepped virtual machine)
9.) Edit some other settings within the virtual machine (cores, memory, NIC, etc.)
10.) Boot the new virtual machine
11.) Walk through the “First Run” steps of the Operating System
12.) The new virtual machine is now ready to use
13.) Navigate to the differencing disk (VHDX) and see how big it is…right it’s really small!

FREE e-Book: The Hands-on Guide: Understanding Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012

The Hands-on Guide: Understanding Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012 gives you simple step-by-step instructions to help you perform Hyper-V-related tasks like a seasoned expert.

You will learn how to:
•Build clustered Hyper-V deployment
•Manage Hyper-V through PowerShell
•Create virtual machine replicas
•Transition from a legacy Hyper-V environment, and more

Download the first 5 chapters (180 Pages) today! Klik on the Picture to go to the Veeam Website.

How to: Obtain IP configuration from a remote server with Windows Server 2012

When you have multiple servers and you want to optain the IP configuration from all that servers, you can use the following command.

winrs -r:SERVERNAME ipconfig

In my labenvironment I’ve installed multiple Windows 2012 servers. I ran the command from my domain controller, and obtain the IP configuration of my Exchange 2013 environment. First I ran the IPCONFIG command on the local server, finally I ran the WINRS command from the domain controller. The result is exactly the same as you can see….but all from one server!! What a powerfull feature to manage your environment 🙂

How to: Create a NIC team within Windows Server 2012

A very nice new feature in Windows Server 2012 is native NIC teaming. This means you can create a team of different NIC’s, without instelling any 3th party drivers or software! Even with different NIC families, for example Intel and Broadcom. Cool!

Within a few clicks, youre NIC team is up and running. Offcourse you can also use PowerShell to manager or create a NIC team. Let’s have a look on some examples from my labenvironment. I’ve created a virtual Windows Server 2012 machine whit a copple of NIC’s in it.

1.) To list all adapter in the machine, you can use the following command
Get-NetAdapter
2.) Rename the adapters
Rename-NetAdapter -Name OLDNAME -NewName NEWNAME
In my example I’m going to create a team of 4 network interfaces (TEAM-INT1,2,3 and 4)
3.) The next step is to create a new team interface
New-NetLbfoTeam -Name LAN-TEAM -TeamMembers TEAM-INT-1, TEAM-INT-2, TEAM-INT-3
As you can see, I’ve only added 3 NIC’s to the team. In the next step, we’re going to add another NIC to the team.
4.) Next we are going to add TEAM-INT-4 to the LAN-TEAM
Add-NetLbfoTeamMebmer -Team LAN-TEAM -InterfaceAlias TEAM-INT-4
5.) Let’s view the team properties
Get-NetLbfoTeam -Name LAN-TEAM
As you can see, all the 4 NIC’s are member of the NIC team
6.) Open the Server Manager and select “Local Server”
7.) Select “NIC Teaming” Here you can edit the properties of your NIC team and see the status of each interface (speed, status, etc.)
8.) When we disable one interface, you see the new status directly

So in this exmple, you have seen how easy it is to build a new NIC team with different NIC’s. No special drivers, no tooling, no 3th party software…just Windows Server 2012!! #cool!