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Create Azure RM VM Using Existing VHD

TailspinToys Canada have been busy upgrading their on-premises, Azure and Office 365 infrastructure.  Previously Azure resources were moved from classic (Azure Service Manager) to the new Azure Resource Manager (Azure RM).   The VMs, storage accounts and VHDs were migrated.   One of the migration blockers was that multiple availability sets were previously present in one of the cloud services.  Th… Read the rest “Create Azure RM VM Using Existing VHD”

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Exchange Management Shell Pipeline Not Executed Because a Pipeline Is Already Executing

When running operations in the Exchange Management Shell, you may run into the situation where the commands do not complete and the error “Pipeline not executed because a pipeline is already executing” is reported.  An example of this is shown below.  This is an Exchange 2010 SP3 RU15 lab server.  In this case a PowerShell one-liner was used to iterate through the Exchange 2010 servers, and to sta… Read the rest “Exchange Management Shell Pipeline Not Executed Because a Pipeline Is Already Executing”

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Remote PowerShell – PSSession WhoAmI

For those who worked with NT and Novell Netware many, many moons ago they became familiar with a handy function– who am I.  Windows folks may also recall it when working with the Client and Gateway Services for Netware, and whoami.exe was also added to the NT Resource Kit.  Remember the days of all the fun res kit tools? *

The whoami command does exactly what you would expect, it tells you who you … Read the rest “Remote PowerShell – PSSession WhoAmI”

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Script To Start Exchange Services

Running scripts to start and stop services has been a task long associated with Exchange.  For those who pre-date Exchange 2000, do you remember the fun issues with the increased WaitToKillServiceTimeout value?  By default in ye olde days HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlWaitToKillServiceTimeout was 20,000 ms (20 secs).   Installing Exchange increased that to 600,000 ms (10 minutes). … Read the rest “Script To Start Exchange Services”

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Script To Automate Exchange Health Manager Service For Monitoring Mailbox Reset

This is a quick tactical script to help Exchange administrators when resetting Exchange Monitoring mailboxes.  Exchange 2013 introduced managed availability which is responsible for evaluating the health of Exchange 2013 and 2016 Exchange servers.  Yes it does also probe downlevel servers, but let’s not get bogged down in that in this post.  In order to do the synthetic user tests, mail and tests … Read the rest “Script To Automate Exchange Health Manager Service For Monitoring Mailbox Reset”

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Script To Remove Windows Update Server Values From Registry

In some of the lab environments provided to me, the base Windows image has pre-set WSUS updates servers.  When I then move the lab VMs to a different network, the original WSUS servers are no longer available, and I typically point to Microsoft Update or a different WSUS server.

In the case of pointing to Microsoft Update, I wanted to delete the initial WSUS registry values.  In my case, these are … Read the rest “Script To Remove Windows Update Server Values From Registry”

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PowerShell Tail Command

In a recent customer conversation, they were excited that PowerShell 5.0 would contain the option to tail a log file.  While they were excited to get that feature, they were less excited to hear that PowerShell 3.0 had already added the –Tail parameter to the Get-Content cmdlet.  Previously there have been other solutions to get this functionality, but is now native in PowerShell.

As an example:

Gets… Read the rest “PowerShell Tail Command”

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Install Desktop Experience – Windows Server 2012 R2

This is an updated version of the original Windows Server 2012 post.  The genesis of which was an application requirement to install Media Player onto a couple of servers.  This met with some muttering and cursing from my colleague in the nearby fabric covered box, as the option to install the Desktop Experience feature is not as obvious as it was on Windows 2008 R2 which is highlighted … Read the rest “Install Desktop Experience – Windows Server 2012 R2”

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AzureVM Static IP Does Not Persist

It is possible to configure a “static” IP on your Azure IAAS VMs.  This is something that we looked at in a previous post.  One thing worth pointing out is that there is a little wrinkle with the current implementation, and you may run into unexpected results. 

Static IP assignment in Azure VMs is not the same as configuring a typical static IP for a server in your on-pre… Read the rest “AzureVM Static IP Does Not Persist”