I saw this on EE this evening, so I thought I’d work it out, what if your Global Address List is full of external ‘contacts’, and you want to remove/hide them?
Solution
First take a look at them, to see you’re not about to cause any damage!
I’m doing some work presenting StarWind vSAN into VMware ESX. Because we also want ‘disk tiering’ it has to be ran from Microsoft Windows with Storage Spaces*. To do that I needed to present the physical disks in the ESX hosts, (HP DL380 Gen 10s) to the Windows Virtual Machines that StarWind will be running on.
*Note: At present, ‘tiering’ cannot be done from the StarWind Linux appliance.
Solution
I approached this problem ‘assuming‘ I needed to give the VM the physical RAID controller in the physical server (of which there are two, one for the SSDs and one for the HDDs. But that’s not the case at all, I realised this when I needed to create a datastore on the host itself, and could see all the individual disks.
Shut Down, then edit the settings of the VM > ADD NEW DEVICE > RDM Disk.
Select and add each Physical disk one at a time.
With all the disks presented you can power on the virtual machine.
You will see all the disk(s) listed under the VMs summary hardware section.
The disk should be available within Windows, to add to a storage pool.
Note: If some of the drives cannot be added, see the following article;
When attempting to create a vDisk in Tiered Windows Storage Spaces you see this;
Failed to create virtual disk – Not Supported
Extended Information:
The storage pool does not have sufficient eligible resources for the creation of the specified virtual disk.
Recommended Actions:
-Choose a combination of FaultDomainAwareness and NumberOfDataCopies (or PhysicalDiskRedundancy) supported by the storage pool.
-Choose a value for number of columns that is less than or equal to the number of physical disks in the storage fault domain selected for the virtual disk.
Of if you are using PowerShell, the error will look more like this;
Solution
I’ve seen the same error when trying to create a disk from a pool that has 1 SSD, and 1 HDD, and also from a pool with many SSD’s and HDD’s. Ive seen it with both ‘Simple’ and ‘Mirrored’ storage.
Recreate the vDisk, but this time DONT use ‘Maximum Size’, drop the Tier sizes, like so.
OK, this is a bit hit and miss ‘I grant you,‘ but, you will need to experiment with the sizes. As a ‘rule of thumb’ aim to lose about 4GB per physical disk. Annoyingly you will need to delete the vDisk and keep retrying (so don’t put a volume on it just yet, or you will have to go to Computer Management and delete that every time!) until you get the size optimal.
Related Articles, References, Credits, or External Links
I’ve not actually seen this myself, but it was asked on a forum, and I managed to replicate it on the bench. When working on a user or mailbox in Exchange you may see the following error;
Error
Can’t find the organisational unit that you specified, Make sure that you have typed the OU’s identity correctly
Solution
This happens because you have a ‘Slash’ ‘/‘in the Organisational Unit that the user object is inside in Active Directory, like so;
Rename the OU to something more sensible!
Why does this happen? It’s because when there’s a slash in the OU name, like ‘MyOU/Name‘ it gets rejected by the system, as programatically it should be ‘MyOU\/Name‘.
I Don’t Have a Forward Slash in My OU Name, and I’m Still Seeing this Error?
Make sure your user, is NOT in a ‘Container‘ rather than an OU. In the example above you can see the icon for ‘Users‘ is different from the icon for “PNL” or “Test” that’s because this is NOT an OU it’s a container, move your user to an OU, then try again. Note: This can happen to the Administrator amount as well, because that’s in a container called ‘Builtin‘.
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While attempting to create some Storage Spaces in Server 2016 today, I presented a bunch of ‘new’ disks and some of them were flagged CanPool as false?
CanPool simply means the disk it available to be added to a storage pool, Id just removed all the arrays from these drives so I was confused?
Solution
Just because we’re on Powershell does not mean I can’t go old school! Launch Diskpart and list disk. You can see some of the drives (the ones I’m having trouble with have a partition on them, the asterisk in the GPT (GUID Partition Table) column gives that away?
WARNING: I know the drives, (apart from the 100GB one,) SHOULD be blank, and I know I can erase them safely, MAKE SURE the disk(s) you are looking at are not in use, and do not have important data on them!
To clean/erase
[box]
select disk {x}
online disk
clean
offline disk
[/box]
If it tells you;
Diskpart has encountered an error: The media is wrote protected.
See the system event log for more information
[box]
attributes disk clear readonly
clean
offline disk
[/box]
Note: In some cases I’ve had to physically reboot the server, before all the disks were CanPool = True.
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Natively with Veeam Backup and Restore, the only way to do this, is to perform an Agent Based backup of your VMware VM. If you are unfamiliar with doing this, you create a Protection Group, and add the machines to that protection group. It’s really designed for backing up physical machines, but there’s no reason you can’t backup a VM in the same way.
Just so you know it’s not smoke and mirrors. here’s my VM in vSphere.
Perform an ‘Agent Based‘ backup off this VM.
Restore > Agent Restore > Instant Recovery.
Select the VM > Next > Set the Hyper-V server as the ‘Host’.
Finish the ‘Wizard’, and perform the restore.
You will need to complete the process by ‘Migrating to production’.
Wait for the process to complete.
And now it’s running in Hyper-V.
I’d run devmgmt.msc and make sure all the drivers are OK. That being said, anything after server 2008 should have the correct drivers for Hyper-V, and Veeam does not support agent-based backups on Server 2008 (or earlier) so all ‘should’ be fine.
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Either you know you are using Azure AD Connect, but don’t know what server it’s running on, or you just want to see if someone has installed it! Here’s how to find which server it’s running on.
Solution
In ‘Active Directory Users and Computers’ > Search for MSOL > This should display the GSMA (Group Managed Service Account) that is used to run the service* > In the account properties > on the Description attribute, scroll to the right and you should see the Computer/Server that the service was installed on.
*Note: Unless someone chose a different account when they installed Azure AD Connect, with custom settings, (see below).
Related Articles, References, Credits, or External Links
There are a lot of things that can be customised on the ADFS logon page, but most people just want to change the image, and the ‘Company Logo’. Note: By default the company logo is just the Federation Service Display Name but you can replace that with a logo of you own.
Replace ADFS Logon Page Main Image
As per Microsoft recommendations;
“We recommend the dimensions for the illustration to be 1420×1080 pixels @ 96 DPI with a file size of no greater than 200 KB.”
Life was simpler when we had DVD Drives and a wallet full of CD/DVDs! I was building an HP DL360 This morning and needed to install Windows. I created a bootable USB with Unetbootin and selected a Windows Server ISO, it wouldn’t boot. So I thought ‘Fine I’ll play the game” I pressed F10 for Intelligent Provisioning.
After selecting USB media – the system could not see my USB Drive?
After a couple of seconds head scrathing the penny dropped, it wants the iso not a bootable drive, (doofus!) So I used a FAT formatted USB and that didn’t work either?
Option 1: Use iLO
Before you all start emailing me, you can install an operating system from virtual media WITHOUT and advanced iLO licence! Annoyingly I was building the server on the bench, so I had to connect my laptop into the iLO with a crossover cable but, here’s me proving it works.
Option 2: Use ExFAT
Format your USB drive using ExFAT, luckily I use macOS and Disk Utility will format a drive using ExFAT for me.
Note: Windows will also format as ExFAT 🙂
Then simply put your install .iSO file(s) on the media.
Now you can see your install media.
Option 3: Use the HP Media Creator
I didn’t try this option, but feel free to download it and give it a try, comment below to let me know how you get on.
