Convert MBR Partitioned Drives to GPT
KB ID 0001407 Problem I got asked if I’d ever had to do this today, I vaguely remember having this problem in the past, but I can’t remember how I solved it. You set the ‘Partition Table Type’ on a disk in Windows, when the drive is first initialised, like so; And the default is MBR, so that usually gets ticked, the problem is MBR only supports disks up to 2TB in size. Now if it’s just a new disk, with...
Remote Desktop Services – Securing By Group Policy
KB ID 0001211 Problem Note: This is not an exhaustive list, but it’s what I use when securing Remote Desktop Services, (Terminal Services) servers. Some of these settings are ONLY for Server 2012 R2 and later. If you have any settings you think are omitted, please comment below. Solution User Access To RDS If you want to create a Domain security group for RDS users than please do so. BE AWARE the ‘Remote Desktop...
vSphere: Presenting Physical Disks to a VM
KB ID 0001563 Problem 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...
The Storage Pool Does Not Have Sufficient Eligible Resources
KB ID 0001562 Problem 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....
Windows Disks ‘CanPool’ set False?
KB ID 0001560 Problem 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...
Veeam: Restore/Migrate vSphere VM to Hyper-V
KB ID 0001559 Problem I saw this question asked on EE the other day, and while I’ve done Migrating from vSphere to Microsoft before, I’ve never really tried with Veeam. Migrating and Restoring vSphere Machines to Azure is easy, but what about Hyper-V? Solution Veeam Backup and Recovery Download 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...
ADFS Logon Page: Change Images and Logos
KB ID 0001556 Problem 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...
ADFS: Deploy Active Directory Federation Services
KB ID 0001140 Problem The actual configuration of ADFS depends largely on what you intend to do with it. Here I’m using it to broker connections from my Microsoft Web Application Proxy. This article is just to ‘join the dots’ and covers just the installation of the role itself. Solution Before you Start: Make sure you have a certificate ready to use for ADFS. I typically use a wildcard cert for this, it’s...
Cant Copy a Group Policy Object
KB ID 0001543 Problem Was asked this this morning, why couldn’t someone ‘Copy’ a Group Policy Object (GPO)? Solution At first I was confused, (I made the same mistake they had), look at what I’m trying to copy? It’s not a Group Policy Object, its a ‘Link’ to a GPO. (Note: There’s a shortcut arrow!’) Locate the actual GPO and you can copy it! Related Articles, References, Credits,...
Windows Adding Firewall Rules With PowerShell
KB ID 0001538 Problem There was a question on Experts Exchange this morning, the asker wanted to be able to add a ‘Trusted’ network range to their Windows Server Firewall settings as a ‘allow all ports’ rule. Solution You can of course add this manually in the GUI, normally I’d simply Add a Firewall Rule with a Group Policy. but the problem with that is, that’s fine if you want to open a particular...