Marcel's questions

I'm writing a Powershell script that queries the status of the latest backup of VMs as follows:

$recoveryVaultInfo = Get-AzRecoveryServicesBackupStatus -Name $vm.Name -ResourceGroupName $vm.ResourceGroupName -Type 'AzureVM'

When I run this piece of the script, I get this error:

Get-AzRecoveryServicesBackupStatus: The client 'XXX' with object id 'XXX' does not have authorization to perform action 'Microsoft.RecoveryServices/locations/backupStatus/action' over scope '/subscriptions/XXX' or the scope is invalid. If access was recently granted, please refresh your credentials.

I am a member of the LogAnalyticsReader group on the BackupVault. I am able to see the status of backups through the Backup Vault > Backup Items blade.

Why can't I do it through Powershell?

I'm to assist someone to upgrade the hardware on a yacht. They currently have Active Directory, running on a Server 2008 machine installed on the boat.

They also have an Office365 subscription, with a number of hosted email addresses.

I plan to consolidate these two, and setup hybrid AD.

My concern is with the occasionally connected nature of the boat. I remember in the olden days that should an AD server in a forest not sync for 90 or 120 days, it would "tombstone", and would need to be massaged back into the forest. The nature of connection on the boat (if at sea) would mean that there could be extended (i.e. 60+ days) where there would be no internet connection.

How does a hybrid topology handle this? Is there a max number of days that an AD server can be disconnected from the internet before it tombstones?

When we started syncing our on-prem AD to our Azure AD instance, we noticed that in some circumstances the groups on Azure AD does not contain all the members that the on-prem group has.

Having gone through the recommendations of IdFix, we couldn't find the reason for this mismatch. All the users were synced correctly.

I've spent way too much time on this.

We have a 8 node Microsoft Private Cloud, hosted on a Cisco Flexpod (B200 blades, Nexus 5k, 6248FI's with two NetApp FAS2550 controllers for SAN). Running UCS 2.2(5a) firmware.

All the hosts SAN boot, and run Server 2012 R2 Datacentre. There is a CSV mounted on each host, that hosts our 70-odd virtual machine's VHDX's.

Recently, we moved to Visual Studio Online and commissioned a number of build servers (well, 3). Once the build is complete, the artifacts are published to our staging and testing environments, each consisting of a single virtual machine running Server 2012 R2 Standard. This publishing uses Robocopy to copy the artificats to the C$ share of those virtual machines.

When that copy happens, we see the following:

• The virtual machine's GUI becomes unresponsive
• When connecting to the VM during this state, we are unable to log in (sometimes ctrl-alt-del has no effect, sometimes the login prompt is shown but typing doesn't show in the password box)
• If we were logged in before the CIFS/SMB traffic started, GUI elements keep running until you interact with them
• After a while, all virtual machines hosted on the same Hyper-V host start experiencing timeouts
• The VM is unresponse to shutdown commands through Failover cluster manager, and we have to turn off the VM which takes a little time, but completes
• After rebooting the VM, it's fine again until you try and copy to it again
• Existing VMs (i.e. VMs commissioned a long time ago) are unaffected, it's only ones commissioned in the last month

To debug, I tried a manual (i.e. Windows copy and paste), which exhibits the same issue.

I've tried:

• Changing receive side scaling settings
• Disabled VMQ (even though we don't have Broadcom adapters, but Cisco VICs), both on the host and on the VM's network adapter
• Restarted the entire cluster (rolling restart of hosts)
• Building a new VM, without any Windows updates. Experiences the same issue
• Confirmed that we don't have any duplicate IP addresses
• There is no AV running on any of the hosts or guest VMs
• Because GUI items that are open before the issue starts keeps running, I ran Resource Monitor and checked the disk utilization. When the issue starts, the disk IO drops to pretty much 0. On this point (along with NetApp specific monitoring tools, and the fact that VM's on all the other nodes keep running) I've eliminated the storage component as being the culprit. See below the screenshot of when the copy started:

Note the drop in disk IO. Incidentally, all other VMs on the same Hyper-V host's disk IO drops to 0 at the same time.

Out of frustration, this morning I created a Gen1 Virtual Machine, and commissioned it as I would any other Gen2. This for some unknown reason, works. If I copy to the C$ share of a Gen2 machine, it fails. If I copy from the exact same location, to the C$ share of this new Gen1 machine, there are no issues.

Update: I've also noted that copying from the Gen2 machines is fine. Just when copying TO them does the issue exhibit.

What could be causing this? What is the difference between Gen1 and Gen2? Could it be a UCS firmware issue.

We have two Microsoft Private Clouds: one consists of 8 nodes (each with two processors) and the other consists of 4 nodes (each with two processors). Call them Private Cloud A and Private Cloud B. Each node is currently licensed on our EA with a Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacentre license.

Some production services are hosted on A, with DR instances for those services existing on B (i.e. SQL availability group with primary on A, one secondary on A (for HA) and one secondary on B (for DR), Exchange cross-site DAG). We also have some production services running on B, with DR instances running on A.

Private Cloud A hosts about 70 VM's (95% Windows Server 2012, rest are Linux based) and Private Cloud B hosts about 30 VM's.

We'd like to implement SCCM (more specifically, SCVMM) to help us manage the virtual environment (which is currently done mostly through Powershell scripts and manual intervention on Failover Cluster Manager and Hyper-V console).

How should we license SCCM 2012 R2 in this environment? Would I need to purchase a Datacentre License for each of the 12 hosts (which would be an exorbitant amount)? Or, do I only license one host with a Standard license, and host all my VM's that run SCCM components on that one host? Or should I rather put down a physical machine to host these components, and license with a Standard license?

I did a SQL 2012 to SQL 2014 upgrade using the upgrade wizard.

The install failed for the DB, Full-Text, Replication, AS and SSRS components, and the error reported was due to a backup location no longer existing. I've fixed the issue by changing the default backup location in the registry (HKLM\Software\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL11.\MSSQLServer\BackupDirectory).

Even though the install of the above components failed, the installation of the common components (Management Tools, Integration Services, Sql Browser, Sql Writer) succeeded.

However, when running the install again and get to the Select Features step, I'm presented with this :

and I'm unable to continue.

From the report of the previous setup, I've found this :

The upgrade process for SQL Server failed. To continue the upgrade process, use the following information to resolve the error. Next, uninstall SQL Server by using this command line: setup /q /action=uninstall /instanceid=MyInstance /features=RS,SQLENGINE,FULLTEXT,REPLICATION. Then, run SQL Server Setup again.

Is there a way to get setup to proceed without having to uninstall?

In our company up until now, we've had an on-site Exchange 2007 installation. For the purposes of this question, we have 3 servers :

• Exchange07MBX01 (Mailbox, Hub Transport)
• Exchange07MBX02 (Client Access)
• Exchange07CAS01 (Client Access, Hub Transport)

Currently, all Outlook clients point to Exchange07MBX01, with HTTP proxy enabled pointing to webmail.mycompany.com.

Over the last couple of days, I've installed Exchange 2013 on different VMs. I've updated everything, so the two are successfully co-existing at the moment. The 2013 servers are :

• Exchange13MBX01 (Mailbox)
• Exchange13MBX02 (Mailbox)
• Exchange13CAS01 (Client Access)
• Exchange13CAS02 (Client Access)

I also setup a hardware load balancer between the two CAS servers, call it Exchange13LoadBalancer. I've also setup the external urls for all my Virtual Directories to be the same as the Exchange 2007 machines, webmail.mycompany.com.

I've successfully moved my own mailbox to the 2k13 servers, by using the Migrate Batch function. I can browse to OWA and access my mailbox.

At the end of the migration, Outlook popped up a message saying that "The Exchange Administrator has made a change requiring you to restart Outlook", which I did. However, no changes were applied. I'm assuming that this change would then point my Outlook Client to one of the new client access servers (my Outlook client still pointed to ExchangeMBX01, with the HTTP proxy pointing to webmail.mycompany.com).

I then took another user, started their migration, added two entries in the host file for :

• webmail.mycompany.com -> Exchange13LoadBalancer
• autodiscover.mycompany.com -> Exchange13LoadBalancer

When the migration completed, and asked this user to restart Outlook, still no changes were applied. Once again, when I manually changed it on his computer, it worked fine.

Onto my question... Is there an automatic way (i.e. AD policy/DNS setting/Voodoo) of changing this? Is this the proper way to migrate users to Exchange 2013? I can't change the DNS record for webmail.mycompany.com to point to the new Exchange servers, as their mailboxes are still on the Exchange 2007 servers... or can I?

What is the best way to move their mailboxes, while not requiring me to go to each user's computer and create a host file/change the mail account to point to Exchange2013LoadBalancer/delete the account and make a new account pointing to the new server?

I have a Hyper-V VM that has 2 virtual NICs, in different networks.

These different networks travel over different physical infrastructure.

Network A is used for management, and goes through a 100Mbps interface. Network B should be used for data, and goes through a 4Gbps interface.

On my domain controller (which is also a DNS server, running Server 2012), the server in question has 2 DNS records... same hostname, 2 different IP's.

When I try to connect to, say, a database on this server, and specify the hostname in my connection string, traffic always goes over the 100Mbps interface.

Is there a way to force the client computer to resolve the IP address of the server in my data network? Do I have to specify the IP address of the server in my connection string?

As in the title... I've made a new (Active Directory connected) conditional forwarder on one of our DNS servers (running Windows Server 2012).

Firstly, how long does it take to propagate to other DNS servers in our environment? And, how can I force it to propagate now?

EDIT: some more info

For the purpose of this discussion, we have two Windows Server 2012 machines (one at a remote site, and one locally). They are at different locations. Both are domain controllers, and have the DNS role enabled. I've added a conditional forwarder on the remote server, made sure it's replicated through AD (it's a checkbox you enable), and would like to know how long it'll take for that to propagate to the local DNS server.

By propagate I mean when will the conditional forwarder show up on the local DNS server?

We've merged with another company, and part of our revamp is to move to a new hosting location, and new servers.

The company currently has an Exchange 2007 server/s, with about 200 mailboxes, for say, abc.com (i.e. users' addresses are [email protected]). These Exchange machines are part of the AD domain, abc.local.

We installed new servers, and to avoid inheriting years of bad admin, we created a new AD domain called, say, def.local, in which we deployed our new Exchange 2013 servers (2 x Hubs, 2 x Storage).

There exists a two-way trust between abc.local and def.local. I'm able to assign permissions for def.local resources to abc.local users, and vice versa.

Is it possible to move the mailboxes between these two setups? We still want to keep the old email domain, abc.com, and, the users should still be able to access this mailbox with their abc.local AD account.

I've seen http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee633491(v=exchg.150).aspx, but in that case the user would have to login to their mailbox using an account created for them in the def.local AD domain.

I have 2 networks :

I have a DC in the internal network for my domain, and a RODC in the DMZ for the same domain. A firewall exists between these two networks, allowing only the ports/traffic I specify.

When I add a computer in the DMZ, and try to add it to the domain, it still tries to access my DC on the internal network, rather than the RODC in the DMZ. I've done the change as specified here (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/977510, i.e. allowing the RODC to be discoverable).

I am allowing the following ports between my RODC and DC :

Service           Source          Destination
Ephemeral ports   49152:65535     49152:65535
FRsRPC            1:65535         53248
Kerberos          1:65535         88
LDAP              1:65535         389
SMB               1:65535         445
NTP               1:65535         123
RPCC Endpoint     1:65535         135

I have two Sites setup... DMZ and Internal. The RODC is part of the DMZ Site, and the DC is part of the Internal site. Subnets are also setup, and assigned to the correct sites.

If I run a nltest /dsgetdc:mydomain.local on a computer in the DMZ, the RODC is returned.

I'm planning on implementing a Hyper-V 2012 cluster, in a host cluster configuration.

Should the host machines be in a domain? If so, should that DC machine be a part of the cluster, or a seperate machine? Should the hosts be in the same domain as the guest VMs?