So I recently had to rebuild my Server 2012 virtual server. I had storage spaces setup and after I finished the install the Virtual Disk was not mounted. I realized that I was able to bring it all back online, but every restart it had to remount the VHD.
I had decided there must be a way to fix it and decided to see what the properties were within PowerShell. I ran a Get-VirtualDisk which showed me my single VHD (pictured below)
As a follow up to Backups are Important! Here is How I do it! I decided I should let everyone know how I am handling remote backups on my blog. It’s not hard to see that I am obviously a Windows guy, I am also glad to admit that I personally prefer Linux Servers for my blog, it’s a smaller impact, and much much cheaper; although I have considered Azure more than once.
So as I have listed on my last blog post I was bit in the rear on backups and decided to go for overkill. I already have a ton of storage at home so I figured there had to be a way for me to utilize that storage and have a remote backup that isn’t in my Dropbox and isn’t a manual process. So I began researching ways to interface with SFTP, I found out that WinSCP has .NET Assemblys available, and I’ll admit I am far from a programmer and didn’t want to try to hook into that using PowerShell. So I let it sit for a couple of weeks and by god an example of exactly what I wanted to do was posted, and all I had to do was minor tweaks.
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While recently blogging about using my Surface to share media from my desktop to my Xbox it occurred to me. Some people may not know how to setup a HomeGroup, and it would be very useful to have step by step instructions to ease the adoption of sharing Music and Videos across all of you’re Windows 8 computers in your home.
This is very simple, just follow the steps below.
Once you have completed that you can access you’re shared content on any computer that is a member by simply opening the File Explorer and under Home Group you will see the users sharing content. You can also add additional files by modifying you’re libraries to include folders in other locations than the default.
Today is the day that I was hoping to call myself an MCSE, I am thrilled to hear that some who have taken the challenge have completed it and I am not shy to admit to my failure. This is not the first time that I’ve failed an exam and I am 100% positive it will not be the last. However I feel that this failure is the most beneficial to me because I have a greater understanding of what needs to be focused on, and what can be completely ignored.
While taking the exam I noticed it is mostly OpsMgr, followed by ServiceMgr, Orchestrator, Runbook Designer, and finally VMM. My exam was 40 questions long and some of them were complete guesses that I had to make. When asked what they tested on the best I can really describe is a lot on integrating the pieces and even more on setting up monitoring and reporting.
If you are at TechEd this week I strongly encourage you go take the exam even if you have never touched it in your life, because at least on you have taken you, you know what to focus on.
Over the past 3 weeks I’ve been in and out quite a bit from the twitter conversations; however I have still been following along. Things became a bit overwhelming switching from being a student to full time and the opening of my pool and Diablo III coming out was extremely distracting too. I am not too far off from my current plan; however I do feel I need to catch up considering I still do not have a fully functioning lab. I had given up on the unified installer after wasting tons of time on it and decided that it would be more beneficial for me to build everything out manually. Building everything manually is much much more time consuming however I feel I have greater in-depth knowledge doing it this way and do not regret this decision at all.
In the past 3 weeks most of my time has been spent building my lab; but I’ve also spent time watching videos and finding new resources. I’ve watched a few of the MMS videos and below I have two that I feel are very beneficial to everyone and I’ve also found a new resource that I haven’t gotten to use yet but I do believe will be greatly beneficial.
I can already feel this is going to be a very challenging Tech Ed, I am excited to see everyone and I strongly encourage everyone continue their studies even after Tech Ed is over!