Microsoft has introduced the Web Application Proxy (WAP) with Windows Server 2012 R2 and has it positioned as a replacement for Microsoft User Access Gateway (UAG), Thread Management Gateway (TMG) and IIS Application Request Routung (ARR). WAP ist tightly bound to the Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS) role. WAP can be used
pre-authenticate access to published web applications, and it can function as an AD FS proxy The AD FS proxy role was removed in Windows Server 2012 R2 and it’s replaced by the WAP role.
Today I changed the SCSI controller type for my Windows VMs in my lab from LSI SAS to PVSCSI. Because the VMs were installed with LSI SAS, I used the procedure described in VMware KB1010398 (Configuring disks to use VMware Paravirtual SCSI (PVSCSI) adapters) to change the SCSI controller type. The main problem is, that Windows doesn’t have a driver for the PVSCSI installed. You can force the installation of the driver using this procedure (taken from KB1010398):
While I was onsite at a customer to decommission an old storage system, one of my very first tasks was to unmount and detach some old datastores. No big deal, until I saw that one after one ESXi hosts went to “not responding”. Time for a heart attack but hey: Why should a host ran into a PDL/ APD, while I was dismounting datastores on the vSphere layer? The LUNs were still there and accessible.
I use Microsofts Deployment Toolkit (MDT) in my lab to deploy Windows VMs with Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2012. I described the installation and configuration of MDT in a small blog post series. Take a look into the intro post, if you’re a new to MDT. But the OS installation isn’t the time consuming part of a deployment: It’s the installation of patches. Because of this, I decided to automate the patch installation and make it part of the OS installation.
The last two days I had a lot of trouble with Microsoft Remote Desktop Services (RDP), or to use the older wording, terminal services. To be honest: Terminal servers are not really my specialty, and actually I was at the customer to help him with some vSphere related changes. But because I was there, I was asked to throw a closer look at some problems with their Microsoft Windows 2008 R2 based terminal server farm.
Today I found this neat PowerCLI One-liner in my Twitter timeline:
PowerCLI Einzeiler um den Adapter-Typ einer VM auf Vmxnet3 zu ändern: Get-VM YOUR-VM |Get-NetworkAdapter |Set-NetworkAdapter -Type "Vmxnet3"
— T. Scheller (@bones44) February 28, 2014 A nice side effect of this one-liner is, that the mac-address doesn’t change, as you can see in the screenshots.
Patrick Terlisten/ vcloudnine.de/ Creative Commons CC0
Patrick Terlisten/ vcloudnine.de/ Creative Commons CC0
If you have ever changed the adapter type of a vNIC you will know, that this leads to a changed mac-address and a new adapter in the OS.
While I was poking around in my Twitter timeline, a tweet from Victor van den Berg (VCDX #121) got my attention.
@Mandivs I'm suprised W2K12R2 MSCS doesn't support in guest iSCSI anymore...You have to use vSphere 5.5 RDM's
— Viktor van den Berg (@viktoriousss) February 11, 2014 My first though “What a step backwards!”. I have installed a bunch of Microsoft clusters in Virtual Infrastructure and vSphere enviroments and most times it was PITA.
