Windows

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. Because WAP stores its configuration in the AD FS, you must deploy AD FS in your organization. The server, that hosts the WAP, has no local configuration. This allows you to deploy additional WAP servers to create a cluster deployment. The additional servers get their configuration from the AD FS.

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. The hosts came back quickly and from that point, I watched the hosts flapping between “connected” and “not responding”. Time for an investigation. My first thought was that it must have something to do with the network. But the network was okay, no problems with interfaces, (M/R)STP or similar. Then I checked the logs and found this

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. Some problems with removable media (USB sticks etc.) and audio on IGEL thin clients were hard to troubleshoot, but we were able to fix them. The main problem was none at first glance.

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.

While I was poking around in my Twitter timeline, a tweet from Victor van den Berg (VCDX #121) got my attention.

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. Especially with Raw Device Mappings (RDM) and bus sharing, which prevents vMotion a VM to another host (regardless of this: it’s not supported!). It’s ironic to invest a significant amount of money into a technology, which  increases availability and manageability, and another technology lowers availability due additional maintenance windows for cluster failovers. But that’s exactly what you get, when you use MSCS with SCSI bus sharing (RDM or VMFS). A way to address this issue is to use in-guest iSCSI. This means that you access the shared disks directly from the VM due a iSCSI initiator running in the VM. To do so, you have to present the disks for the cluster to the VMs, not to the ESXi hosts. To be honest: In-guest increases complexity. Especially then, when the customer doesn’t have a iSCSI infrastructure. A second method is in-guest SMB, which is currently only supported with Windows Server 2012. Just to clear up the matter with in-guest iSCSI and W2K12(R2). Mostafa Khalil provided the crucial information: