Pay Attention to your IT Guy

Recently, a team of people and I performed a migration of a database from old and dying hardware to shiny new hotness. Some of the questions I got, well …

Remove Ghosted NIC from a Windows VM

After performing a V2V, P2V or a clone operation in which the VHD/VHDX file is copied to a new VM, a new NIC is installed in the virtual machine.  This is evidenced by the need to once again set the IP configuration of the NIC.

Create a VM Checkpoint in SCVMM

In a virtualized environment, we have the ability to create point-in-time snapshots, or checkpoints in Microsoft parlance, of virtual machines. This gives the ability to immediately roll back any changes after the checkpoint operation was performed. This is especially useful when debugging an application, or performing migrations and upgrades to applications.

Fix File Associations for ZIP files

From time to time, file associations get broken.  This could be the result of malware, “bit slippage”, uninstall of an associated program, or even some inadvertent change of settings. Here is how to fix a broken ZIP file association.

Simple Project Management with Bulleted Lists

For IT folks, the mentioning the “P” word brings visions of long, drawn-out lists of things to be done, usually enforced by someone who barely knows how to power on their computer. There are even those of us who deny the project-management aspect of information technology. Don’t think of it as just a task list. Think of it… Read More »

Use PowerShell to Remove a Stubborn VM

During a recent cleanup effort in the System Center Virtual Machine Manager console, I found a powered off guest machine.  The status showed the VM as having an “Unsupported Cluster Configuration State”.

Check Remote Services with Powershell

If you need to check the status of a service across several machines, and don’t have monitoring in place, you can use PowerShell to get Running/Stopped/Starting status quickly.