Spoke about how to troubleshoot slow boot and slow logon situations at ITPro Camp Tampa on Saturday. Thank you to everyone that came out.
Attached is the slide deck from the presentation.
*Edit Updated the PowerPoint
Spoke about how to troubleshoot slow boot and slow logon situations at ITPro Camp Tampa on Saturday. Thank you to everyone that came out.
Attached is the slide deck from the presentation.
*Edit Updated the PowerPoint
Fought with a good problem yesterday.
After upgrading my System Center Virtual Machine Manager to 2012 R2; I could not change the SCVMM Settings in Team Foundation Server 2012 Lab Management to point to the new SCVMM server. I could add the library share, but not the host group.
The error was very cryptic, but I could guess that some PowerShell was not happy from the reference to commandlets and Get-Help. The screen shot is above, error text is below for the search engines to index.
"VMM is unable to process one or more of the provided cmdlet parameters. Type Get-Help NO_PARAM -full to view a list of defined parameters and complete descriptions. Then try the operation again."
I am not sure how I am supposed to type PowerShell into the Lab Management Settings window so now what? First a quick search online for "Lab Management Get-Help NO_PARAM" no hits, so drop the Lab Management and I find an old KB from SCVMM 2008; Virtual machines cannot migrate from a Windows Server 2008 stand-alone server to a Windows Server 2008 cluster after you upgrade to System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 with a very long title.
Virtual machines cannot migrate from a Windows Server 2008 stand-alone server to a Windows Server 2008 cluster after you upgrade to System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=975426
Which even though the article is from an old version of SCVMM it lets me know that there may be an issue with the SCVMM agent/console version. When using Lab Management in TFS you have to install the SCVMM console on the TFS server so this makes sense.
SCVMM Console version is 3.1.6011.0
SCVMM Server version is 3.1.7200.0
So after uninstalling the SCVMM 2012SP1 console and installing the SCVMM 2012R2 console and a quick reboot on the TFS server all works.
There wasn't much information on the error provided when the host group add fails so hopefully if anyone forgets the important step of upgrading the SCVMM console on the TFS server they will find this post and have the information to fix it.
For anyone that hasn't seen it, the Microsoft Script Repository, http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcenter, is a great place to find all types of scripts, VBScript, JavaScript, PowerShell, etc.
Today I uploaded a script that will work like a drive duplicator for Windows Image files(.wim).
You can throw a bunch of USB drives in a computer and copy the same .wim image to each in order without having to touch the machine until it's finished copying.
Here is the link to the script at the repository:
http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcenter/Wim-Image-USB-Drive-25381932
Hopefully this helps out anyone doing Windows deployments, Windows To Go or creating WinPE USB drives.
My disk is a cluster size, of 4Kb. This is the default cluster size of an NTFS volume up to 16TB (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/140365). But is this the best size to use?
There are many performance whitepapers that recommend that other cluster sizes should be used for best performance of the disk subsystem. For instance here is a best practice for SQL Server; http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd758814(v=SQL.100).aspx. Other products may have different recommendations.
So how can you find the current disk cluster size?
FSUTIL.EXE
A built in tool since Windows XP/2003. Can be used to view many file system settings. The cool thing about this tool is that it can be used on a Clustered Shared Volume to view the disk cluster size or on a regularly mounted drive with a drive letter.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc753059(v=WS.10).aspx
Example:
Fsutil.exe fsinfo ntfsinfo c:\clusterstorage\volume1
NTFS Volume Serial Number : 0x965c513b5c511779
NTFS Version : 3.1
LFS Version : 2.0
Number Sectors : 0x000000000dbfe7ff
Total Clusters : 0x00000000001b7fcf
Free Clusters : 0x00000000001b7847
Total Reserved : 0x0000000000002004
Bytes Per Sector : 512
Bytes Per Physical Sector : 512
Bytes Per Cluster : 65536
Bytes Per FileRecord Segment : 1024
Clusters Per FileRecord Segment : 0
Mft Valid Data Length : 0x0000000000010000
Mft Start Lcn : 0x000000000000c000
Mft2 Start Lcn : 0x0000000000000001
Mft Zone Start : 0x000000000000c000
Mft Zone End : 0x000000000000cca0
Resource Manager Identifier : ACDA0BE7-F86C-11E2-9402-002522F4122F
NTFSINFO.EXE
A Sysinternals tool. Can be used to view disk information when mounted to a drive letter.
http://live.sysinternals.com/ntfsinfo.exe
Example:
Ntfsinfo.exe c:
NTFS Information Dump V1.01
Copyright (C) 1997 Mark Russinovich
Volume Size
-----------
Volume size : 121601 MB
Total sectors : 249040895
Total clusters : 31130111
Free clusters : 2949108
Free space : 11519 MB (9% of drive)
Allocation Size
----------------
Bytes per sector : 512
Bytes per cluster : 4096
Bytes per MFT record : 1024
Clusters per MFT record: 0
MFT Information
---------------
MFT size : 404 MB (0% of drive)
MFT start cluster : 786432
MFT zone clusters : 3789728 - 3840928
MFT zone size : 200 MB (0% of drive)
MFT mirror start : 2
Meta-Data files
---------------
CHKDSK.EXE
A built in tool. Can check disks for errors and fix errors. If you specify just a scan without fixing the summary will show the partition cluster size.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb491051.aspx
Example:
Chkdsk c:
The type of the file system is NTFS.
Volume label is OSDisk.
WARNING! F parameter not specified.
Running CHKDSK in read-only mode.
CHKDSK is verifying files (stage 1 of 3)...
414464 file records processed.
File verification completed.
10980 large file records processed.
0 bad file records processed.
CHKDSK is verifying indexes (stage 2 of 3)...
529830 index entries processed.
Index verification completed.
0 unindexed files scanned.
0 unindexed files recovered.
CHKDSK is verifying security descriptors (stage 3 of 3)...
Security descriptor verification completed.
57684 data files processed.
CHKDSK is verifying Usn Journal...
34399264 USN bytes processed.
Usn Journal verification completed.
Windows has scanned the file system and found no problems.
No further action is required.
124520447 KB total disk space.
112460852 KB in 315323 files.
188804 KB in 57685 indexes.
0 KB in bad sectors.
590355 KB in use by the system.
65536 KB occupied by the log file.
11280436 KB available on disk.
4096 bytes in each allocation unit.
31130111 total allocation units on disk.
2820109 allocation units available on disk.
Windows Performance Toolkit
Part of the Windows 8 ADK or Windows 7 SDK. Can list partition cluster size on partitions mounted with a drive letter.
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=30652
Example:
Run WPRUI.EXE after installing the WPT. Select the Disk I/O Activity scenario, although any scenario will work. Click start, you only have to run the capture for a few seconds, then click Save to save the trace. Remember to click Cancel to fully stop the WPRUI trace, then exit WPRUI.
After trace is taken Run WPA.EXE from the WPT, open the trace that was previously saved and select Menu->Trace->System Configuration->Storage and multiply the Sector/Cluster and the Bytes/Sector to get the partition cluster size.
There you go, many ways to confirm your partition cluster size after you have formatted your drive. Any other ways not mentioned, please let me know of any other cool tools.
I wanted to get this information out as when I was researching the error below I could not find any information on it online or in our internal database. Hopefully it helps someone out there and they don't have to have a night sleep to have their, eureka moment.
When running Compare-VM command against a Hyper-V guest configuration file, do not rename the file. If the file name is not in GUID format, the following error will occur. After renaming the file to a GUID format, the command worked fine. Using any GUID seems to work, as I deleted the VM from Hyper-V Manager and didn't have the original GUID available.
PS C:\> compare-vm -Path "C:\temp\test2008.xml" -verbose
VERBOSE: compare-vm will import the virtual machine saved at "C:\temp\test2008.xml".
compare-vm : Guid should contain 32 digits with 4 dashes (xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx).
At line:1 char:1
+ compare-vm -Path "C:\temp\test2008.xml" -verbose
+ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
+ CategoryInfo : NotSpecified: (:) [Compare-VM], FormatException
+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : Unspecified,Microsoft.HyperV.PowerShell.Commands.CompareVMCommand