Taylor Brown's Blog

I got a few notes about my signature line on my previous post ‘Program Manager, Hyper-V’… Yep I am now a program manager on the Hyper-V team – I moved over from the Hyper-V test team a few weeks ago and now work on Ben Armstrong’s...

Some folks have asked creating there own VMConnect application – it’s actually really easy.  Here’s a very basic example of how to create your own VMConnect application.  You would likely want to add some error handling, change the window sizing...

I was reviewing my blog statistics the other day and noticed that a number of my old posts going all the way back to 2008 are still getting a lot of traffic.  A lot has changed since 2008 and while in most cases the information has stayed the same...

This is effectively and update from one my very old posts Hyper-V WMI: KVP Exchange aka Data Exchange (Retrieving and Modifying Parent/Host KVP’s) which still receives a lot of traffic.  The same code from back in 2008 still works today even on Windows...

This post is to update an old from one 2008 Hyper-V WMI Using PowerShell Scripts – Part 3 (KVP's - Guest OS Version) – in reviewing that post the most coming inquiry was looking for the guests IP address, well we got that for you in PowerShell now… ...

  In my post yesterday ( Remote Administration Without Constrained Delegation Using PrincipalsAllowedToDelegateToAccount ) I showed how to utilize the new resource-based Kerberos constrained delegation to configure remote administration with Hyper...

You may have read my previous posts on remote administration and constrained delegation ( Enabling Hyper-V Remote Management - Configuring Constrained Delegation For SMB and Highly Available SMB or Enabling Hyper-V Remote Management - Configuring Constrained...

With the release of Windows Server 2012 we introduced a new virtual hard disk format known as VHDX.  This new format provided the foundation for a number of features and performance enhancements.  One such feature is the ability to independently...

One of the most commonly requested features from customers using dynamic memory was the ability to see within the guest what the maximum memory was configured for.  So with Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V servers and with Windows Server 2012 or Windows...

A few times I’ve had people ask me about how they automate moving VM’s off of a cluster node based on some type of detected failure or performance issue. In general my answer is to utilize System Center specifically Operations Manager –...

With all of the new PowerShell cmdlet’s in available for Hyper-V in Window's Server 2012 the one I personally had the hardest time with was Move-VMStorage.  The Move-VMStorage cmdlet is used to perform storage migrations for Hyper-V virtual machines...

I hope everyone that attended TechEd had a great time – this was far and away the best TechEd I have personally attended.  I had promised all the scripts from my session and I decided to wait until the recording/slides where available and just do...

I just finished my speaking session at TechEd 2012, once the recording is available I will post a link…  I’ve already had an overwhelming number of requests for the scripts that I used during the session.  I’m going to do a few posts over the...

After a very long day of travel yesterday I am even happier to be at TechEd 2012 now. This is going to be the most exciting TechEd that I can remember - there is so much stuff in Windows Server 2012 it's really unbelievable. In any case if you are...

I originally wrote this script for my own clusters to upgrade them from Windows Server 2008 R2 to Windows Server “8” Beta and since then I have shared it with a few others who also found it very helpful.  I had some designs on improving it but decided...

In my last post we talked about PowerShell Session Configurations  and specifically about the new RunAs functionality in PowerShell 3.0.  But there’s some other incredibly cool and powerful functionality within session configurations – Session...

In response to my recent set of posts someone pointed me to a new PowerShell 3.0 feature of PowerShell sessions – RunAs… I had seen people use PowerShell session configurations in the past but I had never really seen a need to use them myself that is...

In reference to Enabling Hyper-V Remote Management - Configuring Constrained Delegation For SMB and Highly Available SMB and Enabling Hyper-V Remote Management - Configuring Constrained Delegation For Non-Clustered Live Migration I’ve had some people...

You may have already read my previous two posts on Hyper-V remote management using the UI and configuring Constrained Delegation, for some people that will not be an option or is just undesirable...  Well with Windows 8 and the joy of PowerShell...

In Windows Server 8 we added the ability to live migrate virtual machines without the requirement of a cluster i.e. standalone live migration .  For this feature to work the storage the virtual machine is using must be available to both Hyper-V severs...

  Windows Server 8 brings support for storing and running Hyper-V virtual machines on SMB2.2 file shares, which is pretty handy, especially with the new Scale-Out/Continuously Available file server features in Windows Server 8.  However it does...

It’s been a busy couple months (years) but Windows Server “8” Beta has shipped and is publically available for download ,  I’m personally very proud of all the work that went into Windows Server “8” especially in Hyper-V (maybe I’m biased) but really...

In response to a few of my old posts Hyper-V WMI Using PowerShell Scripts – Part 5 (Creating Virtual Switchs/Networks) and Hyper-V V2: Guest Only External Networks + Add Roles Wizard Changes I’ve had a lot of people ask me how to create external virtual...

Today we released a fix for to resolve an issue that can lead to guest VM’s crashing after a live migration.  This issue only impacted virtual machines that where utilizing virtual SCSI controllers and was only seen under some specific stress conditions...

The SQL CAT team has published a new whitepaper regarding dynamic memory best practices with Hyper-V…  If your virtualizing SQL I would highly recommend taking a look! Summary: Memory is a critical resource to Microsoft SQL Server workloads, especially...