Category Archives: Learning

The Microsoft Management Summit 2013

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MMS 2013 is in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA

Time flies fast and it’s time to look ahead to 2013. My continuing investment in myself is part of that.  Despite a lot of rumors about big changes to MMS (its future, location, timing etc.) things will go forward as they’ve been in the past years. That includes the location. As you probably already heard it’s back in Las Vegas, state of Nevada, USA. So after the, for many people, somewhat disconcerting announcement at MMS 2012 indicating the above mentioned changes, MMS 2013 will once again be held in Las Vegas again. As before it will be focused on the entire System Center Suite. That was confirmed by a mail form the MSS conference team recently and a TechNet blog post

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Recently is was announced that the MMS 2013 content survey is now open. So they’re planning for the Microsoft Management Summit 2013 content and they’d like to hear from us. Why? Well, the better they align the content of the conference to our needs, the better it will be as an experience. This means our return on investment will be bigger which is always a good thing. So if you’re going or thinking of going this is the place, MMS 2013 Content Survey, to voice your opinions on what it should look like content wise. You have two more weeks to fill it out and than it’s scheduled to close down.

Why Attend?

It’s great to have an event focused on managing, deploying and protecting the infrastructure we’ve spent so much time, effort and money building. This conference is dedicated to exactly that. Smaller in scale but very focused. All together in the same hotel/conference center for 5 long days living in System Center and nothing else. As the world’s top operators in this space are there, the networking opportunities are also excellent. I can still remember the amount of talking and discussing I did with my colleagues in 2012, that was stimulating.

It’s also the place to provide feedback to Microsoft about System Center. Things you like, don’t like, things that are missing etc. I most certainly have some feedback for them.

Will I attend?

I’ll most certainly try to attend, that’s for sure. So it’s time to fill out the request form and start cutting through the red tape. Let’s hope the economy doesn’t tank completely and that we can go. The chips might be down right now but let’s not cost cut ourselves out of skills, education, opportunities and a future. Remember, keep moving forward and don’t quit yet, you can always give up later Winking smile.

Quest Technical Experts Conference 2012 Europe Podcast

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As the readers of my blog know I was in Barcelona this week to attend the Technical Experts Conference Europe 2012 organized by Quest (now a part of DELL).  Together with my fellow MVPs, friends and colleagues  Aidan Finn (@joe_elway), Carsten Rachfahl (@hypervserver) and Hans Vredevoort (@hvredevoort) we presented 8 sessions at the Virtualization Track and did a Hyper-V Experts panel to share what we have learned and help answer questions attendees on the new capabilities of Hyper-V in Windows Sever 2012. It was both fun and interesting to do. We learned some more from each other and also from the questions of an alert audience whom we enjoyed presenting to.

Mattias Sundling, a Technical evangelist at Quest and the owner of the Virtualization Track at TEC 2012 Europe did an audio podcast all 4 of us MVPs in the “Virtual Machine” expertise presenting in that track . You can find that podcast here on the vKernel/DELL web site http://www.vkernel.com/podreader/items/tec-europe-2012-mvps-with-mattias-sundling or on YouTube by clicking on the screenshot below. Enjoy.

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Prepare For Windows Server 2012 This Fall

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With the academic year in full swing and no lack of material we need to learn and study Microsoft is giving you a helping hand by providing a huge pool of resources. There’s TechNet, Evaluation software but also the Microsoft Virtual Academy.

To reward you for your hard work you get a cinema ticket to go relax at the movies. Click on the banner for more information on this.

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The nice thing about the Microsoft Virtual Academy that you can do study the modules at your own pace and at your own moment of choosing. Combine this with TechNet Virtual labs and you have a lot of resources at your finger tips to learn even more even if you don’t have the room or resources to build a (home) lab.

If all that technology left you wanting to get some hands on with Windows Server 2012 you can also register for an IT Camp. There should be some more of them coming I’ve read on the site. With Mike Reseler  (@MikeResseler) & Arlindo Alves@aralves) delivering those IT Camps you’ll be in good hands. Happy studying and have fun at the movies Winking smile

Cluster Validation Failure while setting up a Windows 2012 Continuous Available File Share: The password does not meet the password policy requirements

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We were installing a Windows Server 2012 cluster in a W2K8R2 domain and while we were checking out our work by running the cluster validation we got one warning we’ve never seen before:

Validate CSV Settings

Description: Validate that settings and configuration required by Cluster Shared Volumes are present. This test can only be run with an administrative account, and it only tests servers that are cluster nodes.

Start: 9/24/2012 5:01:18 PM.

Validating Server Message Block (SMB) share access through the IP address of the fault tolerant network driver for failover clustering (NetFT), and connecting with the user account associated with validation.

Begin Cluster Shared Volumes support testing on node server1.test.lab.

Failure while setting up to run Cluster Shared Volumes support testing on node server1.test.lab: The password does not meet the password policy requirements. Check the minimum password length, password complexity and password history requirements.

Begin Cluster Shared Volumes support testing on node server2.test.lab.

Failure while setting up to run Cluster Shared Volumes support testing on node server2.test.lab: The password does not meet the password policy requirements. Check the minimum password length, password complexity and password history requirements.

This test requires more than one node. If your cluster contains more than one node, please run validation tests again with more than one node specified.

Now as it turns out this Active Directory domain does enforce some lengthy and complex passwords. By this they are basically driving the admins to use pass sentences which are lot more secure. That also means that the account we are using to run the validation have adequate lengths & complexities.

So, what if we tune down the password length requirements and than run GPUDATE from an elevated command prompt on all nodes of the cluster? Bingo! The cluster valid now passes with flying colors.

I’m guessing that perhaps the local doesn’t have a strong enough password to meet the requirements. But this is just guessing. This is the account that is involved in reducing the clusters dependency on Active Directory so that CSV for example can come on line even if there is not domain controller to contact. Hence my guess that this is related. This did not happen in a lab environment so I’m not going to change the password on all nodes to a more complex one. That is for a lab Smile

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