@joel said in Black Screen of death! Is this a Dell thing?:

Hi Guys has anyone come across an issue where the computer powers on but after the manufacters logo (dell for example) the screen goes black and it stays on that screen?

Note: i can use our RMM remote tools to log onto the computer but it's also stuck on a black screen (so cant control it). I can however do file transfers and navigate via remote background to the 😄 - therefore the computer is online and working but the screen for end user (and us remotely) is blank!

I've looked at new monitors, uninstalling graphics card drivers, running disk and hardware scans, system restores (fails) and a bit lost .... i'm seeing this happen more and more in the last couple weeks.

I dont know if Bitlocker has anything to do with it but have disabled this and rebooted but still have the black screen!

I have attempted to rollback updates and that also doesnt fix it!

Safe mode works fine

Have updated drivers, bios, chipsets all of that good stuff but still no luck getting this working in normal mode and was curious to see if anyone else has had this one! Very odd!

In all cases, it's resulted in a re-format.

I think Dell devices are more affected.

@Joel - When you access via SafeMode does the Event Viewer have anything relevant to the issue?

Looks like 2012 R2, am I correct? Have you tried reinstalling the services?

@Joel said in Hyper V Image reset on startup/shutdown + NIC Settings:

Hi Guys
Wonder if you can help share thoughts on this.
A client of ours has a technical team that often like to test new routers, factory reset them and set them up for small remote sites. The tricky thing is, these guys should not be local admins on their computer (needed to change NIC settings etc and configure static ip's etc).

I was wondering how we can get around this and thought we could have a Hyper V solution installed on their laptops with a Windows 10 image - which they have full admin access too and could simply play around and do whatever they want in that environment (including configuring a Local router). My questions are:

can we pass through NIC cards on the hyper V image? So if they plug in Ethernet cable to the laptop and into a local router, they can see this within the VM image and change/configure things from there?

Would it be possible to have that VM Image reset each time they finish? IE. Can it reset back to the base image each time the VM is either started or shut down?

Let me know thoughts on this.
Thanks
Joel

Yes

Yes, via a script, using event log that looks for a VM action can revert to specified checkpoint.

For example:
aad09557-10e9-43e4-86b7-470dac4ea951-image.png

@black3dynamite said in VMWare - VM Boot Problems:

Is this a UEFI or BIOS install? [...]

Good points, but shouldn't be a problem - as long as no one freaked around with the VM's config.

@Dashrender said in Folder Redirection - GPO - W7 to W10:

@PhlipElder said in Folder Redirection - GPO - W7 to W10:

@Joel said in Folder Redirection - GPO - W7 to W10:

@Dashrender Always giving me sound advice. Thanks Dash. I actually figured this out whilst on site earlier today and just saw your responses.
Adding the computers into the security group we had for FolderRedirection and forcing a GPO update did the trick. Cheers

It's better to place the GPO on the User side not the Computer side. Any membership changes are instant not waiting for the 90 minute refresh threshold for Computer policies.

I use both. Some items are machine dependent some are user.

For user endpoints we only use User based policies. It's a lot easier to manage especially if changes need to be made. Log off, log on. Done.

any errors in the DNS server's logs?

@JaredBusch said in Hyper V - USB Disk not showing up:

@dbeato said in Hyper V - USB Disk not showing up:

@syko24 said in Hyper V - USB Disk not showing up:

@Joel said in Hyper V - USB Disk not showing up:

Hi Guys
Wonder if you can help shed some light on this.

I have a Hyper V core host machine with 2x VM's installed (1x DC and 1x SQLServer).
We have a USB device (8TB) plugged into our host, (put offline) and then bought online within our SQLServer. This has been working well and we use the USB to backup.

HOWEVER, recently the USB from the SQLServer has disappeared and we cant bring it back online! We've rebooted servers but it still wont show up on our SQL Server.

Note: we use Windows Admin Centre to manage the host and VM's and in the pic you can see within Admin Centre you can see in the settings for the SQLServer shows our 8TB Hard Drive, however when we list disk's on the actual VM we dont see it!!! DiskMago.JPG

Can anyone help identify how we can bring our USB back online?
This did happen before and it seems the way we bought it back online was by going on site and using Hyper V Manager software to re-attach the drive but seems a long winded way to bring it back visible. Any ideas?

Thanks

Any reason to not just create a VHDX on the usb drive and attach that to the VM? Passing the usb drive from the host to the VM I don't believe is actually supported. It may work but clearly not reliable.

In order to pass it through the VM needs to have the Storage of the VM as SCSI Controller and add a hard drive and then set it as offline on disk management.
0e10c6df-68b8-46cd-9eae-6d27ecd2e16b-image.png

Not what anyone is talking about.

okay, didn't know that.

Conversely, I over-allocated vCPUs across several VMs (ESXi) when I was new to type 1 hypervisors and ran into performance issues associated with high CPU ready times. After scaling down, performance improved dramatically.

Tags added.

@Dashrender said in HyperV Server - Raid Best Practices:

@scottalanmiller said in HyperV Server - Raid Best Practices:

@PhlipElder said in HyperV Server - Raid Best Practices:

@black3dynamite said in HyperV Server - Raid Best Practices:

Wouldn't it best to use the SSD for things like caching, page file?

Neither the host nor the guests should be paging. If they are, then there is a problem with the way things are set up host wise or in-guest resources wise.

But there should be a file for emergencies.

Ok this is something I don't understand then Windows still has a default paging file... are you saying that in typical use it's rarely actually touched? When I've looked at task manager I frequently see that the system is writing to the page file but the RAM itself is only half used or so..

You should also rarely use Windows 😉

@JaredBusch said in Guide for VM Server Migration...:

Except he does not actually what migration he wants a copy of the VM on the other server so you can test to break things without messing with his live system

Then I would set up replication to the new server. After replication is finished, you can disable replication and be left with a replica you can reconfigure offline.

It's the easiest way to get a real copy somewhere else with minimal effort and requirements.

Thanks all

Everything has been restarted, cant seen any initial problems. I will be investigating later on today though.

@pete-s said in Server rebooting - ASP.Net MVR 2:

%windir%\system32\msiexec.exe /unregister

yes Windows server. I will try deactivating the installer. I presume thats via command prompt i should run

%windir%\system32\msiexec.exe /unregister
%windir%\syswow64\msiexec.exe /unregister

@jimmy9008 said in Hyper-V 2016 (Switch) and NIC:

169.x.x.x shouts out that the VM cant reach a DHCP server. If the vSwitch is using the active interface, and allows guest VMs to share the adapter, i'd check if my DHCP server is ok, on the same network, has IPs available etc. The host would be static so thats why that would be working as it was manually configured.

Should have thought! A reboot of my router fixed it! Thanks guys.

@black3dynamite said in ZeroTier / Software VPN question:

Any objections with setting up OpenVPN instead of using ZeroTier?

I dislike how OpenVPN is a pain in the ass inside Windows.

But it does work well.

I prefer to use L2TP/IPSEC.

Roaming Profiles can be a real bear to manage and when they break they break hard.

We've been using Redirected Folders since the 2000/2003 days. We redirect My Docs and subfolders, Desktop, Links (Favourites/Quick Access links in File Explorer), IE Favourites, and that's it.

Redirecting AppData can be a bad thing. There's certificate and security service content in there that tends to not like being redirected.

Some pearls and caveats involved with Redirected Folders:
1: If user content needs to be redirected back to their machines logon times can be very long especially if they have a lot of content.
2: If a new server destination is set logon times can also be very long as files/content get transferred to the new destination.
3: Destination permissions need to be set as per Microsoft's KB to allow for traverse but exclusive to user access.
4: Be mindful of user OU structure and Redirected Folder destinations relative to Sites especially WAN based sites.
5: If exclusive access is set in the GPO then don't mess with the permissions on the user's home folder (they get created automagically).
6: In cases where the destination server's name is different use the Disable Strict Naming setting in Group Policy to allow DNS to point to the new location and just connect the old file server VM's VHDX/VMDK and share it. Note that the new destination will need to have a new share name.
7: Make sure to use File Resource Manager to set quotas and file type filters and have e-mail set up to warn the user and the admin(s).
8: Offline Files should be set via Group Policy with file types such as .PST, .QBxx, and other active content excluded from redirection.
9: Limit the Offline Files cache size based on the smallest storage being delivered to users or GPO/OU delimit the size for different groups.
10: Redirected Folders and the GPO settings tend to tattoo so keep this in mind.
11: We use GPPreferences to create a set of folders on the C : drive: C:\ClientData\AppName\SubFolders <-- Users are trained to put their active data such as archive PSTs, QB, Sage, ETC data there.

Long story short, there would be a lot less grief with Redirected Folders.

EDIT:
12: Enable Access-based Enumeration on the root share (we do this for all shares)

Some posts that have aged well:
http://blog.mpecsinc.ca/2009/06/sbs-2003-to-sbs-2008-migrations-folder.html
Root folders permissions setup:
http://blog.mpecsinc.ca/2010/12/sbs-2008-and-sbs-2011-folder.html
Microsoft's official doc:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/it-pro/windows-server-2012-R2-and-2012/jj649078(v%3Dws.11)

Thanks again. I'll take a look.
One prob I ran into last time was when I wanted to install Server 2016 on my guest VM. I had the CD Rom connected to my host, but I couldnt find where to load it to boot the VM from it.
I'd like to use a Gen2 server and i'm unsure how to get either a) to boot from the physical DVD connected to my host, or b) load an ISO to the host (ie in the D drive) to then boot from there. Any ideas on that?