Step-by-Step - Cisco UCS Firmware Upgrade

 

I once had to upgrade a Cisco UCS Manager and the process went very smoothly, without any downtime and I documented all the procedures.

For those who do not know this system here is a brief description:

Cisco UCS Manager supports the entire Cisco UCS server and Cisco HyperFlex Series hyperconverged infrastructure portfolios. It enables server, fabric, and storage provisioning as well as, device discovery, inventory, configuration, diagnostics, monitoring, fault detection, auditing, and statistics collection. You can extend the benefits of Cisco UCS Manager globally across an enterprise to thousands of servers in multiple domains with Cisco UCS Central Software.

More information:

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/servers-unified-computing/ucs-manager/index.html

 

In this post I will show you how to Upgrade UCS 2.2(3c) to version 2.2(8f), but it also applies to other versions. I'm  going to show you how to Upgrade the infrastructure (UCS) software, Fabric Interconnects and I/O modules firmware in a two-stage operation.

So, let's start! 

Domain Controllers - DCDiag & Repadmin

All system engineers have experienced replication problems once in a lifetime.Today I will show you some basic commands to Troubleshoot and Diagnose Domain Controllers and replications. I'm talking about DCDiag and Repadmin.

DCDiag:

This command-line tool analyzes the status of one or all domain controllers in a forest and reports all problems to provide assistance in troubleshooting. DCDiag.exe consists of a variety of tests that can run either individually or as part of a set to check the state of the domain controller. Here are some examples:

1. Preparing to install or migrate to Exchange;
2. Checking FSMO roles;
3. Troubleshooting Group Policies;
4. Investigating Active Directory not replicating frssysvol error;
5. Running down Kerberos authentication problems;
6. Resetting the Directory Service Administrator's password;
7. Fixing a servers Service Principle Name (SPN) error.

Repadmin

Performs replication-related tasks, such as managing and modifying replication topology, forcing replication events, and viewing replication metadata and updated vectors.

Let's see some examples and a Script to automize all Domain Controllers replication.

SCCM - Failed to validate content hash on Distribution Point. Yellow Warning

In SCCM when there are many Distribution Points with different published Software, it may happen that there are validation failures and that WMI repository is inconsistent. The events are represented as in the following table:

 

SCCM by default does not have any tools that allow you to resynchronize the entire WMI repository without removing the Distribution Point Role and adding it again. Let's see how to get around this.

Office 365 Users Not able to view Free/Busy and Room information of On-Premises

The other day I had to validate and solve a problem with calendar synchronizations between Office 365 and Exchange 2010 (and vice verse). I was aware that On-Premises users could see the status of all users calendars, but Office 365 users only could see the Office 365 users status. (Office 365 users were not able to view F/B information of On- Premises user mailboxes).

This scenario is valid for Exchange 2010/2013 and Office 365 hybrid architectures with or without ADFS. The errors that I had were this:

Trying to share a Calender between On-Prem and an Office 365 User:

"One or more users cannot be added to the folder access list"

The outlook/webmail calendar had errors:

"No Information. No free/busy information could be retrieved"

"The recipient's server could not be contacted. Contact your administrator"

Let's see the necessary steps for the resolution.

Create Multiple Mount Points in Multiple Disks in one Datastore VMware

I was in a costumer where I had to create many disks to present to several virtual machines in VMware. The Datastores were few, but I had to create 60 disks in each VM (maximum supported with four SCSI controllers). To increase complexity, all of these Volumes in Windows meant to be Mount Points. To optimize this process I had to create some Scripts to help me.

I splited in different points:

• Script to add multiple disks from one datastore to a VM;
• Script to change all the Disks paths to Round Robin (The Storage was a HPE 3PAR);
• Script to Create all the Windows Mount Points;
• Script to view the Mount Points created.

Let's see how to do it!

Capture Image for SCCM - WDS - MDT using DISM and WinPE

We often want to capture machines with SCCM using the ISO capture and we have very strange errors, namely because of sysprep, Windows 10 applications or even permissions. One of the easiest ways to accomplish this capture is to not use SCCM's ISO and let us capture the image at a low level. To do this, just use the ADK tools already installed on the SCCM server.

In this Post I will show you the steps to accomplish this task!

Upgrade HPE Storage 3PAR to v3.3.1 - Upgrade Service Processor to v5.0

SP5 Release Notes:
https://h20564.www2.hpe.com/hpsc/doc/public/display?docId=emr_na-a00002915fr_fr

3PAR 3.3.1 Relase Notes:
https://h20564.www2.hpe.com/hpsc/doc/public/display?docId=emr_na-a00017203en_us


Service Processor 5.0 is completely new and there is only one way to upgrade. Lets find out how.

Changing SQL Server Collation After Installation and in Production

 

 

In some scenarios we can find different SQL Server collations between the server instance and its databases. Sometimes the collation is fixed in some table columns or inside stored procedures to solve some of relationship problems with columns that have different collations. The most common technique to have a consistent collation for the instance and all it databases has a lot of steps and can sometimes be problematic.

 

A classic example is that when you want to reuse a SQL Server for System Center components and the Collation is not SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS (required for the installation)

 

To correct the collations in a few steps is outlined in this Post. It is recommended to create a backup of all databases (including system databases) before take administrative actions on a SQL Server instance. It is important to ensure that there is no fixed collation logic in columns or inside stored procedures, triggers, etc., otherwise the command below may report problems.
In this post I will change  "Latin1_General_CI_AS" collation to "SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AI"

Automation Azure - Script to Change Virtual Machines Size ARM & ASM

In this post I'll show you how to resize automatically azure virtual machines.

Microsoft Azure offers some cheap low spec virtual machines. But as we all know, the prices can go up pretty quickly as the specs go up. But we need large VMs to support today’s modern day workloads. The downside is that most of these workloads are only present during business hours but you end up running and paying for these large VMs even during non-business hours and on weekends.

 

The solution here is to have an azure automation script that resizes the VMs to the lowest possible size during non-business hours and have another automation script to resize the VMs to their original size just before start of business.

 

Because Azure has two portals (for now..), I'll show you the scripts from both (since threre are many differences).

• Old Portal - Azure ASM (Azure Service Manager)
• New Portal - Azure ARM (Azure Resource Manager)

Let's see how to do it!

 

Upgrade In-Place SCCM 2012 R2 - WIndows Server 2008 R2 to 2012 R2

Today, in the post I will show you how to migrate SCCM operating system from Windows Server 2008 R2 to Windows Server 2012 R2 in-place. I had some problems and that is what I will try to describe in more detail. You can do a in-place upgrade from:

• Windows Server 2012 R2 to Windows Server 2016
• Windows Server 2012 to Windows Server 2012 R2
• Windows Server 2008 R2 to Windows Server 2012 R2 (SCCM 1602 or higher)
 
You cannot go from Server 2008 R2 to Server 2016, Windows Server 2008 to Windows Server 2012 or Windows Server 2008 R2 to Windows Server 2012!

 

The key reason for this change is that most installations of SCCM 2012 R2 are based on Windows Server 2008 R2. And if the SCCM evolves, the operating system also has to evolve. Another possible approach would be to install a Windows Server 2012 R2 from scratch and do a restore of the SCCM and database (keeping the same name and IP). I think the first approach is simpler and I will describe it.

 

Terminal Server. Windows cannot connect to the printer. Error 0x00000002

A few days ago I had a customer with a problem that was as follows:

• In a RDS Farm (Terminal Server) some users cannot print to any printer
• It was only happening in one server of the Farm
• some users logged in on the same server had no problem at all and could print to their preferred printer. The error was 0x00000002
• Some users reported that they didn’t get their printer(s) mapped by Script when they logged in to that specific RDS server
• The Terminal Servers were in Windows Server 2008 x86

Let´s see how to resolve this:

Migrate Azure Portal ASM to Resource Manager ARM - Powershell & MigAZ

Today I will show you how to migrate your Azure Service Management (ASM) virtual machines to the ARM (Azure Resource Manager) environment. In this new structure the IAAS service has become more complete and malleable in creation, you can create a virtual machine with two network cards and move that same network card to another machine without having to create everything again. This freedom of movement of resources between virtual machines has made the Azure administration service much easier.

 

So, let's Start!

 

Exchange 2010 Inter-Organizations Migration – Remote Move

The migration scenario:

• Two different forests;
• Exchange 2007 in one forest and Exchange 2010 in the other;
• Exchange 2007 with SP2 installed.

Requirements:

• Create a DNS Conditional Forwarding on the source domain for the destination domain;
• Create a DNS Conditional Forwarding on the destination domain for the source domain;
• Before starting the migration itself, you need to trust between the two domains and deactivate SID Filtering:
• Netdom trust destination.local /domain:source.local / quarantine: No / usero: destination\user / passwordo: *******
• Netdom trust source.local /domain:destination.local / quarantine: No / usero: source\user / passwordo: ********

 

This way, when migrating with ADMT, users' SIDs remain the same (Filtering Disabled), thus ensuring the same permissions on files and groups in the target domain.

 

With ADMT installed on a server machine in the target domain, migrate the users/groups from the source to the destination (need to install the password exporter on a Domain Controller at the source, so we can guarantee the passwords are the same in both domains)

O In this document I will not go ahead with the ADMT settings.