Ying Li(MVP) at myITforum.com

PowerShell script to remove virtual machine from VMWare Infrastructure

yli628 — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 00:57:00 GMT

Forget about the trip to Las Vegas I mentioned before, I started to like VMWare VI Tookkit the more I use it! You just need to cultivate a habit, every time if you need to repetitively doing something...(read more)

PowerShell Script to Take Snapshot on Multiple VM Machines

yli628 — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 03:26:25 GMT

In my previous Blog , I introduced some basics about VMWare Infrastructure Toolkit. Now let's put it into action! Let's say you have a test MOSS or SMS virtual environment, you have a couple of...(read more)

PowerShell Script to refresh GPO remotely on multiple computers

yli628 — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 19:34:19 GMT

Here is a KB article explains how to refresh the Group Policy Settings on remote computers. Basiclly you need to download PsTools from SysInternals and run something like this: For Windows XP Computers...(read more)

Data Warehouse failed to enumerate database components to be deployed

yli628 — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 23:43:34 GMT

Right after I imported a couple of new MP to our OpsMgr environment, I started to get the below alert: Alert: Data Warehouse failed to enumerate database components to be deployed Source: XYZOPMP01.related...(read more)

Introducing VMWare Infrastructur Toolkit (for Windows) 1.0

yli628 — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 02:26:47 GMT

Recently VMWare released their version of PowerShell Cmdlets called VI ToolKit. You can download it Here and it is free! VMWare is also challenging the world's VI administrators for a scripting contest...(read more)

PowerShell Script to Schedule a Task - Task Scheduler API

yli628 — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 04:23:58 GMT

In my previous post , I blogged about how to use PowerShell to retrieve scheduled tasks (Task Scheduler API). Today I will go one step further and discuss how to create a scheduled task using PowerShell...(read more)

Open Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio on Windows Server 2008 box

yli628 — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 17:16:04 GMT

As you may already noticed, when working with Windows Server 2008, there are a lot of nuances we need to pay attention like if you are trying to open Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio, you will get...(read more)

Where is PowerShell on Windows Server 2008

yli628 — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 04:11:31 GMT

As you may already know that Windows PowerShell 1.0 for the first time included as part of the Windows Operating System on Windows Server 2008. But where is it on Windows Server 2008 - for a brand new...(read more)

Pushing OpsMgr SP1 Agent to Windows Server 2008

yli628 — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 03:41:08 GMT

I have a couple of brand new Windows Server 2008 setup and trying to push OpsMgr agent to them but I got the below error: The MOM Server would not execute WMI Query "Select * from Win32_Operatingsystem"...(read more)

How to detach SUSDB that is "currently in use"

yli628 — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 03:16:44 GMT

I am setting up ConfigMgr SP1 on Windows Server 2008 and I installed WSUS 3.0 SP1 and the SUSDB resides on the same box with ConfigMgr Database. After the setup, I am trying to follow the SQL best practice...(read more)

PowerShell Script to retrieve scheduled tasks on a remote machine - Task Scheduler API

yli628 — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 00:24:13 GMT

Rod Trent posted a PowerShell script for Getting the List of Scheduled Tasks . I have the need the other day to retrieve scheduled tasks on a remote server. I give it a try but to my surprise, it doesn't...(read more)

OpsMgr: Why all my agents turn gray - OpsMgr Healthservice must run under local system account!!!

yli628 — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 04:19:54 GMT

The other day, I was working with Quest support for the eXc Blackberry monitoring software. We tried to delete/import their MP. During the process, I will need to input the password for the account which...(read more)

PowerShell Script to identify Agent which needs to have "proxying" enabled

yli628 — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 02:18:02 GMT

Every now and then, I get an alert like this: Alert: Agent proxying needs to be enabled for a health service to submit discovery data about other computers. Source: xyzopmp04.related.com Path: xyzopmp04...(read more)

PowerShell Script to work with DNS WMI Provider

yli628 — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 00:11:25 GMT

The DNS WMI provider exposes a number of DNS objects, including DNS Servers, DNS domains, DNS Zones and DNS Resource Records etc. We could use these objects to manage DNS and you guess it, through PowerShell...(read more)

PowerShell Script to Put the Agent, the Health Service and the Health Service Watcher on the Agent into Maintenance Mode Revisited

yli628 — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 18:26:00 GMT

This is an update version of my previous Post I realize there are may be confusions regarding running OpsMgr related script in regular PowerShell console for some people. This script is for you to directly...(read more)

PowerShell Script to check OpsMgr Agents Service and HealthState

yli628 — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 04:10:26 GMT

Here is a PowerShell script to check OpsMgr Agents Service and HealthState You need to either run it in Operation Manager's own command shell or you can use regular PowerShell console as mentioned...(read more)

OpsMgr 2007 Web Console Remote Access - Unexpected Error

yli628 — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 00:10:40 GMT

When I try to access my OpsMgr 2007 SP1 Web Console remotely as an regular user, I got the below error The Application Event log on my RMS/Web Console has the below error: Event Type: Warning Event Source...(read more)

IIS7 PowerShell Provider CTP2 Released

yli628 — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 00:20:00 GMT

Microsoft released PowerShell Provider CTP2 for IIS7 yesterday and you can download it Here I just installed it on my Vista SP1 machine. It installs without issue (Require you turn on IIS7 and Windows...(read more)

PowerShell Summer Olympics

yli628 — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 23:43:26 GMT

Quest is holding their Summer Olympics (PowerShell) not in Beijing but Here . You could get your hands dirty with PowerGUI and could potentially win anywhere from $250 to $500 gift certificates to Amazon...(read more)

2008 Microsoft® MVP Award

yli628 — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 03:36:40 GMT

Just got an email from Microsoft and I got the 2008 MVP Award in Admin Frameworks. This is the second year in a row! What a great independence day gift! Cheers!

Setup ConfigMgr 2007 SP1 from start to finish

yli628 — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 18:16:00 GMT

As I promised, I will share this end to end ConfigMgr SP1 setup guide. This is for fresh install not for upgrade. You could literally get your ConfigMgr environment up and running within hours! This is for the core infrastructure and you could extend the hierarchy according to your environment.

Download Doc

PowerShell script to add multiple A records in DNS

yli628 — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 22:58:00 GMT

Recently I am focused on to design and implement ConfigMgr for our company. Unfortunately there are no native support for PowerShell in ConfigMgr yet. So if you see I am “slacking”, you know why! But I am finishing up a ConfigMgr SP1 setup guide and will share it soon.

Lately our team received a lot requests to add new DNS records for our testing web server, I am getting tired to add A record in DNS manually for those Host headers in IIS. Here is what I come up

#xyz is dns servername

$A = [wmiclass]"\\xyz\root\MicrosoftDNS:MicrosoftDNS_AType"

$DNSServer = "xyz.R-test.com"
$Zone = "R-Test.com"
$class = 1
$TTL = 3600

#This is your web server IP Address
$IPAddress = "192.168.1.88"

$Sites = Get-content WebSites.txt

Foreach ($Site in $Sites)
{
$A.CreateInstanceFromPropertyData($DNSserver, $zone, $Site, $class, $ttl, $IPAddress)
}

The WebSites.txt is something look like this:

whatever1.R-test.comwhatever2.R-test.comwhatever3.R-test.com

whatever4.R-test.com

…

If whateverx already has a DNS A record, you will get something like this:

Exception calling "CreateInstanceFromPropertyData" : "Generic failure "
At C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator.RELATED-TEST\My Documents\AddDNSARecords.ps1:13 cha
+ $A.CreateInstanceFromPropertyData( <<<< $DNSserver, $zone,$Site, $class, $ttl, $IPAddress)

Thanks Richard Siddaway for his post Here

Breakthrough Product of TechEd 2008

yli628 — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 01:03:55 GMT

The word is out, at the TechEd 2008 for IT Professional (June 10–13, 2008), PowerGUI has received the highest award – The breakthrough product of the show. If you haven’t tried already, You can download from the link above. Trust me, you sure will like it! Kudos to Dimitry and his team!

Sysinternals Live beta avaliable

yli628 — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 03:19:35 GMT

If you are a fan of the Sysinternals tools, check out the beta of Sysinternals Live , a service that can let you execute Sysinternals tools directly from the Web without hunting for or manuallly downloading them. Simply enter a tool’s Sysinternals Live path into Windows Explorer, or at the command prompt as \\live.sysinternals.com\tools\,toolname>, or view the entire Sysinternals Live tools directory in a browser.

How to establish primary-site-to-primary-site communications in ConfigMgr (SCCM)

yli628 — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 22:14:02 GMT

I am working on to setup a new ConfigMgr (SCCM) hierarchy. The first hurdle I have to overcome is once I have the central site (RP and SUP) and the main primary site setup. The standard sender is automatically created for me and all I need is to create the addresses for each site as detailed in How to Create Configuration Manager Site Addresses

So end of the story? Not quite, at least for me.

To create a Configuration Manager site address

In the Configuration Manager console, navigate to System Center Configuration Manager / Site Database / Site Management / <site code> - <site name> / Site Settings / Addresses.
Right-click Addresses and then click New.
Select the type of address that you want to create to start the appropriate New Address Wizard.
To finish installing the address, complete the General, Schedule, and Rate Limits pages of the New Address Wizard.

As this is brand new setup – there is nothing to select when you click the down arrow next to Destination site code. Actually we do can type with a list box even though this is not really new but somehow that down arrow hard coded my brain and make me believe I can only “select” not type. That almost cost me a PSS call!

Once I type in the destination code and type in the Site Server name (if the site you need to connect is 901 on server USNYSCCM01, the destination code should be 901 and the Site server name should be USNYSCCM01!). All I need to do is to wait until the the address from 901 – (Unknown) to 901 – Headquarter.

There is one more thing that bothers me but I don’t know if it is by design. On the central site, I can see the above change but on the primary site console. it stays as 900 – (Unknown). But if you look at it on the console in central site – it indeed change to 900 – Central Site!

The bottom line is I know it is working!

Powershell script to change 'MaximumQueueSizeKb' registry value on multiple servers.

yli628 — Wed, 28 May 2008 22:15:18 GMT

In our SCOM 2007 environment, we get a lot of the below alert:

Alert: Alert generated by Send Queue % Used Threshold

Source: xyz.related.com

Path: xyz.related.com

Last modified by: System

Last modified time: 5/22/2008 6:29:13 PM Alert description: The current value of 60.2739067077637 is outside the accepted threshold

Alert view link: "http://whatever:51908/default.aspx?DisplayMode=Pivot&AlertID={d815369d-b5f9-4b03-a572-fa9857e781af}"

Notification subscription ID generating this message: {4B6F3971-955E-1491-6D82-5C22F1466FC2}

Stefan Stranger has a Blog about this. He mentioned that we need to increase the size of the following registry key:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\HealthService\Parameters\Management Groups\%Management Groupname%\MaximumQueueSizeKb]

Which I have been using to fix the alert and for some server, I even go one step further changing the size to 61440. But I kind tired of doing this on each server – the solution is PowerShell and remote registry!

Mow has a blog about using PowerShell to change the remote registry key.

Enlighten by their work, I come up with the below script to use PowerShell changing registry key on multiple remote server and report in excel:

$a = New-Object -comobject Excel.Application
$a.visible = $True

$b = $a.Workbooks.Add()
$c = $b.Worksheets.Item(1)

$c.Cells.Item(1,1) = "Server Name"
$c.Cells.Item(1,2) = "Old MaximumQueueSizeKb"
$c.Cells.Item(1,3) = "New MaximumQueueSizeKb"
$c.Cells.Item(1,4) = "Report Time Stamp"

$d = $c.UsedRange
$d.Interior.ColorIndex = 19
$d.Font.ColorIndex = 11
$d.Font.Bold = $True

$intRow = 2

$colComputers = get-content C:\MachineList.txt
foreach ($strComputer in $colComputers)
{
$c.Cells.Item($intRow,1) = $strComputer.Toupper()

Function GetRegInfo
{
$reg = [Microsoft.Win32.RegistryKey]::OpenRemoteBaseKey('LocalMachine', $strComputer)
$key="SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\HealthService\Parameters\Management Groups\XYZ Enterprise Apps"
$regKey = $reg.OpenSubKey($key)
$max = $regkey.GetValue("MaximumQueueSizeKb")

If($max -eq '15360')
{
$c.Cells.Item($intRow,2).Interior.ColorIndex = 3
$c.Cells.Item($intRow,2) = $max

#$True make the registry key writable
$regKey = $reg.OpenSubKey($key, $True)
$regkey.SetValue('MaximumQueueSizeKb', 30720)
$newmax = $regkey.GetValue("MaximumQueueSizeKb")

$c.Cells.Item($intRow,2) = $newmax
}
Else
{$c.Cells.Item($intRow,2) = $max}

}
GetRegInfo

$c.Cells.Item($intRow,4) = Get-date

$intRow = $intRow + 1
}
$d.EntireColumn.AutoFit()
cls

Happy PowerShelling and Sharing!

PowerShell script to collect server inventory

yli628 — Tue, 27 May 2008 18:10:53 GMT

$erroractionpreference = "SilentlyContinue"

$a = New-Object -comobject Excel.Application
$a.visible = $True

$b = $a.Workbooks.Add()
$c = $b.Worksheets.Item(1)

$c.Cells.Item(1,1) = "Organization"
$c.Cells.Item(1,2) = "Server Name"
$c.Cells.Item(1,3) = "Operating System"
#$c.Cells.Item(1,4) = "IP Address"
$c.Cells.Item(1,4) = "Service Packs"
$c.Cells.Item(1,5) = "System Type"
$c.Cells.Item(1,6) = "Install Date"
$c.Cells.Item(1,7) = "Manufacturer"
$c.Cells.Item(1,8) = "Model"
$c.Cells.Item(1,9) = "Service Tag"
$c.Cells.Item(1,10) = "Serial Number"
$c.Cells.Item(1,11) = "Number of Processors"
$c.Cells.Item(1,12) = "Total Phsyical Memory (GB)"
$c.Cells.Item(1,13) = "Last Reboot Time"
$c.Cells.Item(1,14) = "Report Time Stamp"

$d = $c.UsedRange
$d.Interior.ColorIndex = 19
$d.Font.ColorIndex = 11
$d.Font.Bold = $True

$intRow = 2

$colComputers = get-content C:\MachineList.txt
foreach ($strComputer in $colComputers)
{
$OS = get-wmiobject Win32_OperatingSystem -computername $strComputer
$Computer = get-wmiobject Win32_computerSystem -computername $strComputer
$Bios =get-wmiobject win32_bios -computername $strComputer

$c.Cells.Item($intRow,1) = $OS.Organization
$c.Cells.Item($intRow,2) = $strComputer.Toupper()
$c.Cells.Item($intRow,3) = $OS.Caption
#$c.Cells.Item($intRow,4) = $IP.IPaddress[0]
$c.Cells.Item($intRow,4) = $OS.CSDVersion
$c.Cells.Item($intRow,5) = $Computer.SystemType
$c.Cells.Item($intRow,6) = [System.Management.ManagementDateTimeconverter]::ToDateTime($OS.InstallDate)
$c.Cells.Item($intRow,7) = $Computer.Manufacturer
$c.Cells.Item($intRow,8) = $Computer.Model
$c.Cells.Item($intRow,9) = $Bios.serialnumber
$c.Cells.Item($intRow,10) = $OS.SerialNumber
$c.Cells.Item($intRow,11) = $Computer.NumberOfProcessors
$c.Cells.Item($intRow,12) = "{0:N0}" -f ($computer.TotalPhysicalMemory/1GB)
$c.Cells.Item($intRow,13) = [System.Management.ManagementDateTimeconverter]::ToDateTime($OS.LastBootUpTime)

$c.Cells.Item($intRow,14) = Get-date

$intRow = $intRow + 1
}
$d.EntireColumn.AutoFit()
cls

Migrating Standalone File Sever to Clustered File Servers - The Easy Way?

yli628 — Wed, 21 May 2008 23:41:00 GMT

We are currently working on a File server migration project. The plan is to migrate the current Window 2000 file server to a three nodes Windows Server 2003 Clustered file server. All the disks are on the SAN. Instead copy files or restore files from backup. We decided to re-map the SAN volumes to the new clusters, this will carry over all the data and NTFS permissions except – it won’t carry over the Shares as the share information stored in the OS registry.

My fellow MVP friend Jeremy Moskowitz helped me identified the registry key for the shares

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Shares\ and

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Shares\Security

We tested it out and it is all happy except the shares will not fail over. Then we realized the fact that we need to create the File Share Resource through Cluster Administrator not Windows Explorer. Export/Import registry key is equivalent to creating shares through Windows Explorer. But creating hundreds of shares through Cluster Administrator even by script is daunting task and further more – it is not optimal configuration anyway!

Further digging point me to this KB256926 and our problem solved!

All we need to do as instructed in the above article

1, Create one single (root volume) cluster file share resource.

2, Grant everyone full control share-level permissions in cluster administrators.

3, Using the Parameters tab for the root cluster file share resource, click to select the Share all sub-directories check box.

4, Set appropriate NTFS permissions.

That is all we need to do for the new users folder created!

PowerShell V2 CTP2 and PowerShell Scriptomatic V1 Avaliable

yli628 — Mon, 19 May 2008 03:01:42 GMT

In case you don’t already know, Windows PowerShell V2 Community Technology Preview 2 (CTP2) is available for download Here

Another Pre-Memorial bonus for PowerShell fans is that Windows PowerShell Scriptomatic V1.0 now avaliable and you can download it Here

PowerShell script to install SCOM Agent on multiple servers

yli628 — Thu, 15 May 2008 23:15:08 GMT

Here is a PowerShell script to install SCOM agent on multiple servers.

In my previous blog Re-Uniting PowerShell Console I explained how you can run SCOM related PowerShell script in regular PowerShell console.

Now continue on

PS Microsoft.EnterpriseManagement.OperationsManager.Client\OperationsManagerMonitoring::NYTWOPMP01> C:\InstallSCOMAgent.ps1

Here is what’s in InstallSCOMAent.ps1 script – becareful with the path, as SCOM seems very picky about it. You have to use full path even the serverlist is in the same directory with InstallSCOMAgent.ps1

$creds = Get-Credential

#Create an array $Servers for a list of servers

$servers = get-content c:\ServerList.txt

$DiscoCnfg = New-WindowsDiscoveryConfiguration -computername:$servers -performverification: $true -actionaccount:$creds -computertype: "server"

$ms = Get-rootManagementServer

#You have to Discover the computer first

$DiscoResults = Start-Discovery -managementserver $ms -windowsdiscoveryconfiguration:$DiscoCnfg

install-agent -ManagementServer $ms -AgentManagedComputer: $DiscoResults.custommonitoringobjects

My productivity goes up significantly because of this!