Can't add disks to a Microsoft Failover Cluster

Just something simple that I thought I would share.

I had to rebuild a Microsoft Failover Cluster today and when I went to add the disks back into the first node I could not see any disks. The message I was getting was "No disk suitable for cluster disk were found". I hunted around on the mighty Google trying to find something that would help me out and got close but nothing spot on.

Tried running a Get-ClusterSharedVolumeState....nothing....
Tried running a GetClusterAvailableDisk....Nothing.
Ran Get-ClusterLog and then I went to Event Viewer - Applications and Services - Microsoft - Windows - FailoverClustering - Diagnostic.

What I found in there finally pointed to me what was going on. I was getting the below error on each of my disks:

A physical disk reservation was stopping the disks from being seen in the cluster.

So I was able to run the following command on each of my disks and VOILA! They all showed up in Failover Cluster Manager to be added as Cluster disks!

Clear-ClusterDiskReservation -Disk 1
Clear-ClusterDiskReservation -Disk 2

It will ask you "Are you sure you want to clear the disk reservation on node SERVERNAME" 

I was then able to continue with the rest of my cluster rebuild without issue!

BTW this worked in my case. I do not guarantee this will work for anyone else. As always research and check and make sure that the above solution fits your issue. I am not responsible for the use of knowledge from the above on any computer systems. There are no warranties expressed or implied.

SOLVED! Moving RDS to a new SQL server

We have been trying to figure out what we needed to do to get our RDS server moved to another SQL server during a DR situation.

The message we were getting in the event log was:

The Remote Desktop Management service terminated with the following service-specific error %%4294967295

Now I looked at several articles online and there was a lot of different ideas, but in the end, with the help of my SQL Admin we figured it out! 

On my Windows 2012 R2 RDS Broker server I went into the registry searching for the connection string to the SQL server. It was located in the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tssdis\Parameters key.

The DBConnString value had the whole connection string in there! Here is where we stumbled a little...(yes, I am a little slow on the uptake sometimes) 

DRIVER=SQL Server Native Client 11.0;SERVER=OURSQLSERVER,64229;Trusted_Connection=Yes;APP=Remote Desktop Services Connection Broker;DATABASE=RDBrokers

The number....right after SERVER=OURSQLSERVER? 64229? That is the port that our instance of SQL was originally running on. Turns out when we restored the SQL instance to our new server...the port had changed!

DOH!

So we went into SQL Server Configuration Manager, selected the SQL Server Network Configuration, Protocols for (Instance Name), selected TCP/IP, right clicked and selected properties. Once the TCP/IP properties dialog box comes up, select the IP Addresses tab and in our case we scrolled to the bottom of the page to TCP Dynamic Ports under the IPALL heading and found the new port our SQL instance was running under.

Now, to get RDS up and running we could do one of two things....We can change the port the SQL instance is running under, stop and restart the SQL instance....or we can change the connection string that we referenced earlier. So we chose to do the later. We changed the 64229 port in the connection string to the new port 64225 and WHAM!!! RDS Management service started right up when we started it under services.

So after a quick happy dance. We tried RDS and we were back in business!

Hope this helps someone!

Thanks for reading!

VMWorld 2016!!!

WOOHOOO!!!

I get to go this year! I'm so excited, first time going to Vegas and first time going to VMworld in Vegas! In case you haven't started booking your session....they are booking up FAST! I have already had to Favorite some in hopes that they might open up more sessions or someone might drop.

My plan is to cover as much as I can from the conference. I normally just throw up whatever highlights I see and try not to geek out too much *grin*.

 I really want to do some networking this year...so I will attempt to be a little more social. I normally go with the intentions of meeting up with the photography group or going to the Hang Space and somehow it just never seems to happen....I get plenty of pictures....but that is normally me wandering aimlessly around and finding cool stuff.

Anyway look forward to seeing everyone!

#VMworld2016

New Free eBooks from Microsoft Press

Here is the URL for some new Microsoft books. There is some good stuff out there!

https://mva.microsoft.com/ebooks?CR_CC=200687234&WT.mc_id=16265-DEV-crm_web_w04_dsd_ebookazur-1


Introducing Windows 10 for IT Professionals, Preview Edition
Introducing Microsoft SQL Server 2014
Introducing Microsoft System Center 2012 R2
Introducing Windows Server 2012 R2


and a host of other SCCM and Azure books.

Virtual Center Server Service Constantly Crashing

Ran into a new experience today. Came in from my Christmas holiday after being off for 12 days and low and behold my vCenter is not working.

Everything seems to be starting....but then it crashes out, and restarts itself. I could log into the vCenter just long enough to see all the VMs and boom. It crashed again....%^&*!!? Not the way I want to spend my first day back.....ah well...

So I poke around for a while and finally call VMware, as I had never seen this particular behavior before. We fussed around for a while until the Tech called over his senior resource (I seriously owe this guy a beer), he had us open up the vpxd log. In there we did a search for "minidump". The minidump section of the log pointed out that a VM on one of my hosts was causing the issue....

"2016-01-04T15:54:53.874-06:00 [10036 info 'Default' opID=SWI-335197fd testSet=host-62114,vm-2380] CoreDump: Writing minidump"

The next thing the senior did was to then search the log file from the top and what he found was that Network Adapter 1 on VM-2380 was mentioned in the log. Interesting ......

2016-01-04T15:54:33.484-06:00 [10036 warning 'VmCheck' opID=SWI-335197fd testSet=host-62114,vm-2380] [NetworksAccessible] virtual device "Network adapter 1" (4000) has an empty backing info

Ok the next thing he did was to search for vm-2380 in the log from the top and it gave me the exact name of the VM that was having the issue.....

At this point it was a mad scramble to log into the Hosts via the vSphere Client and find the offending VM (of course it was on the last host in our farm). We did an "edit settings" on the VM and saw the Network Adapter was listed in a "inconsistent state" instead of being in the proper VLAN. So we powered off the VM and as soon as we did it changed back to the proper VLAN. Now we were able to start the Virtual Center Server service and it stayed up and stable with no issues....

Simple enough fix, but I learned something, so I figured I would pass it along.

Weird Windows 10 RDP issue

RDP Freezing up, Mapping Drives with Alternate Credentials Freezes up Explorer

Ran into a weird little issue with Windows 10 today. We are rolling these new Dell Precision T1700s out to the System Administrators and our Programmers, and figured out that we could not RDP to anything with alternate credentials and we could not map drives in Windows Explorer with alternate credentials either. If you tried to RDP it would freeze up the RDP session, and if you tried to map a drive through Explorer it would freeze up Explorer but good! If you managed to get to Task Manager you could kill Explorer and restart it.

I tried the mighty Google for answers, and came up with nothing! After a couple of weeks of trying different things, I again turned to the mighty Google and this time struck GOLD!
https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/1120802-remote-desktop-in-window-10-pro-is-not-able-to-connect-to-any-clients?page=1#entry-5097312 

Sail_Maine for the WIN!!! Thank you so much for finding this.

Turns out, the Dell Data Protection Protection Suite was causing this to happen. 

• Dell Data Protection | Client Security Framework
• Dell Data Protection | Security Tools
• Dell Data Protection | Security Tools Authentication

We had to remove the Client Security Framework first, then remove the Security Tools Authentication, finally the Security Tool and reboot.

Try and fire up the RDP with alternate credentials now...and BAM!!! We have a winner folks! We can now get where we need to and no more unhappy programmers.....well, at least for now! 

HAPPY DANCE!!! 

Edge Browser Hijack

I have been working on Microsoft stuff for almost twenty years now....I know there is forever going to be a new exploit or bug but "C'mon Microsoft!!! Really?" This one is just careless and stupid. This is your new flag ship browser that you are touting the best security on!

I just ran into a really nasty Browser Hijack on Windows 10 with Microsoft Edge.

I clicked on a website link and was immediately presented the below. I can't close it, I can't hit Alt-F4 to close it, I can't get to the setting for Edge. No problem normally right? Just close it with Task Manager and it will go away. Then you can scan with Antivirus just to be sure….well not so much. When I re-opened Edge I immediately got the same pop up again. Here is the thing….I could not get it to close so I could not get around it. I tried closing the browser again and same thing. I read a couple of articles online, one stating that if you turn off networking you can reset it but no joy there either. There is a nine page long discussion here http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/insider/forum/insider_internet-insider_spartan/edge-browser-hijacked-unable-to-reset/1768f671-90d9-4dfb-88c5-679a3664634a?page=1 that even up until today people are trying to figure this one out.

I found my answer here http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/insider/forum/insider_wintp-insider_web/how-do-i-stop-all-these-damned-tabs-that-keep/75f8687c-ca58-4236-9919-bba58efc8249?page=1 through FirstBrownman's post.

What I had to do to fix this was

1.       Close the Edge Browser

2.       Navigate to the following directory C:\Users\<users>\AppData\Local\Packages\Microsoft.MicrosoftEdge_xxxxxx\AC\MicrosoftEdge\User\Default\Recovery\Active

3.       Delete everything in that directory.

You can now open Microsoft Edge back up again without the above.

BTW this also works if you are experiencing a lot of popups in Edge as well! 

At this time doing a scan with Windows Defender does not work!  So again...."C'mon Microsoft!!! Really?"