Use PowerShell - Steven Murawski

LOPSA-East is This Week

Steven Murawski — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 18:13:19 +0000

If you within travel distance to New Brunswick, NJ, there is a great conference (LOPSA-East) occurring on Friday May 3 and Saturday May 4th.

Keynoting the conference will be Marcus Ranum, one of pioneers in the firewall, VPN, and IDS systems.

LOPSA-East features technology specific training covering:

PowerShell
Windows Clustering
Puppet
Chef
CFEngine
IPV6 and DNSSEC
Working with SSDs

If you are trying to drive technical change (introducing configuration management in your environment for example), check out Tom Limoncelli's Evil Genius 101 class. Tom is the author of The Practice of System and Network Administration, which is THE book that helped me really become a sysadmin. Tom also has a class on Advanced Time Management focusing on team efficiency.

David Blank-Edelman will be talking about Building A SysAdmin sandbox. I've been bumping into David at a few conferences and I finally had the chance to hear his keynote at the Cascadia IT Conference this year which was entertaining and thought provoking. David also has a class on implementing Wordpress for SysAdmin

And, I would be remiss if I didn't highlight my co-worker Peter Grace's class on the Care and Feeding of Windows Servers for Unix/Linux Admins. One thing that's come out of my classes has been a request for more transitional training. I've had a number of sysadmins who have primarily been in the Unix/Linux world and are now being required to deal with Windows systems as well. Pete lived that experience, and shares his thoughts on what you need to understand, troubleshoot, and maintain Windows servers in a way that is familiar for Unix/Linux admins.

Find more about the training and talks at LOPSA-East.

"DevOps" Is Going To Make My Head Explode

Steven Murawski — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 21:18:12 +0000

The term "DevOps" has been floating around for a few years now. It's gone from relative obscurity to being "that thing" that organizations need to survive and thrive.

What is DevOps?

At it's heart, DevOps is about culture and process. The DevOps mindset draws from manufacturing thinkers like Demming and Goldratt, as well as modern day thought leaders like Allspaw and Humble.

The focus of DevOps culturally is to bring IT in line with the business objectives. This is accomplished by defining and controlling the flow of work, shortening feedback loops (getting new software into production sooner), and continually experimenting and improving.

These cultural objectives are backed by technological trends. Standardizing workflows (automation, checklists, kanban boards) provides IT a way to provide a baseline of service, as well as a platform for improving the quality of that service in an incremental fashion. Building and surfacing dashboards provide the business with more immediate feedback as to the state of the IT systems, as well as uncovering potential bottlenecks or unaccounted for issues. Leveraging version control systems for all aspects of environmental configuration make customizing or changing the environment a safer, more stable operation.

There are a lot of great books (more posts to come on those..), web sites (like IT Revolution), and podcasts (like DevOps Cafe and The Ship Show). More content, thoughts, and applications are coming out regularly in a variety of media sources.

That sounds good.. Why am I upset?

I am totally on-board with the DevOps philosophy. I love Goldratt's "Five Focusing Steps" and the Gene Kim's "Three Ways" and I think they are integral to how the IT field progresses in this day and age where downtime is not tolerated, new features must be surfaced regularly, and budgets and personnel are harder and harder to come by.

To me, a lot of this stuff sounded like things I read and studied (Peopleware, Release It!, and The Practice of System and Network Administration, amongst others) as I learned to be a sysadmin. I'm glad the DevOps movement has garnered attention for these concepts and the tooling around them, but I'm somewhat saddened that we needed a movement to do so. I thought it was just part of being a professional sysadmin that we talk to developers, find common ground, and work to streamline processes. I thought it was just part of being a professional to want to understand the business processes that rely on our IT systems and how we can continually improve the service. But it was obviously a big enough issue that a counter culture had to rise up and show the world that there is a better way.

But that's not what really has me steamed...

What's really got me worked up is the absolute failure of people who claim to support DevOps to have a clue as to what it actually is. I will have to hang up if I'm on another conference call and hear something to the effect of "I've got to hire me a DevOps", or "here's some tooling for the DevOps". DevOps is NOT a guy, a team, or job description (well, maybe part of a job description). A person can work in a DevOps environment, embrace DevOps principals and tool chains, but is not this mythical "DevOps" person.

DevOps has become a buzzword band-aid.

Are your teams in a rut? Re-org and call them DevOps teams.
Need to hire new personnel? Post an add for a DevOps guy.
Want a new reason for CIO's to buy your product? Advertise them as tooling a DevOps would use.

When I hear someone say "a DevOps", what I'm really picturing that person meaning is a person performing developer and IT operations work. Those people exist, but to say that they are "a DevOps" totally ignores the core cultural and process components of DevOps, which is the existence for the movement. The other scenario is when the term "DevOps" is applied to a cross-functional team of developers and operations staff. While this can be a good thing, it is not necessarily a DevOps team.

By focusing the term on a role the person or team is playing, the cultural and process components are ignored. Those are the true value in the DevOps movement and should not, no wait, cannot be ignored. Just having a person who performs the roles of a IT operations person and a software developer or having a cross-functional developer/operations team does not guaranty that you will have an automated build and deploy process, nor will it mean the IT is focused on the business, nor continually striving for improvement. That is the real value of DevOps.

In summary, if you hear a person say, "I need to hire me one of those DevOps guys," or "Let's set up a DevOps team," and there is no organizational willpower to change operating practices and culture, smack them. Well, don't smack them, that could cause all sort of legal issues, but think about smacking them, smile, listen politely, and start looking for another place to work, or another vendor to buy from, or new friends, as that person really hasn't done their homework and is just looking for a quick fix by applying buzzwords.

In summary of the summary -

To all those using and abusing the term DevOps, words mean things. Research what you are talking about before opening your trap (creating your marketing material, etc..). Stop making my life harder by confusing things for people. DevOps can help people make their environments better, but only if they know what it really is.

MMS 2013 - Advanced Automation session

Steven Murawski — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 22:12:24 +0000

I had a great time presenting with Kenneth Hansen at MMS 2013. There was a lot of demand for the scripts from our demo, so here they are...

The Demo

While the core of our session focused on the scenarios that PowerShell V3 enables, our principal demo was around configuration management. We started with a running domain controller and a base VHD. From there, we provisioned two web servers with a call to Assert-VM. When the two web servers were ready, we deployed our website with Assert-Website.

Behind the Scenes

The scenario highlights the power that declarative configuration management holds. Providing configuration variables in script files leaves an artifact that can be version controlled, providing a safety net for changes and allowing all versions of the environment to be replicated.

By breaking the configuration into an environmental and a structural component, we isolate where changes need to be made, minimizing the places data needs to be changed, and as we learned early in the presentation, changes are a major driver of failures.

The second major concept demonstrated the is idempotent operations. Idempotent operations mean that the command can run time and time again, and the only result will be the direct effect of the command, with no additional side effects. Writing functions to act in an idempotent manner allow us the freedom to run the command as often as we would like without fear that our production environment would be impacted. This allows us to make changes to some configuration items and re-run the whole configuration script. Our existing configuration would be validated and the changes then applied.

If you are responsible for server configuration, it'd be to your benefit to check into configuration management systems like this (e.g. Chef, Puppet, and CFEngine amongst others) and how you can leverage these techniques in your build and deploy process.

Cascadia IT Conference

Steven Murawski — Sat, 16 Mar 2013 05:08:54 +0000

I had the honor of being asked back to the Cascadia IT Conference to teach my PowerShell Fundamentals and my Building Your PowerShell Toolkit classes. My students were top notch. There were some great questions in both classes and we all learned some stuff.

For those attendees, I'm attaching the files from the Fundamentals and Toolkit classes, including shell history from the Fundamentals class.

If you are interested taking these classes, I'll be giving them at the upcoming LOPSA-East conference.

Upcoming Conferences

Steven Murawski — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 02:12:48 +0000

Cascadia IT Conference

I'll be back at the Cascadia IT Conference (March 15 and 16) for the second year. I'll be teaching a full day of PowerShell (PowerShell Fundamentals in the morning and Building Your PowerShell Toolkit in the afternoon). I'm also planning on hanging around for all the technical sessions on Saturday.

If you are in the Seattle area, this is a conference that is worth checking out. There are some great tutorial (Root Cause Analysis, Introduction to Puppet, Building A Sysadmin Sandbox, amongst others). On Saturday, there are also technical sessions covering IPv6, InfoSec, Chef, Logstash, designing IT Emergency Drills, and much more.

Microsoft Managemen Summit

I'll be at the Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) for the first time this year. I'll be co-presenting the Advanced Automation Using Windows PowerShell with Kenneth Hansen (the guy who runs the PowerShell team). This promises to be an awesome session. We'll be highlighting many of the enhancements to PowerShell V3 and the infrastructure in Server 2012.

ForenSecure

And I'm back at ForenSecure this year. Last year I did a talk on Windows 8 and Server 2012 and the enhancements in the security posture in that release.

This year, I'm going to be giving a talk on Continuous Availability and Disaster Recovery from the standpoint of how StackOverflow (and the rest of the StackExchange network) survived Hurricane Sandy and contrast that to the heroics that were required to keep companies like Fog Creek and Squarespace online and running.

LOPSA-EAST (formerly PICC)

Finally this spring, I'll be at LOPSA-EAST. I'll be teaching the two PowerShell classes (Fundamentals and Building Your PowerShell Toolkit), as well as a class on Continuous Availability with Windows Server 2012 Failover Clustering. Somehow, the conference organizers also found a few minutes in the schedule to let me do a technical session on Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V. LOPSA-EAST is going to be a busy couple of days.

You'll also find a lot of other great technical sessions and tutorials at LOPSA-EAST. You'll find content on Puppet, CFEngine, and Chef. Courses on driving change in your team, migrating to IPv6, and how to navigate the business world. My friend and co-worker Peter Grace is teaching a class, "The Care and Feeding of Windows Servers for Unix/Linux Admins". Technical sessions cover content from Automation to Monitoring, to Patch Management. My friend and co-worker George Beech has a session on "When Disaster Strikes - Moving StackExchange across the country and surviving 75 Broad".

Good Bye 2012, Hello 2013

Steven Murawski — Tue, 01 Jan 2013 18:02:57 +0000

2012 in Review

I started 2012 with a great surprise and the year continued to be one of my busiest.

The year started with my MVP award and spending a lot of time working with Windows 8 Server (before it got its actual product name) and trying to make PowerShell V3 make sense in my hybrid environment. The Greater Milwaukee Script Club and Greater Milwaukee IT Pro User Community both struggled on (Script Club continued thanks to the support of Tim Lemmers at Greenfield PD and the IT pro group due to the efforts of Brian Lewis and Michael Steineke).

March led off with the birth of my son. After that I had a chance to go to the Cascadia IT Conference and teach two PowerShell classes there, as well as meet a great community of people.

April brought a bit of a change of pace with the ForenSecure conference. I had the opportunity to present on the security enhancements in Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012. After ForenSecure (the next day in fact), I gave a presentation on scritable UI with PowerShell at SQLSaturday 118. April led into May with the PowerShell Deep Dive at TEC 2012. I had two sessions there (PowerShell V3 in Production and Windows Workflow Foundation and PowerShell Workflows for the IT Pro) and learned a ton as well.

May continued with PICC 2012. This was my second year at PICC and I had another day of teaching PowerShell there as well as spending time talking about Windows Server 2012, systems administration and other fun topics with a great group of guys and gals. I also had an opportunity to talk about Windows Server 2012 with the Wisconsin SQL Server Users Group.

June and July passed relatively quietly, focusing on spending some time at home and in the office, working with Server 2012 and PowerShell V3 as they neared Release to Manufacturing (RTM).

August brought me to ThatConference. ThatConference gave me an opportunity to talk to some local (and not so local) developers about some of the cool new features in PowerShell V3.

September and October were spent rolling out Server 2012 RTM (and using PowerShell Worflows to ease configuration and the new Hyper-V commands to perform cross platform migrations).

November brought me to TechOnTap for a day of Powershell with Brian Lewis and Adam Driscoll and a host of local community members, including Jes Borlandand Derek Schauland. The next week, I returned to Appleton to talk about PowerShell with Jes Borland and the FoxPass SQL Server Users Group. The end of November also brought to a close my time as a systems engineer at Edgenet (though for good reasons).

December started off with the start of a dream job, becoming a sysadmin for StackExchange, home of ServerFault and StackOverflow. The euphoria was short lived, though, and it was off to the USENIX LISA conference. LISA was an interesting experience (deserving of it's own blog post). I taught a PowerShell Fundamentals class there and got to spend time with a ton of great people. Wednesday of that week brought a real surprise. While waiting for two of my co-workers for breakfast, I saw none-other than Bruce Payette (of the PowerShell team) walk by talking to Jim Truher (formerly of the PowerShell team). Shortly thereafter, Jeffrey Snover walks up as well. It turns out the USENIX organization was presenting them an award for the advancement of systems adminitration that PowerShell provides on the Windows platform. I closed out the year getting acclimated to my new work environment and of course dealing with the holidays.

2013 What's To Come

Now that we are in to 2013, I don't know what lies ahead, only that it will be interesting! I find a renewal of my MVP status in my email today, so I am so very pleased and humbled to still be a part of that great group of professionals that make up the PowerShell MVPs.

New Beginnings

Steven Murawski — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 12:27:36 +0000

Where I was...

Friday was my last day with Edgenet, where I've worked as a senior sysadmin for the past two years. Edgenet has been a great environmement to work in. The IT team was top notch and we got to work with all sorts of great, bleeding edge tech (we had Windows Server 2012 in production since the Developer Preview). I got to play with large geo clusters and a significant Hyper-V implentation. I'm very grateful for the time I had there and the great team I worked with.

Where I'm going...

Today, I start in my new role as a sysadmin for the StackExchange family of sites, including ServerFault and StackOverflow. I've been a user of StackOverflow since the early private beta days. I'll be joining a team of great sysadmins (Kyle, George, Pete, and Bart), several of which I came to know at the PICC conference over the past couple of years. More to come as I find my way in my new role.

Still Time For Early Bird Registration For LISA 2012

Steven Murawski — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

----------------------------------------------------

SAVE THE DATE

LISA '12: 26th Large Installation System Administration Conference

December 9-14, 2012, San Diego, CA

https://www.usenix.org/lisa12

Early Bird Registration Deadline: November 19, 2012

Sponsored by USENIX in cooperation with LOPSA

-----------------------------------------------------------

LISA is coming to San Diego, CA, December 9-14, 2012. As always, the breadth and quality of this year's tutorials, paper presentations, invited talks, and participants are excellent. Learn more at https://www.usenix.org/lisa12.

New for 2012 are themes, which allow you to follow a specific topic through tutorials, workshops, technical sessions, and the refereed papers track. The LISA ‘12 themes focus on cloud computing, IPv6 and DNSSEC, and Super Sysadmin.

Take advantage of 47 half- and full-day training sessions from industry leaders, including:

* John Arrasjid, Wade Holmes, David Hill, Ben Lin, and Mahesh Rajani on virtualization with VMware

* Eric Shamow on Puppet

* Shumon Huque on Using and Migrating to IPv6

Take anywhere from 1 to 6 full days of training and create the curriculum that meets your needs.

https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa12/training-program/training-program

The LISA '12 technical program offers practical information on a variety of key topics, such as:

* Vint Cerf's Keynote Address on “The Internet of Things and Sensors and Actuators!”

* Invited Talks such as Matt Blaze's "NSA on the Cheap," Geoff Halprin's Closing on "15 Years of DevOps," and Selena Deckelmann's Plenary on “Education vs. Training"

* Paper Presentations on practical concepts such as storage and data, tools you can use, and building and infrastructure

* Practice and Experience Reports that give you real-life experiences on topics ranging from iOS configuration management to optimizing a news Web site

Interactive sessions, including:

* Full- and half-day intensive workshops geared towards senior sysadmins

* Guru Is In sessions, led by experts such as Tom Limoncelli on time management and Owen DeLong on IPv6, which allow you to pose your toughest questions and get answers

* The Vendor Exhibition provides insight into new products and services and a look at who is hiring.

https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa12/exhibition

* The "Hallway Track" offers ample opportunities to meet and mingle with colleagues and industry leaders during breaks, BoFs, and other social activities:

https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa12/activities

* Discounts are available!

-- Registration: https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa12/registration-information

-- Airfare and hotel: https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa12/hotel-and-travel-information

* Connect with other attendees, check out additional discounts, and help spread the word!

Banners and buttons: https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa12/help-promote-lisa-12

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/280256018711626/

LinkedIn: http://www.usenix.org/linkedin

Google+: https://plus.google.com/u/0/108588319090208187909

Twitter: https://twitter.com/lisaconference #LISA12

YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/USENIXAssociation

-----------------------------------------------------------

WHAT: LISA '12: 26th Large Installation System Administration Conference

WHEN: December 9-14, 2012

WHERE: San Diego, CA

WHO: System administrators, network administrators, CIOs, CTOs, researchers, tool providers, support and help desk personnel, etc.

WHY: Get the practical information you'll need to succeed in these uncertain economic times.

HOW: https://www.usenix.org/lisa12

LISA 2012–Now with more PowerShell

Steven Murawski — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 11:15:27 +0000

The 2012 LISA (Large Installation System Administration) Conference is coming up (December 9-14).

If you aren’t familiar with LISA, it is a conference focusing on systems administration topics with a rich history (this is the 26th one). There are 47 different full or half-day classes to choose from, as well as three days of additional technical sessions across three main themes – Cloud Computing, Super Sysadmin, and IPv6 and DNSSEC.

You’ll find sessions like “Seven Habits of the Highly Effective System Administrator”, “Root Cause Analysis”, “Building a Massively Scalable, Geographically Disparate IaaS Cloud”, “Dude, Where’s My Data? Replicating and Migrating Data Across Data Centers and Clouds”, “Using and Migrating to IPv6”, and “If You Can’t Monitor It You Can’t Manage It” and tons more ( more about the training program and more about the technical sessions).

I’ll be at LISA this year (my first time there) teaching a half day PowerShell Fundamentals class. I’m really excited to be going there, as I’ve been hearing rave reviews about this conference for the past three years.

I hope to see you there!

Server 2012 in 31 Days–Recap

Steven Murawski — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 10:00:00 +0000

My friend Microsoft IT Pro Evangelist Brian Lewis (twitter, blog) contacted me about a series he, Matt Hester, Keith Mayer, and Kevin Remde were going to do through the month of October on their favorite things in Server 2012.

My first thought was that a month was not enough, since Server 2012 is chock full of new goodness. I watched the series develop and added my own meager contribution on what I think is the killer feature in Server 2012 – SMB3 and Continuously Available File Shares. They surprised me and managed to cover an impressive amount of the feature set.

Below I’ve posted a handy dandy index with all the various posts. Check them out and see what Server 2012 can do for you!

Day	Author	Blog Post Link
1	Kevin	The Cloud Platform (Part 1 of 31)
2	Brian	Windows server manager-2012 (Part 2 of 31)
3	Matt	PowerShell 3.0 (Part 3 of 31)
4	Keith	Hyper-V Live Migration (Part 4 of 31)
5	Kevin	Windows Server 2012 and Hyper-V Replica (Part 5 of 31)
6	Keith	Storage spaces in windows server 2012 – (Part 6 of 31)
7	Kevin	Yes there is an I in NIC – Windows Server 2012 (Part 7 of 31)
8	Keith	Getting started with Hyper-V network virtualization
9	Matt	Get happy over the free Hyper-V Server 2012 (part-9-of-31)
10	Brian	31 days of our favorite things: Simplified BrancheCache Part 10
11	Matt	Getting Snippy with PowerShell 3.0 (Part 11 of 31)
12	Veeam	How to get unbelievable deduplication results with Windows Server 2012 and Veeam backup replication
13	Brian	Simplified VDI Configuration and Management in Server 2012 Part 13
14	Keith	Task mastering the new task manager (part 14 of 31)
15	Keith	Improve File Server Data Resiliency with ReFS (Part 15 of 31)
16	Sumeeth	Simplified DirectAccess (Part 16 of 31)
17	Matt	SMB 3.0 The Glue in Windows Server 2012 (part-17-of-31)
18	Steve	Server 2012 Continuously Available File Shares (Part 18 of 31)
19	Keith	Improved Taste Less Filling More Uptime – Server Core in Windows Server 2012 (19-of-31)
20	Kevin	Extend Your Hyper-V Virtual Switch in Server 2012 (Part 20 of 31)
21	Brian	To NIC or to Not NIC hardware requirements (Part 21 of 31)
22	Kevin	Windows Server 2012 Versions (Part 22-of-31)
23	Kevin	31 Days of our Favorite Things: Windows Server 2012 – I think, therefore IPAM. (Part 23 of 31)
24	Kevin	31 Days of our Favorite Things: Windows Server 2012 and the RSATs (Part 24 of 31)
25	Kevin	Top 3 New Tricks with Active Directory Admin Center – 31 Days of Favorite Features in #WinServ 2012 ( Part 25 of 31 )
26	Brian	31 Days of Our Favorite Things: Dynamic Access Control (Part 26 of 31)
27	Matt	31 Days of Our Favorite Things: Get the Gremlin Out of Your Active Directory Virtualization Infrastructure with Windows Server 2012 (Part 27 of 31)
28	Keith	Step-by-Step: Scoping out the NEW DHCP Failover in Windows Server 2012 – 31 Days of Favorite Features ( Part 28 of 31 )
29	Matt	31 Days of Our Favorite Things: Gone in 8 Seconds chkdsk in Windows Server 2012 (Part 29 of 31)
30	Brian	Server 2012 RDS What’s New? (Part 30 of 31)
31	Matt	31 Days of Our Favorite Things: No Better Time than Now to Choose Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012 over VMware (Part 31 of 31)

Server 2012–Continuously Available File Shares

Steven Murawski — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 22:45:00 +0000

I think SMB3 and the enhancements to the clustered file share roles are some of the most important new features in Server 2012.

There are some great new features in file shares and the SMB protocol. Some of the terminology can be confusing, so I’m going to loosely define a few of them right up front.

SMB3 – Revised SMB protocol with improved performance, scaling, and support for technology like RSS and RDMA. It was introduced with Windows 8 and Server 2012.

Highly Available File Share – A clustered file share. This can be made Continuously Available.

Continuously Available File Share – A file share with Transparent Failover enabled. This can be a Highly Available File Share or a Scale Out File Share.

Scale-Out File Share – A file share optimized for application workloads like SQL Server and Hyper-V. Scale-Out File Shares are Continuously Available.

What Makes a File Share Continuously Available?

There are a couple of key features in this scenario.

Transparent Failover
Witness Service

Transparent Failover

Transparent Failover is the capability of an SMB3 client to maintain a connection with data located on a remote (Server 2012) clustered file share despite the transition of the role between cluster nodes (planned or unplanned). This capability allows for more seamless access to documents and application data of all types.

Witness Service

The Witness Service coordinates the access to a clustered Continuously Available File Share. When an SMB3 client connects to a Continuously Available File Share, it notifies the Witness Service on the cluster, which picks a different cluster node to be the witness for this SMB connection. This node then has the responsibility to help transition the SMB3 client to the new host for the role in the case of a failover, without requiring the client to wait for TCP timeouts.

The Difference Between Continuously Available File Shares and Scale-Out File Shares

I touched on this earlier, but this is an important distinction that has definite performance impacts. All Scale-Out File Shares are Continuously Available, but not all Continuously Available File Shares are Scale-Out.

Scale-Out File Shares target certain workloads, like hosting Hyper-V virtual machine files or SQL Server Databases. The disk access for these file shares is optimized for files that are being held open and continually accessed. They leverage Cluster Shared Volumes to provide access to the same data across multiple cluster nodes. Additionally, Scale-Out File Shares do not have their own IP address associated with their client access point. The Scale-Out File Share registers all of the IPs (that the cluster allows client connections on) in DNS with the client access point name. The SMB3 client uses DNS round-robin to initially distribute load to the file servers. Scale-Out File Shares are limited to a maximum 8 nodes in a cluster.

Other Continuously Available File Shares operate as more traditional file shares, but with the added benefit of quicker (seamless) failover from cluster node to cluster node. These more traditional file shares have their own IP address associated to the client access point name. These shares can be used for any other file sharing purpose, with data/disk access mirroring more traditional modes. The disk for these file shares is cluster disk that is accessible only from the cluster node hosting it.

Lesson Learned

I’m emphasizing the difference in these two for a reason. In my initial deployments and testing, I didn’t really have a clear understanding of the difference. I thought that a Scale-Out File Share was the best all-around option, after all, every node was a potential endpoint so the performance had to be great. That didn’t happen in practice.

My VM’s that I had hosted on a Scale-Out File Share were performing great. The other workloads I targeted were not going so well. I had initially deployed a file share to be the target for SQL Server backups as a Scale-Out File Share. It turned out that the data access patterns of generating SQL backups was not really in line with the intended usage for the Scale-Out File Share and the performance was abysmal. Converting that to a Continuously Available Share improved the performance instantly and measurably (no change to the backend disk, still on the same servers – the only change was the type of file share and how the disk was presented to the cluster – no longer as a Cluster Shared Volume, but as a cluster disk).

The flip side is also true. If I were to host my VM’s on a regular Continuously Available File Share, I would see performance degradation. The performance would still be superior to a 2008 R2 or other SMB file share, since SMB3 is a more efficient protocol and allows for better throughput, but the optimizations for disk access would be lost.

By going with the Continuously Available File Share and not the Scale-Out File Share for my backups, I did not lose any reliability. They are both highly available and have the Continuous Availability/Transparent Failover capability.

How This Is Revolutionizing My Data Center…

Continuously Available File Shares are transforming my data center. I am able to host virtual machines, SQL databases, IIS application directories, and push more shared files onto file share clusters than ever before. By hosting my application workloads (VMs, SQL, etc..) on a file share, I reduce my dependence on any one particular storage method. I’m able to add a layer of indirection that allows my application servers to remain ignorant of the storage layer, which makes deploying new application and infrastructure servers much faster.

Advances in networking technologies (for example RDMA), allow for throughputs that are off the charts and disk speed is the limiting factor. (In some of my testing, I was getting 4GB, yes GIGABYTES, a second across Infiniband connections. And that was due to the file writes for the test being larger than the cache on the disk and requiring actual disk access for the test. Stuff that could be handled in the cache or in memory were even faster.)

In the year that I have had Windows Server 2012 in production (through it’s various previews, betas, and RCs), SMB3, Continuously Available File Shares, and Scale-Out File Shares have proven to be my FAVORITE thing.

Back on RunAs Radio

Steven Murawski — Wed, 27 Jun 2012 08:57:08 +0000

Richard Campbell was kind enough to have me back on RunAs Radio to talk about SMB3 and Scale-Out File Shares in Windows Server 2012. We didn’t really talk about anything PowerShell related, but SMB3 and Scale-Out File Shares are a radical topic and are changing my data center deployments in a very good way. Richard is a super smart guy and always drives the conversation in interesting directions, bringing out points that might have passed by and offering interesting insights that really make you think.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, if you aren’t listening to RunAs Radio – start! It’s a great way to keep abreast of the change and directions the Microsoft IT field is taking. In recent shows, Richard has covered MDT 2012, SharePoint, boot performance, SQL Server 2012, Disaster Recovery in the Cloud with VMWare, System Center 2012, and the list goes on…

RunAs Radio and PowerShell V3

Steven Murawski — Wed, 23 May 2012 08:41:41 +0000

I joined Richard Campbell, the host of Runas Radio to talk about PowerShell V3 and Server 2012. We had a great conversation and covered some of the improvements and new features in PowerShell V3 and the new cmdlets and support in Server 2012.

What’s RunAs Radio?

RunAs Radio is a weekly internet audio talk show for IT professionals focused on Microsoft products. They cover a full range of topics from a Microsoft-centric view point. Each show is about 30 minutes long and is focused on a single topic.

Why Should I Subscribe to the Show?

RunAs Radio provides a great way to keep on top what’s new and changing in systems administration. They cover topics from SQL Server to IPv6 to System Center to Group Policy to Wireshark and everything in between and in the cloud. Some of my favorite shows are with some of the Microsoft PFE's like Clint Huffman and Jeff Stokes, where they cover some performance monitoring and tuning topics. Even if you don’t work directly with a technology that they discuss, listening will provide you with a basic understanding or familiarity with other things happening in our industry. In this market, we never know where our jobs or careers are going to take us, so you never know when this information will pay off!

What Are You Waiting For? Go Subscribe!

Back on the PowerScripting Podcast

Steven Murawski — Tue, 15 May 2012 14:35:26 +0000

You think Hal and Jonathan would learn, but they keep having me back on the show.

Hal was out of town, but Jon and I had a great talk about Server 2012 and PowerShell V3. As always, there was great conversation in the chat room and some good questions. Jon had a surprise for us all. After the interview, he played Jeffrey Snover’s keynote from the PowerShell Deep Dive.

Check out this episode and the other great shows and interviews they have.

PowerShell at PICC

Steven Murawski — Sat, 12 May 2012 07:13:40 +0000

I had a great time with my classes at PICC. Both the PowerShell Fundamentals class and the PowerShell Tips and Tricks class were a lot of fun and resulted in great conversations at the breaks and after the classes.

The fun continued in the evening with the Bird of a Feather sessions where we spent some time talking about Server 2012, Server Core, and remote server management. What a great time.

I’ve uploaded my slides and sample scripts and I’ll have the shell histories from the classes posted in a day or two (I need to comment them so they are useable…), so check back on Monday for the annotated shell histories.

I wanted to say a big thank you to everyone who attended my class and especially those who made a point of talking to me about problems they face or where they are using PowerShell.

I also wanted to thank the organizers of PICC for having me out again this year.

Want to PICC up some new skills?

Steven Murawski — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 17:03:09 +0000

If you are out on the East Coast and want to pick up some new skills or freshen up some old ones, check out PICC – the Professional IT Community Conference.

PICC is hosted in New Brunswick, New Jersey and is two days of great SysAdmin content (May 11/12).

You’ll find half day training sessions on things like:

PowerShell (by your truly)
Puppet
Time Management
Technical Resume Writing
IPv6
Workplace Presentations
and more…

There are also conference sessions on topics like:

Ganeti (Virtualization Management Platform)
Windows Deployment with MDT 2010
Scaling the StackExchange Platform
Configuration Management
Securing MySQL
Deep Application Monitoring
and more…

I’ll be there, and I’m definitely going to walk away better prepared to do my job.

What are you doing to improve your skillset?

The Games Are Afoot!

Steven Murawski — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 09:30:00 +0000

The Scripting Games that is!

This year’s games are in progress, but it’s not too late to start. Each weekday a new event is posted, but you have a week to turn in your solution, so get out there and start writing some PowerShell.

All the details you need are available from the Scripting Games All In One Links Page, where the Scripting Guy Ed Wilson has thoughtfully provided (and updates daily) links to the events, rules, and other great information.

What Type Of Events Are There?

Well, the first couple of challenges give us an idea..

In the beginner category, you’ll be doing things like:

In the advanced category (should you dare..), you’ll find challenges like:

What’s In It For Me?

The Games are a great way to get hands on with PowerShell in a non-destructive manner. None of the challenges are going to require you to “format c:”. You also have a chance to win some prizes, so get out there and try them out!

Cascadia Community Conference - 2012

Steven Murawski — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 15:37:00 +0000

I had a great time at the Cascadia conference this past weekend. I missed Friday, but got to spend all day Saturday teaching PowerShell to a great group of attendees. There were some great questions and interesting thoughts developed in both the Fundamentals class and the Tips and Tricks class.

I want to thank the organizers of the conference for having me out and especially to the attendees for my classes, most of whom spent all day with me.

For those that were in the class, I've linked to a zip file with some of the commands we ran through, and an xml file with the shell history for the problem we worked through in the afternoon.

To load the shell history, you can use Import-Clixml (path to the xml file) | add-history. After that Get-history will have all the commands we ran when we tried to work out the error handling for that web request.

PowerShell V3 – Default Parameter Values

Steven Murawski — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 10:45:41 +0000

PowerShell Version 3 introduces the concept of Default Parameter Values.

This allows you to specify a value for one or more parameters for one or more commands.

To implement this, you need to populate a new hashtable – $PSDefaultParameterValues

That Description is Not Helpful

Let’s look at some examples -

First off, we can specify the value for a parameter for a specific command. The pattern used for the hashtable entries is “NameOfCommand:NameOfParameter” = “ValueOfParameter”.

(I’m stealing some of these examples from the samples provided in CTP1.)


$PSDefaultParameterValues = @{"Get-Process:Name"="powershell"}

Get-Process

Get-Process e*

With that set, every time we run Get-Process and do not specify the Name parameter, the PowerShell runtime will stick “powershell” in for that value. A specified parameter will always override a default value.

Let’s go the other way and, instead of specifying one command, set a parameter value on all commands (that have that parameter.


$cred = Get-Credential mydomain\mydomainadminaccount

$PSDefaultParameterValues = @{"*:Credential" = $cred}

This would provide your $cred to any Credential parameter.

We can also use wildcards to match multiple commands.

$PSDefaultParameterValues = @{"*-AD*:Server" = 'MyDomainController'}

This would provide a default value to the Server parameter for any command whose noun started with AD (like everything in the ActiveDirectory module.

Since this is a hashtable, it can hold many different mappings -


$PSDefaultParameterValues = @{

  "*:Credential" = $cred

  "Get-Process:Name"="powershell"

  "*-AD*:Server" = 'MyDomainController'

}

To turn off DefaultParameterValues (without removing everything you have set up), you can set a key “Disabled” equal to $true.

$PSDefaultParameterValues += @{"Disabled" = $true}

This concludes our brief look at DefaultParameterValues for today.

Go grab Version 3 CTP2 and give it a whirl…

When Import-Module Does Not

Steven Murawski — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 09:34:46 +0000

A question came up about the behavior of Import-Module (in the context of this interesting discussion of whether module authors should provide aliases), especially with Version 3 and the auto-loading of modules (what’s that?).

So What’s the Question?

Does the auto-loading of modules in PowerShell Version 3 use Import-Module behind the scenes? If it does, can we use default parameter sets to control what types of things are imported?

What Actually Happens?

So, it turns out that Import-Module does get called behind the scenes and a default parameter set (new feature) can be used to customize the import of new modules.

$PSDefaultParameterValues = @{	"Import-Module:Alias"=@()
	"Import-Module:Function"='*'
	"Import-Module:Cmdlet"='*'
	"Import-Module:Variable"='*'
}
Get-Module
Get-BitsTransfer
Get-Module

This example (when used in PowerShell V3) will (from a base PowerShell session) show you what modules are loaded, attempt to run the Get-BitsTransfer command, and then show you what modules are now loaded (should include the BitsTransfer module now). Since we’ve provided an empty array to the Alias parameter for Import-Module, any module that is imported will import any aliases.

Seems Like It Works… Where’s the Problem?

The problem comes in when you specify that only one of the four parameters (Alias, Function, Cmdlet, and Variable).

You might expect that when you specify one parameter (example Alias), that the other portions of the import (Function, Cmdlet, and Variable) would behave just like if you did not specify any of them.

Example -

Open a new PowerShell session (V2 or V3) -


Import-Module BitsTransfer
Get-Command -Module BitsTransfer

Get-Module

This will import BitsTransfer module and all attendant commands and functions. Note the ExportedCommands in the Get-Module output.

Open a new PowerShell session and try -


Import-Module BitsTransfer -Alias @()
Get-Command -Module BitsTransfer

Get-Module

This should import the BitsTransfer without any aliases (yes, I know BitsTransfer doesn’t have any aliases, but I wanted a module that most any Windows 7 or Server 2008 R2 machine would have – feel free to test with whatever module you desire).

This did import the BitsTransfer, but no commands or variables were imported. It only attempted to import aliases, and since we specified that aliases were to be an empty array, nothing was imported.

This is counter-intuitive and is not the experience we should have. Specifying one parameter should not change the default value of other parameters (from all to none in this case).

What Can I Do About It?

First of all, open PowerShell and try it! If you have one of the CTPs of Version 3, try it there. Also try it in V2 using Import-Module directly.

Then go to Microsoft Connect and vote up https://connect.microsoft.com/PowerShell/feedback/details/716857/module-partially-loads-with-import-module.