Reading Time: < 1 minuteManaging your AKS clusters efficiently is crucial, especially when dealing with problematic nodes or reducing the number of deallocated nodes. With the AKS node deletion feature in preview, you can now remove specific VMs without switching the node pool state. Steps to Remove Specific VMs in AKS First you need Read more
Reading Time: 4 minutesYou may have seen some of my previous blog posts about monitoring your servers using Azure Log Analytics. If not you can find them at https://pixelrobots.co.uk/2019/06/monitor-your-servers-cpu-usage-using-azure-log-analytics/. In this post, I am going to focus on using Azure Log Analytics to monitor your servers disk space. In fact, I am going Read more
Reading Time: 4 minutesAt one of my Azure user groups, someone asked me about monitoring servers using Azure. So I thought perhaps more people would like to know this too, hence this blog post. This post will focus on monitoring CPU usage. I will go through the query I use and will show Read more
Reading Time: 3 minutesWith Windows Server 2016 we have some cool new features within Hyper-V. One of them are Hyper-V Virtual Machine Groups. In this post I am going to explain what Virtual Machine Groups are and how to create them. What are Hyper-V Virtual Machine Groups? First thing to note is that Read more
Reading Time: 2 minutesRecently I have needed to configure an Active Directory to replicate changes between sites straight away. They had everything set to replicate at the default 15 minutes but this was not quick enough due to a dispersed helpdesk. The best way to do this is to enable Use Notify replication. Read more
Reading Time: 3 minutesNow Windows Server 2016 has been out for a few months I have decided to update my lab Domain to 2016 forest functional level. But first I need to migrate the FSMO (Flexible Single Master Operation) Roles to my new Windows Server 2016 Domain Controllers. In this Step by Step Read more
Reading Time: 3 minutesSometimes, as a sysadmin you may need to move the Active Directory database and / or log files from one location to another. This may be due to your Domain Controller running out of space. The location you choose to move the files to may be a different folder or Read more
Reading Time: 4 minutesWhat is new in Active Directory on Server 2016? We have a few new features to play with in Windows Server 2016 regarding Active Directory. Some of them being time-based group membership, privileged access management, and Microsoft Passport to name a few. I am not going to go into too Read more
Reading Time: 2 minutesAutomatic Virtual Machine Activation was added into Windows Server 2012 R2. It allows you to activate your VM’s without using a KMS Server or using MAK Keys and you do not require an internet connection either! The VM’s activate against the host Hyper-V server. Using this method the Guests activation Read more
Reading Time: 4 minutesWhat is Cloud Witness? Cloud Witness is a new type of Failover Witness Quorum Witness that uses Microsoft Azure blob storage to read/write a blob file which is then used as an arbitration point in case of split-brain resolution. There are significant benefits with using a Cloud Witness. Uses Microsoft Read more