Just created a new Wiki page on the PowerShell Survival Guide that is a quick guide to getting started with PowerShell remoting. I focused strictly on PSSession, since I find that the simplest way to get started. Let me know what you think, or better yet, update the content to improve it. That, after all, is what a Wiki is all about!

I and several Microsoft employees and other MVPs started this blog many years ago, at the dawn of the Microsoft x64 era, with the intent of providing a place to find solutions and information around 64-bit Windows computing. And, over the years, I think we did a good job of providing a place for those solutions that the community discovered to reside. After the initial flurry of activity, the rest of the folks who were part of that original group pretty much dropped off, and it became my personal

Probably one of the first scripts any new Windows PowerShell user writes is a custom profile. Your PowerShell profile ($profile in PowerShell speak), is run every time you open a PowerShell window, and it allows you to do a lot of different things to set up your environment the way you want it. Actually, though, there are four profiles that affect your PowerShell window, as described in this MSDN article . There are arguments for which profile you should be editing, but my personal preference is

As I reported earlier , my HP ML350 G5 died, and it was clearly a motherboard failure. Now that was bad enough, but worse was that I had VHD files on the P400 RAID5 array that were not as recently backed up as was desirable. Given that the ML350 wouldn’t boot at all, how to recover the important information on the array? Well, thanks to a suggestion from Greg Starks, a friend at HP, I was able to completely and easily recover all the content of that array. The key requirement was to have a second

Well, we seem to have had a bunch of HP related posts lately. This one is pure bad news, however. HP has decided to stop supporting Windows Home server. As reported on WeGotServed.com , HP has stopped selling or developing any servers for the WHS market, effective immediately. HP, of course, claims this has nothing whatsoever to do with the announcement from Microsoft that they were abandoning Drive Extender in the next version of Windows Home Server , code-named Vail. Yup, sure. I believe that.

Well, it’s been an interesting time with this ML350 . It has done yeoman duty as my primary Hyper-V server for 3 1/2 years now. We’ve had good experiences, and bad experiences. Especially during the Power Supply mess three years ago, but it’s also been prone to misbehaving in any sort of power event, even though it’s been sitting behind a pretty decent UPS. And it eats SAS drives – I’ve had 4 or 5 of them fail. Now in fairness to everyone, this machine was completely maxed out. It had 16 GB of very

A new HP Proliant MicroServer just arrived in the office. And it is a sweet little gem. Small, square, and light in weight, this little server packs a decent punch. And is completely quiet. Mine came with 2 GB of RAM, and 2x 1TB hard disks, but it can hold 8 GB of RAM (2 slots only), and 4 internal 3.5” SATA hard disks. Plus an eSATA slot and 6 USB2 slots, so we’re not likely to run out of hard disk space very quickly. The first thing I did was slot in a couple more 1TB hard disks I had available

Those folks at Microsoft who bring us Windows Small Business Server and Windows Home Server have a new product coming out soon – Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials. This is based on the same code as Windows Small Business Server (SBS) 2011 Essentials, but focused on providing client backup and network storage for existing business networks. See Sean Daniel’s blog post for pictures and details. Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials can be joined to a regular Active Directory domain, and

I just received my notice that I’ve been awarded MVP status for the 11th straight year, this year as a Windows PowerShell MVP again. And while I’ve seen a lot of changes in the MVP program over that time, not all of them ones that I like or approve of, I continue to value the award for the company it puts me in—that of people I respect who truly care about the community we all are part of, and who give of their time and expertise to help that community prosper and grow. I believe in that, and my

According to the Windows Storage Server blog , Windows Storage Server (WSS) 2008 R2 has released. This now includes three SKUs – Workgroup, Standard and Enterprise. At the lower end, the Workgroup product is limited to 25 users, and won’t do clustering. But does do iSCSI support, and would be ideal in a small Hyper-V environment. We’re also hearing reports of new “cluster in a box” implementations that leverage the new high availability bits built in to WSS 2008 R2. I’m hoping to get my hands on