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Read-Only Friday August 4, 2023 End Of Life Server 2012R2 and managing EOL

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Read-Only Friday August 4, 2023

Do you still have any Windows Server 2012R2 or earlier in production? This is a friendly reminder that they will be going End Of Life October 10 of this year. If you do have any in production, what is your plan to decommission them? Do you still need the server, or will you be spinning up a new upgraded VM? Do you have the licensing to upgrade? What are your next steps?

Talking about End Of Life, how do you manage and track your equipment and licensing for this scenario? Do you have special asset/license management software, SharePoint list, SQL Database, Excel workbook, or even a csv with dates and costs?

If you’ve made it this far, I’m hoping this isn’t a surprise and this is only a reminder to keep following your plan, but if this is the first time you’re hearing this, please look at this now and put a plan in place, especially if you will need to purchase new licensing. While you are at it, I’d check those servers running 2012R2 and see how much of the services you really need running now, as a lot has probably changed since you first put them into production. Also, do you have enough resources to run both at the same time, or do you have to take a current backup(test to make sure the backup works), delete(or turn off and hope you don’t accidently turn it on while new server is on) your current 2012R2, then build the new on?

Good luck with your migrations and as always if there is anyway I can help, feel free to reach out! Have a great Friday, and remember no unscheduled changes today.

Module Monday July 31, 2023

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Well, here it is!  Module Monday, but this one is a module I’ve been working on for a bit and figured it’s time to put it out to the community for others to enjoy and improve. Have you had to test PowerShell scripts on your 365 tenant and really didn’t want to use your production environment, but wanted to keep the close as possible for testing accuracy? Then you’ll want 365AutomatedLab in your tool chest. It can also be used to add multiple users to an environment from an excel sheet or add multiple groups to a user per their title from an excel sheet. Hope you check it out and leave some feedback! So much I want to do with it and super excited about this project that I feel can help so many!

I’ll be doing some blog posts and video tutorials in the near future. Any preferences?

Thanks to Andrew Pla for the extra push 😆

https://github.com/DevClate/365AutomatedLab

Read-Only Friday 365 Developer Program

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Want to have some fun with Office 365, but don’t want to mess up your production environment? Or what about being able to try out scripts and not having to brace yourself as you run them and hope they don’t clear out all your data? Now you can do whatever you want with the Microsoft 365 Dev Center.

That is right, up to 25 E5 licensed users at your disposal for 90 days and will be renewed as long as you are using it. They will even create 16 users for you, mail traffic, and more. This isn’t just for PowerShell, this all aspects of 365.

Awesome, right? Here are few examples:

  1. You could copy up to 25 of your current users and import them into this Developer tenant and test scripts see exactly how it would work with your information. Think of those times where you test a script with fictional users and your script works perfect, but once you put it into production, your script fails because one username had a character that your test data didn’t have. Now your spending unnecessary time trying to figure out what went wrong when it worked perfectly in proof of concept.
  2. You want to test new features or policies, but you don’t want to enable them in your production environment, as your not 100% sure how it will react to your environment. Configure this test environment how your current tenant is then enable those features or policies you want to test. Much safer to test in the dev environment, then do it in production and all of a sudden your users can’t access critical resources or anything at all!
  3. Your boss wants you do a proof of concept on how to streamline the onboarding process and to make it as simple as possible for the organization. It is recommended that you use Sharepoint and Teams as the company already uses both and are familiar. Instead of using your production environment, you can do this all in the dev tenant without affecting anything in production. You can even invite key players in this project to login and test it with you. Now you don’t have to worry about a teams alert that you setup for when a new hire has been added to AD or Microsoft Entra ID spamming a your production channel because your script or flow errored.

These are just a few scenarios that the 365 Dev tenant can be useful, but there are so many more. I’m barely scratching the surface, and hope you sign up right away for this if you haven’t already. It is free, if you administer or develop 365, you need this.

I hope you found this helpful, and if you have any questions, I’d be glad to help out in anyway I can.

Sign up for the Microsoft 365 Dev Center

Read-Only Friday March 10, 2023

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It’s Friday, and I’m going to keep this one short in sweet copy. I’ve mentioned this module before, but it is so helpful if you use any of the products, that I want to make sure you don’t miss out on it! Yes, I know it’s Read-Only Friday, but this module will step up your documentation game ten fold.

AsBuiltReport on Github or you can find them on asbuiltreport.com.

What they have created is multiple modules depending on the product you need documentation on, and with one quick line of code, you get a full breakdown of the product you requesting information on. How about a 144 page document on your Active Directory? Not bad, right?

Check them out, and let me know what you think!

GitHub:
https://github.com/AsBuiltReport

Website:
https://www.asbuiltreport.com/

One-Liner Wednesday March 8, 2023

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Are you using VMWare? Ever had to troubleshoot why a VM isn’t working? Or need to know the status of a virtual machine? If you haven’t used PowerCLI before(I know I’ve mentioned it previously), check out this one liner.

 get-vm servername | select-object name, powerstate, usedspacegb, provisionedspacegb

What this does is first finds the server you are looking for with “servername.” Then it shows the server name, whether it is turned on or off, how much storage space is used, and finally how much storage is provisioned. This gives you a very quick overview of the status of the server.

I know, very simple, but it works… and you can expand on this. You could not put a servername in, and it will show all of your virtual machines with the information above.

What about if you have 100s or even 1,000s of servers, you could export to gridview or even better to excel with the importexcel module for filtering.

Hope you found this useful, and if your not already using the PowerCLI module to start using it and make your life easier.

PowerShell Gallery:
PowerCLI

Module Monday January 30, 2023

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We are back, and hope you had a great weekend! Today’s module is one Jeff Hicks had told me about last week and I started playing with it. It’s a neat module that makes managing your tasks easy. His module is called PSWorkItem.

It allows you to create predefined categories with a description, that you can add your tasks too. You can even set the default category so that you don’t have to keep on typing the category name for each task for your primary category. The categories can highlighted in the color of your choosing if you need that feature. Another great feature is that you can input due dates and view tasks by a numnber of different filters. There is an option to put percentage complete which can be very useful if you have certain milestones for your code, and once you reach it you could have it automatically update PSWorkItem for you.

If you are looking for a simple task list that gets the job done, I highly recommend this, especially since you can easily integrate it into your coding. I know there are other ways, but you could even create a template of tasks that need to be completed for a project, then link that project so that after each task is run successfully, it automatically completes it for you.

I know Jeff has a future task of making it so you can use it with a WPF or TUI, but I’d also love to see it integrated with PowerShell Universal.

GitHub:
PSWorkItem