Ondrej Žilinec – IT Blog

When you buy Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacenter edition you don’t have to activate every Windows Server 2012 virtual machine (Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacenter, Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard or Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials.). There is new license key for Windows. It’s called Automatic Virtual Machine Activation (AVMA). You have to active Hyper-V host operating system. Then you use one of following AVMA keys for VMs on your Hyper-V hosts:

You use this keys using elevated command prompt on VM:

slmgr /ipk <AVMA_key>

When you do all of these steps all your Windows Server 2012 will be automatically activated. Even without  access of Internet from VM.

I hope something similar will be deployed on VMWare virtualization.

More oficial from Microsoft here.

Where there is a problem with AD replication, there is most of the time problem with DNS. Most of the time there are bad DNS records or missing DNS records. There is cool utility to check DNSLint.exe from Microsoft. It is designed to do all manual check I do when trying to solve AD replication problems.

You can download it from here and also read more about it.

It’s bad it’s not included into operating system by default.

Couple days ago I migrated fileserver. We moved redirected My Documents for users on another server. We also hided these shares behind DFS namespace to make it more manageable in future. But we found out problem with this setup –  offline files. Windows XP kept offline copies of old and new redirected files. We had to clean this offline data database. I setup start up script:

@ECHO OFF
IF EXIST C:\OfflineFilesClean.txt (
  REM Do one thing
) ELSE (
  reg.exe add “HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\NetCache” /v FormatDatabase /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f
  echo Vymazane > C:\OfflineFilesClean.txt
)

This script was dedicated just for Windows XP, so I had to apply GPO using WMI filter:

SELECT * FROM Win32_OperatingSystem WHERE Version LIKE “5.1%” and ProductType = “1”

This script would work also on Windows 7 and Windows 8, but those OS didn’t have problem.

That’s all for today,