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Romain Serre
Romain Serre
IT and Virtualization Consultant. Romain is specializing in Microsoft technologies such as Hyper-V, System Center, storage, networking, and MS Azure. He is a Microsoft MVP and MCSE in Server Infrastructure and Private Cloud.
Romain Serre
  • Romain Serre
  • August 16, 2016

Why moving from Windows Server 2012 R2 to 2016 for Hyper-V

Windows Server 2016 will be released the next month said Microsoft the last month. Windows Server 2016 brings a lot of new features compared to the last Windows Server version for Hyper-V, networking and storage. In this topic I will try to convince you to move from prior Windows Server edition to Windows Server 2016 with eight reasons.
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Romain Serre
  • Romain Serre
  • August 2, 2016

Deploy an Azure VM from a generalized image in Azure RM portal

Microsoft Azure provides a way to deploy Azure VM from the Marketplace or from a generalized image. When you deploy the Azure VM from the Marketplace, no customization is deployed. You have to configure the operating system as your master. When you have several Azure VMs to deploy, the customization of each system can be time consuming. A lot of companies have a master or a baseline image in a VMDK for VMWare, in a VHD(X) for Hyper-V or in a WIM image. In this topic we will see how to create a generalized image from a single Azure VM and how to deploy Azure VM from this generalized image.
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Romain Serre
  • Romain Serre
  • June 17, 2016

Manage storage QoS Policies from VMM 2016

The QoS policy was a feature included in Windows Server 2012 R2 that enabled to set a minimum and a maximum IOPS on a VHD(X). These policies were not centralized and you had to set the QoS policy on each VHD(X) independently. In Windows Server 2016, Microsoft has improved this feature because the policy can now be stored in the cluster database. You can create a policy based on a minimum / maximum IOPS and/or a bandwidth. This policy can be applied to a VHD(X) (Dedicated Policy Type) or to a set of VHD(X) (Aggregated policy Type).
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Romain Serre
  • Romain Serre
  • May 16, 2016

Rename VM network adapter automatically from Virtual Machine Manager 2016

The next version of Hyper-V which comes with Windows Server 2016, brings a new feature called Virtual Network Adapter Identification. This feature enables to specify a name when a network adapter is added to the virtual machine and to retrieve this same name inside the VM. This feature can be also managed from Virtual Machine Manager 2016. This feature is really great to automate the renaming of the virtual network adapters inside VMs. In this topic I’ll show you how it is working and how to automate the renaming of the network adapters with PowerShell.
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Romain Serre
  • Romain Serre
  • April 21, 2016

Extend Active Directory to Microsoft Azure

Extend Active Directory to Microsoft Azure is a common scenario when you implement hybrid cloud. For example, protected VM with Azure Site Recovery may need access to Active Directory even if On-Premise datacenter is unreachable. You can also extend your Active Directory to Azure when you use production workloads in Azure VMs to avoid to implement a new forest or to avoid to use the VPN connection for all Active Directory workloads. In this topic, we will see how to extend the Active Directory to Microsoft Azure.
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Romain Serre
  • Romain Serre
  • March 10, 2016

Manage Nano Servers from Server Management Tools in Microsoft Azure

Server Management Tools has been released last week in the preview build. This tool is available in Microsoft Azure to manage servers from a Web-Based GUI and command line. It is able to manage Windows Server 2016 Technical preview running on servers located On-Premises or in Azure as well.
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Romain Serre
  • Romain Serre
  • February 26, 2016

Deploy Hyper-V VM Switches and vNIC consistency with PowerShell

When a large Hyper-V infrastructure is deployed, often Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) is installed. It enables to deploy logical switches which are mainly VM Switches and virtual network adapters for Live-Migration, Backup, heartbeat, storage or management purposes. However small or medium business doesn’t necessarily implement VMM because it is expensive or not well-known. Even if you don’t use VMM, you can deploy consistency VM Switches on several Hyper-V by using PowerShell. This topic aims to show you how to deploy VM Switches and virtual network adapters by using PowerShell. In this way you will be able to make a standard script to configure your Hyper-V hosts.
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Romain Serre
  • Romain Serre
  • February 17, 2016

Automate the Hyper-V Virtual Machine deployment with PowerShell

For large Hyper-V infrastructure, IT people use often Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) to automate tasks as VM deployment. VMM provides profiles (hardware, operating system and application) and then we use these profiles to build a VM Template. Most of the time, a VM Template contains a VM hardware configuration and the OS configuration (join the domain, product key and so on). Then VMs are deployed from templates which decrease the time to deploy a working VM.
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