In 2006 Windows Administrators got their first glimpse into what the world of PowerShell scripting might look like when PowerShell, which was then known as Monad was released under beta conditions to the world. 10 years later we are now into our 5th iteration of the scripting language and have seen a thriving ecosystem form around the Verb-Noun style of automation. PowerShell is a powerful tool and can be an amazing time-saver to for any Windows administrator to know. That said, as with any scripting/programming languages getting started can be a little daunting, especially if you have had no scripting experience to fall back on. Below we will take a look at 5 tips that can save you both time and energy when writing your PowerShell scripts.

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.

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.

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.

Warning: This article is written with information related to Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 4. Storage Replica is a new feature introduced in Windows Server 2016 that enables storage-agnostic, block-level, synchronous replication between servers for disaster recovery, as well as stretching of a failover cluster for high availability. Synchronous replication enables mirroring of data in physical sites with crash-consistent volumes ensuring zero data loss at the file system level. Asynchronous replication allows site extension beyond metropolitan ranges with the possibility of data loss.

Microsoft released the last version of the Nano Server, Technical Preview 4. They released the TP4 of System Center too. with this last version, SCOM has the ability to monitor a Nano Server.

In this article, I will explain to you how to change the subnet of a Virtual Machine in Azure. Following is the official documentation on the Microsoft Website this documentation.