• Part 1 – from installing the feature to creating the Windows Server Failover Cluster
• Part 2 – retrieving and changing cluster object properties and adding clustered disks
• Part 3 – managing permissions, changing parameter values, moving clustered resources and dependencies
• Part 4 – common cluster troubleshooting tasks

Enjoy!

MrDenny, thanks for the wonderful opportunity to be a part of People Talking Tech.

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Get-VM | Export-VM -Path "F:VirtualMachines"

That command exports all of the Hyper-V virtual machines from my old laptop and copy them to the external hard drive. After plugging in the external hard drive to the new laptop, I copied the entire folder to the D: drive. Once the copy process was completed, I imported all of the virtual machines into Hyper-V.

PS D:VirtualMachines> Get-ChildItem -recurse *.xml | Import-VM

Pretty slick especially when you’re dealing with several Hyper-V 3.0 virtual machines that you need to copy from one machine to another. And, as always, the simplicity of a one-liner command is what I use to convince IT administrators to start playing around with Windows PowerShell. Exporting and importing my Hyper-V virtual machines only took less than 20 minutes.

This is something that I needed to deal with when one of my customers wanted me to fix a process that included running a backup and restoring it on another server as well as truncating the tables.  They simply needed to clone their database structure for testing purposes. I highlighted the fact that the backup/restore/table truncate process is utilizing a lot of unnecessary resources – network, disk and CPU – when all they needed was the database structure. That’s where I recommended using database creation scripts. It’s lightweight and does not utilize unnecessary resources. While I’m a big fan of process automation, I emphasize the need for proper definition of the process as well as making the process as simple as I possibly can. This PowerShell script is just one of the steps included in that process.

$sourcePath="C:temp" #Variable to contain location of SQL scripts

$s=new-object ('Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Smo.Server') "LOCALHOST"

#Assign object to the database selected
$dbs=$s.Databases

#Script database creation - adding GO statement
$dbs["$database"].Script() +"`r`nGO`r`nUSE [$database]`r`nGO`r`n" | Out-File $sourcePath$database.sql -append

#Generate script for all tables, excluding system tables
foreach ($tablesin$dbs["$database"].Tables | where {$_.IsSystemObject -eq$false})
{
$tables.Script() +"`r`nGO`r`n" | Out-File$sourcePath$database.sql -append

#Generate script for all indexes in the specified table
foreach($indexin$tables.Indexes)
{
$index.Script() +"`r`nGO`r`n" | Out-File$sourcePath$database.sql -append
}

#Generate script for all triggers in the specified table
foreach($triggerin$tables.Triggers)
{
$trigger.Script() +"`r`nGO`r`n" | Out-File$sourcePath$database.sql -append
}

#Generate Default Constraints on columns that have them
#Iterate thru all the columns in the table
foreach($columnin$tables.Columns)
{
#Iterate thru all the default constraints in the columns
foreach($defaultin$column.DefaultConstraint)
{
#If there are default constraints, script out the ADD CONSTRAINT command
if ($default-ne$null)
{
$default.Script() +"`r`nGO`r`n" | Out-File$sourcePath$database.sql -append
}
}
}

}

You can literally dig deeper on the different properties of the Table class to generate the corresponding script for the objects that you wish to create. Happy scripting!

Here’s an article I wrote on how to use Windows PowerShell to connect to SQL Server via mixed mode authentication

I wrote a PowerShell command to query the current state of the VMs running on Hyper-V

Get-WMIObject -class "MSVM_ComputerSystem"-namespace "rootvirtualization"-computername "."

This will actually display a bunch of information about the VMs running on Hyper-V but what we’re really concerned about is the name of the VM and it’s currently running state. These two properties are associated with the ElementName and EnabledState attributes of the MSVM_ComputerSystem class. All we need to do with the command above is to pipe the results to a Select-Object cmdlet, specifying only these two properties, as follows

Get-WMIObject -class "MSVM_ComputerSystem"-namespace "rootvirtualization"-computername "." | Select-Object ElementName, EnabledState

While the EnabledState property will give you a bunch of numbers, I’m only concerned with those values equal to 2, which means that the VM is running. But, then, you might not remember what the value 2 means. So might as well write an entire script that checks for the value of the EnabledState property. I’ve used the GWMI alias to call the Get-WMIObject cmdlet

$VMs = gwmi -class "MSVM_ComputerSystem"-namespace "rootvirtualization"-computername "."
foreach ($VM IN $VMs)
{
switch ($VM.EnabledState)
{
2{$state="Running" }
3{$state="Stopped" }
32768{$state="Paused" }
32769{$state="Suspended" }
32770 {$state="Starting" }
32771{$state="Taking Snapshot" }
32773{$state="Saving" }
32774{$state="Stopping" }
}
write-host $VM.ElementName `,` $state
}

On a side note, make sure you are running as Administrator when working with this script as you will only see the VMs that your currently logged in profile has permission to access. Running as Administrator will show you all of the VMs configured on your Hyper-V server

# define constants
$domainstr = ",dc=domainName,dc=local"
$domainnb = "domainName" # domain netbios name
$domain = "domainName.local"

$ADs_UF_NORMAL_ACCOUNT = 512 # Disables account and sets password required.

# Remember to enable the account before logging in

# Prompt user to enter the default passsword for the users
$defaultPassword = Read-Host "Please enter default Password:" -asSecureString

# Read the list of users from the CSV file
# Include other user properties in the CSV file as necessary

Import-csv users.txt | foreach
{
# Create user name based on FirstName and LastName column in the CSV file
$strUser = $_.firstName + " " + $_.lastName

#Form the LDAP string based on the OU column from the CSV file
$strLDAP = "LDAP://OU=" + $_.OU + ",OU=domainName Domain Users" + $domainstr

$target = [ADSI] $strLDAP
$newUser = $target.create("User", "cn=" + $strUser)
$newUser.SetInfo()

#Define a naming convention for the login based on your corporate policy
#This one uses the first letter of the firstname and the lastname
$userID = $_.firstName[0]+$_.lastName

#Define the other user attributes based on the columns defined in the CSV file
$newUser.sAMAccountName = $userID.ToString()
$newUser.givenName = $_.firstName
$newUser.sn = $_.lastName
$newUser.displayName = $_.firstName + " " + $_.lastName
$newUser.userPrincipalName = $_.firstName[0]+$_.lastName + "@" + $domain
$newUser.mail = $_.Email
$newUser.physicalDeliveryOfficeName = $_.Location
$newUser.title = $_.Designation
$newUser.description = $_.Designation
$newUser.SetInfo()

$newUser.SetPassword($defaultPassword.ToString())

#Normal user that requires password & is disabled
$newUser.userAccountControl = $ADs_UF_NORMAL_ACCOUNT

Write-Host "Created Account for: " $newUser.Displayname

}

One of the challenges I have when I was starting out as a SQL Server DBA was to check for the last backup date for a database. One way to do this is to find out which tables in the MSDB database contain the records of the backup history. What’s really challenging here is the fact that you would have to look at the tables and their corresponding relationships which, apparently, MSDB doesn’t have. You simply have to rely on what SQL Server Books Online has to say. Plus, the MSDB database will only contain records for databases with backups. What about those without?

For SQL Server 2005, the script below displays the last backup date of all the databases on your SQL Server instance. This script is from the MSDN Code Gallery

SELECT
T1.Name AS DatabaseName,
COALESCE(CONVERT(VARCHAR(12), MAX(T2.backup_finish_date), 101),'Not Yet Taken') AS LastBackUpTaken
FROM sys.sysdatabases T1 LEFT OUTER JOIN msdb.dbo.backupset T2
ON T2.database_name = T1.name
GROUP BY T1.Name
ORDER BY T1.Name

You can simply replace the sys.sysdatabases table with master.dbo.sysdatabases for SQL Server 2000

Below is the equivalent script using Windows PowerShell.

$instance="Your_SQL_Server_Instance_Name"
[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName('Microsoft.SqlServer.SMO')| out-null

# Create an SMO connection to the instance
$s = new-object ('Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Smo.Server') $instance

$dbs = $s.Databases
$dbs | select Name,LastBackupDate, LastLogBackupDate | format-table -autosize

The only thing to note here are the last two lines – the one that creates an instance of the database object and the one that displays and formats a few of the database object properties. The first few lines will be the same for just about any PowerShell script that will access SQL Server using SMO