Virtualization Manager 7 has just been released – Analyze the Past, Fix the Present, Prepare for the Future
It’s pretty epic with some great new features, but I’m going to concentrate on the deployment of the virtual appliance (vApp) itself.
PowerShell
How I Build an Orion Server
UPDATE: There’s an updated version of this post now available for scripters.
I’ve posted several times about how I personally build my SolarWinds Orion Servers. For this post, I’ll just discuss how I setup a Main Polling Engine on a Windows 2012 R2 Server.
Converting Linux VHD’s to VHDx
Virtual Hard Drives are the nuts and bolts of Virtualized Servers. This includes Linux Servers, but converting the hard drives provided some interesting findings.
After reading a bunch of the Microsoft documents about running Hyper-V for performance, there’s a big push to move all machines From Generation 1 to Generation 2 and Hard Drives to the VHDX Format.
Building My Orion Lab
So, I normally need to build a Lab for my SolarWinds Orion. If I’m doing this on my own machine and don’t have the luxury of a Windows Deployment Server (WDS), and I’ve built a custom hard drive for my Windows Servers, then I use a PowerShell script to do this work for me. (Seeing a pattern here?)
Creating a Windows Server Hard Drive “Template” for Hyper-V
This may not be the “official” way to create a template for Hyper-V according to Microsoft, but if you are running in an environment without SCCM or WDS (or on your personal machine), I’ve found that this process works very well.
This is fairly simple list of tasks, but it’s very long. Thankfully, you’ll only need to do this once and then you can re-use the image as many times as you like. I update mine once a quarter (to get the newest updates).
Tweak where it’s appropriate for your build.
Configure IIS Logging
I always move my IIS logs to a different drive, and I almost always include all fields. This is something that annoys me since I have to do it over and over again. Just like everything that I have to do over and over again, I wrote a script to do it for me. The … Read more
Moving SolarWinds Logs to a new Drive
I built a script which facilitates changing the default logging location for most SolarWinds programs in a SolarWinds Orion installation. Not every log can be moved, but this script does change the majority of the log locations and also takes a backup of the original file beforehand. The important part is the RegEx that is used … Read more
Removing Default Web Site & Application Pool
I’m always sick and tired of having to remove the IIS Default Web Site and DefaultAppPool after I’ve installed the Web Roles in Windows Server 2012 R2. So, I created a short script that will remove them. DISCLAIMER: These materials are provided “AS IS” without any express or implied warranty of any kind.
Required Windows Features with SolarWinds Orion
My presentation is completely built around optimizing your SolarWinds Orion installation. In that presentation, I make reference to several scripts that I use to help me in provisioning Orion Servers. One such script is used to install the necessary Windows Features for each role. It uses XML files as the source for which features are needed … Read more