I had the following issue when upgrading vCenter from 4.0 to 4.1. Whilst the database upgrade and install appeared to complete successfully, the vCenter service would not start once the install was complete. In the vpxd.log located at C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\VMware\VirtualCenter\logs, you see errors similar to: [2010-07-27 13:42:26.837 03204 error ‘App’] [VpxdMain] Failed to initialize: Not initialized: boolean storageIORMSupported [2010-07-27 13:42:26.837 03204 error ‘App’] Failed to intialize VMware VirtualCenter.

WMI in Windows Server is a treasure trove of information and well worth investigating, particularly when needing to run reports against many servers. In addition it is possible for third-parties to make use of WMI and store their own information in there. This is true of a recent requirement I had to monitor Citrix Licensing. Whilst it’s obviously critical to purchase enough licenses for Citrix that you need, its also important to not have too many lying around not in use, since you’ll be wasting money.

Richard Siddaway has posted details of January’s UK PowerShell User Group Event. Microsoft Scripting Guy Ed Wilson will be joining us for a live meeting about PowerShell Best Practises. “Learn Windows PowerShell best practices as they apply to each stage of the script development lifecycle. See the differences between working interactively from the Windows PowerShell prompt, writing an inline script, adding basic function, advanced functions and finally the implementation of Windows PowerShell Modules.

Both Alan and I have been particularly busy over the last few months, in particular with the upcoming PowerCLI book. So we have had a bigger than expected gap between episodes of the Get-Scripting Podcast , but you’ll be pleased to know that we are back with one of our best episodes to date. We were fortunate enough to get to spend some time talking with Jeffrey Snover , the inventor of PowerShell, for this episode.

Whilst working with Microsoft Support on a performance case we needed to supply them with some Perfmon logs. To do so required creating a User Defined Data Collector Set containing a number of counters. You can obviously do this through the GUI, which is fine for one server, but we needed the logs from around 200 servers. So we created a Data Collector Set on one server and then saved it out to a template which stores the data in an XML file.

When working with Exchange 2010 it is possible to remotely connect with PowerShell to an Exchange 2010 server without having the Exchange Management tools installed on your local workstation. This is a feature known as implicit remoting. The technique to connect is very straightforward, but to make it not necessary to have to remember the commands I wrapped them up into a function Connect-ExchangeServer which I then stored in my PowerShell profile.

Whilst at VMworld Europe 2010 I attended a session on virtualising Exchange 2010. This was one of the most useful sessions I went to and whilst it confirmed a number of issues I had read about in the Best Practices Guide there was one tip I picked up from the session that was not in the guide and I thought would be useful to share. When deploying Exchange 2010 in a Database Availability Group (DAG) on vSphere the Database and Log file disks are only currently supported on RDM disks not VMFS.

Outlook 2003 is listed as a supported client for Exchange 2010 with the following caveats: Clients running Outlook 2003 don’t use RPC encryption, which RPC Client Access requires by default. You will either need to turn off the RPC encryption requirement or configure Outlook 2003 to use RPC encryption. However, Outlook 2007 and later versions are automatically compatible with the change to RPC Client Access because they support RPC encryption by default.

I previously blogged about Extending the System Disk in Windows Server 2008 where as a new feature over Windows Server 2003 it is possible to extend the system volume online and without needing to resort to third party tools which often required at least a reboot. I’ve now used this feature many times, but yesterday I had an issue when extending the volume of a Windows Server 2008 system drive where it returned the horrible looking error below ‘The parameter is incorrect’.

The book ‘PowerShell in Practice’ by Richard Siddaway was published back in June 2010 and I was fortunate enough to have been involved as a tech reviewer for the book during the writing phase. This book is a great resource and is aimed at the Windows Systems Administrator, particularly one who covers a wide variety of areas and perhaps doesn’t necessarily specialise in only one area, say Active Directory or Exchange.