Today’s UK VMware User Group was a great community content event. Of course there was a sponsor presentation (Veeam) without whom these type of events can’t be put on, but there were also a lot of contributions from people in the group. We had: Veeam talking about their reporting and backup products. Mike Laverick from RTFM education talking about Site Recovery Manager and not the VMware view of it, rather real world struggles - warts and all as he put it.

Whilst monitoring some newly provisioned Citrix servers running on VMware hosts today, I soon became very bored with manually checking how many sessions were on each Citrix VM as the load on each one increased, whilst trying to get it to the optimum level. I knew it was possible to use Powershell to connect with Citrix servers, but had never really looked into it before. Not surprisingly it turned out to be very straightforward.

This is the second meeting of the newly formed UK Active Directory User Group: The second [ADUG] UK Active Directory User Group meeting will be on the evening of the 11th March at Microsoft’s London (Victoria) Offices. The meeting will co-hosted with the Windows Server User Group. The draft agenda is: 18:00 for 18:25 Arrival and registration 18:25-18:30 Welcome and introductions 18:30-19:45 James O’Neill takes a quick tour through the new features in Windows Server 2008 R2 (just to whet your appetite).

These are great events if you are able to get to them (unfortunately no webcast for this one): The Steering Committee are pleased to announce the next UK London VMware User Group meeting, now kindly sponsored by Veeam Software, to be held on Tuesday 10th March 2009. We hope to see you at the meeting, and afterwards for a drink or two. Our meeting will be held at the Thames Suite, London Chamber of Commerce and Industry, 33 Queen Street, London EC4R 1AP, +44 (0)20 7248 4444.

Don’t forget 7pm GMT on Thursday February 26th sees Rolf Masuch presenting a Live Meeting to the UK PowerShell User group. Rolf runs the German PowerShell User Group. Session abstract: PowerShell as Active Directory Login Script Loginscript, why? The Script Draft in the form editor Start with PowerGUI Editor The script skeleton The script details Get in running Output of information Formatting of the information Putting the script on the server The path on the domain controller Setting the users login script Running .

As promised to those who attended the MMMUG on Wednesday night my slides from that evening are available on my SkyDrive. Enjoy.

At last week’s UK Powershell Usergroup Jonathan Noble was showing us some Powershell examples and at one point demonstrated something similar to the below. Essentially you create an empty array, but then somewhat surprisingly (well to me anyway) you can select some elements even though they don’t exist! You are then able to add to the array using the names you have selected. $MYInfo = "" | select-Object Name, CPUUsage,Owner, ProcessID $MYInfo.

This started (for me anyway) when my wife told people I was away at Geek Week, i.e. Teched EMEA and I had for a long time described my (or lack of as others might say) own fashion style as Geek Chic. Anyway after the legends of the IT Crowd used my Geek Chic phrase (OK, I’m claiming it) multiple times during one of their recent shows I decided to try and find some more and here’s the results.

Coming up in February are two events for the UK Powershell User Group. Following the Technet Event Managing Windows Servers with Powershell V2 on Feb 10th at Microsoft London there will be a Powershell UserGroup meeting. My good friend Jonathan Noble will be travelling down all the way from the North of England to present for us about using Powershell to automate tasks in the large University environment he works in - well worth turning up for.

Doing a lot of investigation into password policies available in Windows Server 2003 and 2008 at the minute, plus some of the third-party solutions available around this area. One of the reasons I’ve never myself recommend using the ‘Complexity On’ feature in Windows Server is the sheer difficulty in trying to explain to users that you need to use characters from at least three of the following four groups: Uppercase Lowercase Digits Special Characters They typically switch off as soon as you get to the …at least three….