Hyper-V Disk Resize

One of the cool features with Hyper-V 3 and Windows Server 2012 R2 is the ability to resize virtual hard disks without the need to shutdown the virtual machine, use diskpart and WinPE etc...

 You just have to open up Hyper-V Manager and use the edit wizard on the hard disk that needs more space.

 The more "cool" way to do this is to use powershell of course! You can use the following command on the parent partition (this is the Hyper-V host) to extend the hard disk:

Get-VM "WindowsServer2012" | Get-VMHardDiskDrive -ControllerType SCSI | Resize-VHD -SizeBytes 100GB

 There are some limitations though... You won't be able to use the edit hard disk wizard when the virtual machine has snapshots. This is also supported only on VHDX virtual disks connected to SCSI adapters.

I can't say I haven't resized the virtual hard disk of a snapshot with the above command but you should not do this because you will break the chain. You shouldn't have snapshots anyway!

Great article on MSDN by Ben Armstrong: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2014/01/28/online-vhdx-resize-in-windows-server-2012-r2-windows-8-1.aspx

Popular posts from this blog

Domain Controller Machine Password Reset

Image
On my lab environment, I've configured two Active Directory sites since most enterprises have offices in more that one places. My lab however is not running 24/7 and the domain controllers in the second site are rarely turned on in order to save resources. This leads to issues with the Active Directory replication such as the "The target principal name is incorrect" error when I execute:  repadmin /syncall /AdeP. To remedy the issue, we have to reset the machine password of the domain controller that has been offline. First off, we are going to stop and disable the Kerberos Key Distribution Center (kdc) service on the problematic domain controller, in our case DC4. There may be some tickets in the cache so we should also clear them using klist purge Now it's time to change the machine password of the domain controller using the command netdom resetpwd /s:dc3 /ud:lab\administrator /pd:* Replace the "lab\administrator" with an account on your...
Keep reading

Managing Active Directory User Certificates using PowerShell

I first came across user certificates when I was working with email certificates a few years ago and I have to admit that I had trouble updating the certificates on the objects! Most organizations have a Microsoft Active Directory Certification Authority that issues the certificates used internally. When a certificate is issued to a user, the Microsoft Certificate Service saves the public key in Active Directory. The userCertificate attribute is a multi-valued attribute that contains the DER-encoded X509v3 certificates issued to the user. Although we rarely need to pay attention to this attribute, there are cases where we have to update it. To make things easier, I've written PowerShell functions to Get, Remove, Import and Export the certificates on that field. To get the list of certificates for an object, use the Get-ActiveDirectoryObjectCertificate function: PS C:\> Get-ActiveDirectoryObjectCertificate -UserPrincipalName cpolydorou@lab.local DistinguishedName  ...
Keep reading

Configuring a Certificate on Exchange Receive Connector

Today's article is about configuring Exchange receive connectors with specific certificates. Out of the box, Exchange uses self signed certificates to provide TLS secured mail flow. This will definitely be an issue if you expose the SMTP protocol to client computers since they won't trust the certificate. In this article we are going to configure a certificate that was issued by a third part authority to the Client Frontend receive connector. We'll start with getting the thumbprint of the certificate using the Get-ExchangeCertificate cmdlet: [PS] C:\> Get-ExchangeCertificate Thumbprint                               Subject ----------                               ------- 241B864DC82C664FECBA18B8D54987AAFB65B4C2 CN=*.lab.com, ... D4D210886B34E690191A1F008C78FDD0E7325DD4 CN=Exchange2013A 960171662EB26116...
Keep reading