Yesterday Microsoft announced some Hyper-V features from Windows 8. The first was that Hyper-V “3.0” will support “more than” 16 vCPUs per VM.

Microsoft is stepping in with a new feature called Hyper-V Replica. This will give us the ability to replicate VMs asynchronously. This means it will work over longer distances, with lower capacity lines, higher latency, and will be cheaper. It also means that there is a slight delay in replication of VM data.

Hyper-V Replica will be a built-in feature with no extra charges!

Citrix continues to gain momentum as the market leader in cloud infrastructure and today Citrix announced about acquisition of Cloud.com.

The Cloud.com product line, known as CloudStack™, helps providers realize the vision of cloud computing by making it easy to deploy and manage simple, cost-effective “infrastructure-as-a-service” clouds that are massively scalable, secure and open by design. This acquisition brings an immensely powerful, hypervisor-agnostic solution to the Citrix cloud portfolio.

Public cloud providers are seeking to build clouds with maximum flexibility, security, and scalability that are open and cost-efficient. Citrix is answering the call by delivering the fastest path to a next-generation, “infrastructure-as-a-service” cloud platform. In addition to the new CloudStack product line, the Xen virtualization platform powers many of the world’s largest public clouds, while the Citrix NetScaler platform delivers a fast, secure, reliable cloud experience for an estimated 75% of all internet users each day.

Please visit www.citrix.com/cloudfaq to learn more.

The Virtual Machine Manager Self-Service Portal 2.0 SP1 (VMMSSP) is a fully supported, partner-extensible solution that customers can use to pool, allocate, and manage their computing, network, and storage resources to deliver the foundation for a private cloud platform in their datacenter. Download here.

netcfg.exe
Netcfg can be used to enumerate and show adapters, networking services and protocols. Installation and removal of the same components can also be done with netcfg.

When run in a command prompt just running netcfg won’t show you anything, but to get the syntax you’ll need the netcfg /?.

netcfg [-v] [-e] [-winpe] [-l ] -c

-i
-winpe installs TCP/IP, NetBIOS and Microsoft Client for Windows preinstallation envrionment
-l provides the location of INF
-c provides the class of the component to be installed (p == Protocol, s == Service, c == Client)
-i provides the component ID

The arguments must be passed in the order shown.

Examples:
netcfg -l c:\oemdir\foo.inf -c p -i foo
…installs protocol ‘foo’ using c:\\oemdir\\foo.inf

netcfg -c s -i MS_Server
…installs service ‘MS_Server’

OR

netcfg [-v] -winpe
Examples:
netcfg -v -winpe
…Installs TCP/IP, NetBIOS and Microsoft Client for Windows preinstallation environment

OR

netcfg [-v] -q
Example:
netcfg -q MS_IPX
…displays if component ‘MS_IPX’ is installed

OR

netcfg [-v] [-e] -u
Example:
netcfg -u MS_IPX
…uninstalls component ‘MS_IPX’

OR

netcfg [-v] -s
where,
-s\tprovides the type of components to show
\ta == adapters, n == net components
Examples:
netcfg -s n
…shows all installed net components

OR

netcfg [-v] -b
Examples:
netcfg -b ms_tcpip
…shows binding paths containing ‘MS_TCPIP’

General Notes:\n”
-v Run in verbose (detailed) mode
-e Use servicing environment variables during install and uninstall
-? Displays this help information

See the pictures for listing adapters and protocols.

hvremote.wsf
Hvremote lets you configure remote administration of Hyper-V hosts either it be the server or the client that’s not in a domain and so on. On the download page for hvremote they have an excellent 10-second guide. More details:

nvspbind
Nvpsbind lets you enable or disable network protocol bindings on adapters by using the command line. In Server Core or Hyper-V Server this isn’t possible otherwise since the control panel applet isn’t available (that’ll be the ncpl.cpl). Check this out for more information!

nvspcrub.js
And if you use the above utility a little too much, or just happen to remove the Hyper-V role from a Core-box you might need this script to rescue you. It’ll reset the network configuration and remove the Hyper-V networking components. Read more and download!

As many of you know, I do a lot of IT projects. Here, at CuruIT.com I’m publishing lot of posts about many deferent IT areas, like Active Directory, System Deployments, SCCM, Scripting, Exchange, Scripts and Tips.

Last week I launched a brand new blog dedicated to Microsoft “Unified Communications” and related technologies like Exchange and Lync.  It called: CURU.ca.

At CURU.ca I’m going to publish news, articles, tips and tips mostly about Exchange and Lync. 

So if you are planning, piloting or deploying Exchange or Lync, please visit to http://www.curu.ca, have a look around. Think you are an Exchange or/and Lync expert already? Great! please join Curu.ca and ask to become news-poster. Contact me admin at curu.ca.

Oh and promote this new www.curu.ca endeavor by spreading the word!

With Exchange 2010 Service Pack 1, you may find that performing a search via Outlook Web App (OWA) results in an error message, “The action couldn’t be completed. Try again later.” Additionally, Outlook clients operating in Online Mode can no longer search for attachments or embedded emails.

When this issue occurs, you will see the following events in the application log:

Log Name: Application
Source: MSExchangeIS Mailbox Store
Event ID: 9877
Task Category: Content Indexing
Level: Error
Keywords: Classic
Description:
Content Indexing function 'CISearch::EcGetRowsetAndAccessor' received an unusual and unexpected error code from MSSearch.Mailbox Database: Mailbox Database 1 Error Code: 0x80043629

Log Name: Application
Source: MSExchangeIS Mailbox Store
Event ID: 9842
Task Category: Content Indexing
Level: Error
Keywords: Classic
Description:
Function CISearch::EcGetRowsetAndAccessor detected that content indexing was disabled for database '' because of error '0x80041820' from MSSearch.