I have been working to deploy the Application Approval Workflow (AAW) ( http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=29687)for SCCM and SCSM using SCORCH. It worked following the instructions for the most part but out of the box it did not populate the requesting user and just put a generic title for the Service Request in. I wanted more. I wanted the affected user and the title to say what application was being requested.

Lately I have been playing with Windows 10 and wanted to manage with SCCM 2012 R2  and SCEP 2012 R2 in my environment.

SCCM 2012 R2 Client

I tried installing it out of the box, but it would fail. Looking at the CCMSetup log. I saw this:

If you are having problems with collections taking a long time to refresh membership, it is very possible that you have incremental updates or collection membership evaluation schedule set of happen frequently on a large number of collections.

Rule of thumb:

History

I needed to create bulk Email Subscription on my SQL Server ReportsServices (SSRS 2012) so I could do multiple subscription to the same report for SCCM 2012 R2 (System Center Configuration Manager) for email recipients in multiple time zones and each requiring a different parameter value. I did not want to do this manually as I had 4 reports that needed these subscriptions with 64 email recipients in 10 time zones and each recipient requiring a specific parameter value. I also did not want this restricted to use by SCCM so this tool can be run for almost any report. This is a reoccurring activity for me so to save some work, I ended up writing a application to make it happen. I am calling it "SSRS Bulk Email Subscription Tool". 

Bacula - Backing up Hyper-V Cluster Virtual Machines (VM)

Backing up in a Cluster is very similar to what we did in Bacula - Backing up Hyper-V Virtual Machines (VM), but the Powershell scripts have to look not just at 1 machine but all nodes on the cluster that have Hyper-V VMs on them.

Set each of your nodes up as discribed in Bacula Client and Windows Cluster Service and put the File Daemon as a Generic service on your Scale-Out File Service Role. Next we will have to put the scripts that are used in place. Thes scripts will go into the Bacula folder on your ClusterStorage disk whic is normally mounted in your "C:\ClusterStorage" folder and would be something like C:\ClusterStorage\Volume1.

What good is a backup solution if you can't backup your Virtual Machines? You can always use Windows Server Backup but then you are using 2 systems and have to have things scheduled just right. Here we will look at getting backups of your VMs within Bacula.

This article builds on what we did in Bacula Windows Age​nt ands just adds a couple of scripts to take Checkpoints (Snapshots) of your VMs then backs them up on incrimental and Full backups.

I run a Windows Cluster on Windows 2012 R2. I have a File Server in the Clustered environment and wanted to make sure I get Cluster's file share backedup. I also run a Scale-out File Server in the cluster and the principle is the same for both scenarios. What I go over will work for backing files in those services. If there are Hyper-V services in the environment some tweeking needs to be done but I will cover that in a different article.

Note on Scale-Out File Server

On Scale-Out File Servers, you will want to add a Client Access Point Resource to the Fail Over Cluster Role since Scale-Out file servers can be accessed by any node, and this will give the backup part of it a dedicated IP that will always be on the owner host

Installing Bacula Windows Client

So we have configured Bacula in Bacula with Tape Autochanger and it working, so Now we need to make it works with Windows Client and Windows Cluster. I actually use this on Windows 8.1 and Windows 2012 R2 and it works. I also am successfully using this to backup Windows 2012 R2 Hyper-V Virtual Machines in a clustered environment, and Windows Clustered File Server. Once you figure out how to do it, it is not that difficult. In this article I Will go over configuring the Windows Client and this should work for Windows 2008, Windows 2008 R2, Windows 7, Windows 2012 and Windows 2012 R2. 

Today I was trying to install the Server for NFS (Network Filing System) role service on my Cluster nodes so I would be able to better work with my Linux systems and the install was failing on all 3 nodes with a very generic error (Thanks Microsoft):

The request to add or remove features on the specified server failed.
Installation of one or more roles, role services or features failed. Error:0x800f0922

Sooo... I got an old Dell PowerVault-132T tape changer with a LTO-2 Drive. Actually I have 2 drives but 1 of them won't spin up so I am waiting on a part to make them both work, so for the purposes of this article I will do it with 1 drive and amend it later when I have the second drive fixed. I built this on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

​This has made for a great series of articles! including: