Setting up a lab

There are so many good reasons to have a lab available. There are very few reasons to not. IT organizations are constantly testing new releases, new configuration, and some widget that needs to be rolled out. We need to evaluate software and solutions that we want to implement in our production environments. With Windows 8+ and the latest versions of Hyper-V there are really no good reasons to not have a lab to use.

With that said, managing the lab in Hyper-V is very easy and to be honest, it is quite fun. If you are a VMWare shop, that is great. Either way there are some simple techniques and best practices that can be super helpful.

This video walks through some thoughts and ideas on how to manage your lab, how to setup the core environment and prepare for testing. We’ll try to follow up with additional content related to evaluating Specops solutions, but first things first…

Enjoy!

Why are my cmdlets not working? Duh!

PS C:> Get-VM

PS C:> 

What? I have multiple VMs running on my system. I use this cmdlet often. What? Why did it suddenly stop working?

So, what to do? Of course my first move is to look at the help system.

PS C:> Get-Help Get-VM -ShowWindow

I really like the 'ShowWindow' parameter. It dumps the complete help file into a separate window where you can filter, zoom, search and more. 

Unfortunately I didn't find anything. I don't get an error in the console. I started using bing. Or Google, whatever you choose. I use bing. Of course there are lots of forum threads and random links. Nothing to do but start reading. 

The 'ah-ha' moment suddenly becomes the 'duh' moment. I saw a thread on the Get-VM cmdlet not working. And a few people were adding very complicated troubleshooting including SC-VMM stuff etc. At the end of the long thread... someone posted "run the console as admin"... DUH! 

I always run my console as admin, but for some reason this time I forgot. And didn't check.

If you have a problem in PS, and it is bizarre/strange... make sure to check how it is running. It is simple, the title bar of the console will tell you if you are running as admin. Make sure to check.

If you are new to PowerShell, simply right-click on the PowerShell Icon in the task bar and choose your option. Simple...