Veeam - Failed to create persistent connection to ADMIN$

I have been adding new Hyper-V hosts into Veeam recently, where the hosts for some reason have been left on a WORKGROUP.  This reuqires us to use a local administrator account, and quite often throws an error saying it "Failed to create persistent connection to ADMIN$".

This is luckily a very easy fix and can be sorted out within a couple of minutes by adding a registry DWOROD.

Navigate to the following:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System

Create a DWORD value called LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy and assign it a value of 1.

Once you've done this, you can add the Hyper-V host to Veeam and it will work perfectly!

Deleting Data on Deduped Volume Doesn't Clear Up Space

I have recently cleared up some data on a drive volume which was deduped via Server 2012 R2.  The dedupe functionality was working extremely well, and I was getting 80% dedupe on a 3.5TB volume, so no complaints there, however when it came time to archive off some data and then delete it, I noticed that the data wasn't actually freeing up. 

This little issue will only occur when you've got Dedupe enabled via the Server OS.  Luckily, there's an easy way to get around this, with a quick PowerShell command.

The solution is to enable something called Garbage Collection.  This is actually a scheduled job that is designed to reclaiming any unused chunks of data that are no longer being referenced by files that have been recently modified or deleted.  WHilst it may run on a scheduled basis, we need to force it to run here, to speed up that process.

Open up PowerShell and type in the following command:

Start-DedupJob D: -Type GarbageCollection -Verbose

The drive letter in bold is whatever your volume is which you'd like to run this on.  Once you've done this, the server will kick into action and will start cleaning up the volume.  You can monitor it's progress by using the following command:

Get-DedupJob

Error apply Hard Drive changes | Failed to add device 'Synthetic Disk Drive' | Hyper-V

So today I was adding a new disk to a clustered virtual machine running in a Hyper-V environment.
When I clicked 'apply' to save the changes I'd made, I received the following error message:

The device was being saved from one of the Virtual Machine Hosts, to a SAN where all the HDDs were located.

Luckily, this was a nice and easy fix.  When you're going into the drive settings, check on the top-left corner where it shows you the iSCSI Controller / IDE Controller.

Simply change this to one of the other settings, and click 'apply', to see whether it will let you save it.  In my case, it was set to IDE Controller 0, and I needed to change it to SCSI Controller.

Once you've changed this, you should be good to go!

Configure SMTP Relay from On-Prem to Office 365

The following steps will guide you through creating a SMTP relay on a server which will allow you to use the Scan to Email functionality on printers/copiers etc, relaying through Office 365.

This is probably the easiest way to get devices emailing out once you've migrated to Office 365.

1. Find a server that you're going to use as the SMTP Relay, go to Server Manager and then Add Roles and Features

2. From Server Manager, click on Tools, then IIS 6.
If you haven't installed this yet, please do so

3. Expand the serer name, right click on SMTP Virtual Server #1 and click on Properties

4. Click Access tab, then Relay.  Then select either specific IPs or select "All except the list below".

5. Click the Delivery tab, then click Outbound Security, tick Basic Authentication, then enter a username and password of an Office 365 mailbox.  This is used for authentication with your Office 365 tenant.

6. Make sure TLS Encryption has been ticked

7. Click Delivery, then Advanced, then enter smtp.office365.com as the Smart Host address.

That is all you need to do to get the SMTP Relay up and running.  To test this is rather easy as well, and it's highly recommended that you test it before configuring devices to send through this relay service.  

Test Relay Service

1. Create a new Notepad document with the following contents

FROM: scantoemail@domain.com (same as the mailbox you're authenticating with)

TO: adam@mydomain.com (email you're sending the test to)

SUBJECT: Test email

Save this as Email.txt.  Copy this .txt file to C:\inetpub\mailroot\Pickup.  It should immediately disappear as it's picked up and sent through the relay.  

If this arrives in your mailbox, then it's all up and running.  Just make sure that when you're configuring printers etc, the send 'from' address needs to be the same address that you're authenticating with on the SMTP Relay server.  If the emails don't match up, it will error out and won't send.  You can setup the devices to send anonymously as well, and the authentication is done on the SMTP Relay server side. 

Poor Network Performance | Network Shares (Server 2012 R2)

I was recently doing some work for a client where they had noticed that the network performance from their workstations to the File Server was rather poor.  When transferring data to the File Servers (and any other shares on the Virtual Host), it was very slow.

All the VMs were either Server 2016 or 2012 R2, and it was running on a Virtual Host which was Server 2012 R2.  The Server was a Lenovo x3650 m5.  All the NICs were Broadcom and the drivers were fully up to date.

After looking into the issue, I found that some of the settings on the Network Adapters needed to be changed/updated (on the Virtual Host itself) to allow for faster transfer speeds.  To do this, I needed to open up each Network Adapter, then click on Configure, then the Advanced tab.  Once I did this, I had to set the following options to Disabled:

• TCP/UDP Checksum Offload (IPv4)
• TCP/UDP Checksum Offload (IPv6)
• Large Send Offload V2 (IPv4)
• Large Send Offload V2 (IPv6)
• Virtual Machine Queues

Just remember that when performing these changes, it will drop the network connectivity to the adapter for about 5 seconds.  If you're making this change on a live host, it will potentially disrupt network traffic to the VMs and the Host.  If you have a NIC Team in place, do this to one Adapter, then wait for it to come back online before doing it to the next one to make sure that network connectivity to the host itself remains active. 

After doing this to the NICs in my NIC Team, I tested the network connectivity and it was considerably faster.

If you need IT Support in Perth, contact Winthrop Australia today.