How to Start/Stop/Restart Tools in CentOS

/etc/vmware-tools/services.sh restart

Lync helpful PowerShell commands

command to see your routing group and primary FE server - get-csuserpoolinfo 

checks if pool is ready for upgrade - get-cspoolupgradereadinessstate

This command should put the FE server in a graceful shutdown of Lync for a maintenance windows with minimal impacting end users - stop-cswindowsservice -graceful

checks the pool pairing status - Get-CsBackupServiceStatus 

Status of database replication state

• Get-CsDatabaseMirrorState -PoolFqdn -DatabaseType User
• Get-CsDatabaseMirrorState -PoolFqdn  -DatabaseType CentralMgmt

Start manual process of database fail-over to mirror

• Invoke-CsDatabaseFailover -PoolFqdn  -DatabaseType User -NewPrincipal mirror -Verbose
• Invoke-CsDatabaseFailover -PoolFqdn  -DatabaseType CentralMgmt -NewPrincipal mirror -Verbose

Start manual process of database fail-over to primary

• Invoke-CsDatabaseFailover -PoolFqdn  -DatabaseType User -NewPrincipal primary -Verbose
• Invoke-CsDatabaseFailover -PoolFqdn  -DatabaseType CentralMgmt -NewPrincipal primary -Verbose

Check fabric state of the pool - Get-cspoolfabricstate

Offline folders sync issues on windows 2008 R2

Setup scenario is that user folders are in a single centralized share and they all access their folder with proper permission on the folders so that only they can have an access to a folder.

Some of the users had intermittent issues of their folders not syncing properly or their files would randomly get locked and they could not save the file without saving as different name.

FIX:
Give root folder that is shared out a special permissions for "Authenticated Users" (or some other group if you wish to limit share access to only certain user group) under advanced options. The permissions required are: "Traverse folder /execute file", "Read attributes" and "read extended attributes"

NOTE:
Permissions above need to be applied only on root folder so make sure "This folder only" is selected while changing permissions.

Changing key in windows server 2012

When installing a new win 2012 OS in case where key is not installed immediately during install wizard you might get into issue where there is not place in GUI (at least that I could find) where you can change to appropriate key in order to activate windows.

Thanks to powershell there is even easier way of doing this:

slmgr -upk (this removes the current Product Key)
slmgr -ipk XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX (this installs the new Product Key)

Once key is installed using first command you can also go to action center in order to use GUI to enter key and activate windows.

IOPS Explained

I found this great article explaining IOPS and correlation to latency read/write % and IO data size.
IOPS Explained Article

How to use esxtop

I found this great article full of benefitial references for using esxtop. Here it is: http://www.yellow-bricks.com/esxtop/

How to download a diagnostic log bundle from an ESX/ESXi host using PowerCLI

Login to desired host using PowerCLI:
Connect-VIServer -Server HostnameOrIPAddress

Download a diagnostic log bundle from host:
Get-VMHost HostNameOrIP | Get-Log -Bundle -DestinationPath c:\Storage\Location\