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Unattended Install of VMWare Workstation 11

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One of the apps a lot of places I consult for use is VMware Workstation 11. They use it to test out deployments, apps, that sort of thing. I use both VMware Workstation and Hyper-V running on Windows 8.1. Both have benefits and draw backs, but that’s not what this article is about.

Installing it unattended so you can script the install is rather tough. The instructions on the VMWare site are plain wrong and don’t work as advertised. I am not even sure why the stuff is there it’s so bad. Luckily, I was able to find an install guide online and thought I’d pass it along.

If you download the install you will get file named along with the version in the name.

Run that file with the following switches. For example ->

Vmwareworkstation-x.y,z.exe /s /nsr /v ADDLOCAL=ALL DISABLE_AUTORUN=0 EULAS_AGREED=1 DESKTOP_SHORTCUT=1 QUICKLAUNCH_SHORTCUT=0 AUTOSOFTWAREUPDATE=0 DATACOLLECTION=0 SERIALNUMBER=”abcde-fghij-klmno-pqrst-uvwxy” REBOOT=ReallySuppress /qn /LiV C:\temp\Install_VMwareWorkstation_11.0.0.log

You can add the file to your applications in Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) and use the above line with a proper serial number to deploy it automatically.

The original article I found is located at IT Ninja

Ensuring your Azure Website is Fast to Load

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So I’ve been playing a bit with WordPress on Microsoft Azure. One of the things I quickly noticed was that the site was slow to load when I first accessed it. A wait time of 10 – 15 seconds was not uncommon. For a production website, that’s unacceptable. I figured there had to be a way to speed this up, no one would use the Azure service if it is that slow.

The fix is an easy one provided you are not using the free or shared tier. (I am using Standard Tier) Go to the configuration tab and part way down the screen there is a toggle for Always On. Basically, if this is set to Off, the site goes to sleep to save system resources when it hasn’t been accessed for a while. Great idea for a test site, not so good for a live site. So just change the Always On setting to On and you are finished.

Screenshot-Microsoft-Azure

Provisioning Users in Office 365 Who are Not Provisioned

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One of things when setting up Office 365 is to provision new accounts with licenses. There is a quick and easy way in Office 365 to get a list of these users and then provision these users. Login to your Office 365 account via PowerShell

Get-MSOLUser -Domain "contoso.com" -UnlicensedUsersOnly -All | Select UserPrincipalName | Export-Csv -Path 
"c:\temp\filename.csv"

Once you have a file full of your unlicensed users you can then set each of the users with an Office 365 License. Using the same filename we created above we can run the following command which will basically loop for each user in the file and set the license.
Import-Csv -Path “c:\temp\filename.csv” |%{Set-MsolUserLicense -userPrincipalName $_.UserPrincipalName -AddLicenses “contso:ENTERPRISEPACK”}

How did I get the license to use? Easy, Just run  Get-MsolAccountSku and it will list off your licenses. For a full page of information check the TechNet blog for more of these.  I am also sure there is a way you can use a variable to pass the values on without creating a file, but I do like having the file for a sanity check if something goes wrong.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/treycarlee/archive/2013/11/01/list-of-powershell-licensing-sku-s-for-office-365.aspx