Configuring a guest Windows 2008 R2 Cluster on virtual machines with virtual shared storage

This is a lab environment I created of a virtual windows cluster with iSCSI virtual shared disk.
The setup consists of 3 Windows 2008 R2 VMs

1. Active Directory and Storage Server: DC 192.168.1.10
2. Cluster First Node: Node1 192.168.1.11
3. Cluster Second Node: Node2 192.168.1.12

ACL permissions for IIS7 application pools

In W2K8R2/IIS7 application pools run by default under the builtin identitiy ApplicationPoolIdentity.
To grant ACL permissions to web applications running under these pools resolve names like this:

IIS APPPOOL\[APP POOL NAME]

Windows 2008 Sysprep, Newsid

To prepare a Windows 2008 template image for cloning:

• Run c:\Windows\System32\sysprep\sysprep.exe
• Configure the dialog box as in the screenshot below
• Create your image after the machine is shut down. Windows will reconfigure itself on the next boot.

Manually merge Hyper-V Differencing Disks with Parent (Delete Snapshots)

If you have avhd differncing disks and you want to merge all data into a single vhd file but you do not see snapshots to delete in the Hyper-V console, follow these steps:

Shrink a VHD disk using VhdResizer

I have a Hyper-V virtual machine with a disk of size 127GB that I'm going to shrink to 70GB