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

Monitoring Custom Event Log using SCOM 2007 R2

I am going to configure SCOM to send email alerts whenever an event gets logged in a custom log "Applications and Services Logs"

From the Operations Console go to Authoring tab -> Rules (under Management Pack Objects)

Configure a highly available virtual machine on a Hyper-V cluster

To make a virtual machine highly available on a hyper-v cluster:

1. Create the machine on server as you normally do from Hyper-V Role in the Server Manager and store in the Cluster Shared Volume
2. If the machine requires network access, make you sure the virtual network you attach it exists with the same name on all Hyper-V nodes
3. From the Server Manager -> Features -> Failover Cluster Manager expand the cluster then from "Services and applications" click "Configure A Service or Application..." on  the Actions pane and follow the wizard as below