Dwarfsoft [GPA]

So we had some Blade Chassis and implemented some Firmware upgrades. Surely this should not impact the blades themselves, or the OS on which they run? You’ve got to be kidding right. As soon as the Blade Chassis firmware has been upgraded we lost all four Broadcom NICs, and we had four new Broadcom NICs added in their place. This means that any IP Configuration has been lost and so has, in our case, Team configuration. Due to the four original NICs being removed, their Connection Names have also become unusable, because there are hidden devices that are still using those names.

Firstly, how do we remove devices via PowerShell. The Answer can be found on any Windows 7 workstation in the C:\Windows\Diagnostics\System\Device\CL_Utility.ps1. There is a function there called RemoveDevice.

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I’ve been busy working on a project that is implementing a SQL Geo-Cluster. One of the requirements was to modify the NIC bind order such that the order of preference is Production,Heartbeat,…,Microsoft Failover Cluster Virtual Adapter. Most of this can be achieved through the Network Adapter Advanced Configuration window (Start->run->ncpa.cpl->Advanced Menu->Advanced Settings…) but the Microsoft Failover Cluster Virtual Adapter is a Hidden adapter and needs to be handled separately.

The original Suggestion from the Design document is to run “wmic nicconfig get description,settingid”. This list is used to get the SettingId of the NIC where the description is “Microsoft Failover Cluster Virtual Adapter”. The SettingId is then checked and moved in HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\tcpip\Linkage\Bind. The line in the Multi String that equals “\Device\” needs to be moved to the last line.

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