Deploying a Cloud Witness for Windows Server Failover Clusters is a great quorum option. However, if storage account which is to be used as the Cloud Witness is in a national cloud, the the Create Cluster Quorum Wizard and PowerShell cmdlets may not work. Fortunately the CIM method used by wizard and PowerShell cmdlets allow us to successfully create the Cloud Witness.

There are instances where a computer does not have internet access and therefore cannot use the Install-Module cmdlet to install modules from the PowerShell Gallery. This article will walk through how to manually download a module and install it on an offline computer.

I ran across a scenario where I needed to log off a user from a number of computers without knowing which computers they were logged into. The best way I found to do this programmatically was to use the quser (query user) and logoff commands. Unfortunately, the quser command outputs each record as a string. It would be nice if this was a PowerShell object so each property is easily accessible.

I needed a way to display the health state of the Server Pending Restart Monitor from the Server Pending Restart management pack in a SCOM dashboard. SCOM does not have a native method to display the health state of all instances of a specific monitor, so fortunately Hugh Scott pointed me to PowerShell Grid Widgets as a possible solution. This article discusses how I approached the problem and how I ended up at this PowerShell Grid Widget dashboard solution.

When creating groups in System Center Operations Manager (SCOM), it may be helpful to know what stage of the lifecycle the monitored object is in. SCOM has an Asset Status property is used by System Center Service Manager (SCSM) to manage the status of the object, however this property isn’t visible or usable in the SCOM interface with the exception of creating a group.