I received an inquiry from one of my mid-size (100-200 users) customers today. They’ve been planning on implementing a new online service which requires the latest Java version.

The clients have a large quantity of outdated versions of Java, which needed to be uninstalled before we deployed the newest version.
They are currently running Windows 7 and Windows 8, so somewhat modern operative systems.

My customer has bought a Hewlett-Packard server with a Windows Server 2012 ROK (Reseller Option Kit) license.
However this customer had some issues with the installation of the license on the Hyper-V guest server. Since the Windows server does not recognize the ‘hardware’ as a Proliant server, licensing will not succeed.

However there is a simple solution…

Do you ever get that sinking feeling, when you’ve forgotten the root password to your test lab?  Again?

I hate it too!  So I decided to figure out a way around it, using a work around…

I have been struggling a bit with adding .NET Framework 3.5 on a few systems (and reference image for MDT). The posts on MSDN and TechNet are good, but not always crystal clear.

Here is how I solved the issues we were experiencing…

I finally I got some time to play with the new Azure Active Directory Sync tool and its configuration.

The installation was very straight forward. The step-by-step instruction are provided on MSDN. The administration tools and scripts are located in difference places compared to DirSync which was little confusing in the beginning.