Tag: Server 2012

Server 2012 R2 Licencing Problem

I’ve seen a problem on a few servers, where they have been fully configured to use a licence server with available CALs, but after a time still report that there are no licence servers available to use. The servers had been configured to talk to the licence server by following the process Microsoft document at the link below;

Guidelines for installing the Remote Desktop Session Host role service on a computer running Windows Server 2012 without the Remote Desktop Connection Broker role service

Everything appears to check out, and I know the licence server is being used by other Server 2012 R2 servers for their CALs, so I know essentially the licence server is working. The server appeared to just not be using the licence server details I’d given it and simply falling over when the grace period ran out.

The solution was found in the registry, with the following key;

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server\RCM\GracePeriod

After removing the binary value in there and only leaving the default string and rebooting the server, the servers would check in to the licence server. I had to take control of the registry key to make this happen, and then revert the permissions back after I’d finished.

Some people have reporting seeing event ID’s 1129 and 1130 in the TerminalServices-RemoteConnectionManager event log, but I didn’t see these in all cases.

Server 2012, 2012 R2 & 2016 Disable Or Remove Deduplication On A Volume

Update – 11/11/2020: I’ve added a link here to Microsoft’s updated Server 2016 documentation that details deduplication – Understanding Data Deduplication

I just thought I’d post about this, as it’s something I’ve come up against recently, how to disable deduplication on a volume on Server 2012, 2012 R2 or 2016 and inflate the data back to it’s original form. In this example, the volume in question is E:

So let’s start with step one;
DO NOT DISABLE DEDUPLICATION ON THE VOLUME
If you disable dedup on the volume first, you simply stop new data being processed, rather than rehydrating your already deduplicated data.

So with that in mind the, step two would be to run the following command in PowerShell;
Start-DedupJob -Type Unoptimization -Volume E: -Full

When that job has completed, which you can check with the Get-DedupJob
command, you’ll then find that deduplication has been disabled on the disk. Since there’s still the garbage collection job to run, we need to rather counter-intuitively turn dedup back on for the volume with the following command Enable-DedupVolume -Volume E:

Once this is done, the next step is to run the following command to start your garbage collection on the volume;
Start-DedupJob -Type GarbageCollection -Volume E: -Full

Finally, after that, the final step is to turn off dedup on the volume with the following command;
Disable-DedupVolume -Volume E:

And that should save you any unnecessary drama.

Note
When all this is done, the volume will still show in some places like server manager sat at 0% deduplication rate, which is fine, as we’ve turned it off. I would guess this is just a bug, but it seems once a volume has been touched by the deduplication processes, it never goes back to a blank value for dedup rate.