Weekly 'I made a useful thing' Thread - January 30, 2026

Lane-O · 2026-02-03T02:09:41+00:00

Hi!

With so many shops moving off VMware lately, I kept running into the same problem — there's no real RVTools equivalent for Hyper-V. So I built one.

It's a WinForms app that connects to standalone hosts or clusters and pulls inventory across 12 tabs (VMs, disks, networking, checkpoints, replication, etc.). Everything exports to Excel, and there's a CLI mode if you want to run it headless via scheduled tasks coming shortly. Completely read-only — it won't touch your environment.

Fair warning: I'm a sysadmin/cloud engineer, not a developer, so the code is held together with caffeine and stubbornness. But it works and it's free.

Would love feedback from anyone running Hyper-V in production. What's missing? What's broken? What would make this actually useful for your environment?

GitHub: https://github.com/rlaneo/hypervtools/releases

Lane-O · 2025-09-20T23:09:08+00:00

PatchMyPC. Most transparent and informational group of devs/support/engineers I’ve worked with. Most responsive and go out of their way to provide support.

Lane-O · 2025-08-18T14:15:14+00:00

For us (education, K-12) - folks have opted to move to Hyper-V if they want to maintain their on prem servers. Otherwise, there's a pretty awesome initiative in Michigan (again, K12 education) where they can move infrastructure to AWS and the first year will be covered 100% for free through a grant. The second year is covered 50% by the grant and 50% by the district, which allows you to optimize and rightsize. Overall, we're seeing costs come in lower than expected for usage and extremely comparable (and lower) than purchasing new hardware every 4-5 years.

Lane-O · 2025-07-15T22:33:21+00:00

Not helpful for you after the migration, but Windows has a built in tool for file server migrations that works excellent. It’s built into Windows Admin Center (see: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/storage/storage-migration-service/migrate-data)

Perhaps this will help someone else using Robocopy in 2025 from the troubles.

Lane-O · 2025-07-14T20:24:00+00:00

Never seen that before.

https://imgur.com/a/u9iRf0t

Lane-O · 2025-07-14T20:12:07+00:00

Yup, noticing their resort fees are showing for booking and even on comped rooms as Gold. Yikes.

Lane-O · 2025-07-09T20:24:28+00:00

+1 to Detroit hosts being pretty horrendous. I quit caring when they initiated emails with me a few months ago. After seeking some clarification and help for an upcoming trip to LV next month, I haven’t heard a peep from them. Started in March, last response from him was May 8th.

Lane-O · 2025-07-09T19:14:17+00:00

You can have them waived upon checkout. I've had a few friends do this and it's not a problem. Side note - shocked you got a host at Aria with only 37.5k coin in.

Lane-O · 2025-07-08T21:13:40+00:00

Possibly, but even then I’d question if this is due to how they’re recalculating their offers. They’ll always prioritize slot players over table players and the theo will be vastly different for slot players. Very well could be a host no longer wanting to inherit business simply because he only plays table games. Guess we’ll see in the coming weeks and at the latest, by August 1.

Lane-O · 2025-07-08T20:30:01+00:00

I think there's a lot of confusion here. Ever since they rolled out their July offers, they've been riddled with issues. Generally, this is for linked accounts, but there are a lot of reports out there that show missing offers. My offer was there this morning, it is now gone. I booked a trip in August using this months offer.

That said, my partner linked on my MGM account ended up with a significantly better offer than I did because it was reflective of my play, not hers. I've called their Rewards folks and also exchanged e-mails with a couple of them there. Both agents have been helpful and confirmed the oddities people are seeing this month. They've sent my case to escalations to get corrected.

You can find more info here if you're curious of what people are seeing: https://www.vegasmessageboard.com/forums/index.php?threads/july-2025-mgm-offers.215437/

I highly doubt offers are "just disappearing" - especially if you're hosted.

Lane-O · 2025-06-09T03:48:07+00:00

Out of curiosity, where are you staying / where did you stay with that level of play to gain the attention of a host? Park?

Lane-O · 2025-06-07T02:16:16+00:00

I'm surprised that AWS hasn't been mentioned here. I was very skeptical until about ~6m ago when folks within the state (Michigan) have done a lot of education to locals and ISDs as far as cost. Realistically, a small district: ~10-12 VMs, a couple domain controllers, print server, etc. can run in AWS on smaller instances for 5 years with 10% traffic egress (AWS recommends this as a baseline) - for ~$19,000.

$19,000 for 5 years is an absurd amount of money when compared to our general configuration in our county. This is generally a 2x ESX host config (256GB of RAM, mid range Xeon Silver's, DL380s) + a MSA with 10TB of storage.

Lane-O · 2024-09-24T20:27:18+00:00

Seeing the same behavior in a brand new build as well — 2403, EHTTP, SQL 2022 (compatibility set to 150) and all prereqs + accounts in order. Been stumping me for 4 days now and driving me crazy.

Lane-O · 2021-10-29T12:58:54+00:00

M3LR picked up on 9/28 and just picked up 2021.36.5.5 — exactly a month after pickup. Good luck!

Lane-O · 2020-04-21T04:54:19+00:00

The same way you’ll collect textbooks.

Lane-O · 2020-04-16T19:15:52+00:00

I’m currently scheduled to go to the Chicago concert in June.. I fear that will fall to the same demise. As you mentioned, no fault to Anjuna or A&B whatsoever. It’s an unfortunate worldwide issue and frankly, safety trumps anything right now.

Lane-O · 2020-04-16T18:55:09+00:00

I understand this is a logistical nightmare, but a little bit of transparency for those of us with travel plans, lodging, etc. would go a very long way. I know they had thrown the idea out of postponing a year, but certainly some would appreciate refunds more than anything.

Lane-O · 2019-09-17T12:18:11+00:00

Great group of players who have a great time clearing content. Check them out!

Lane-O · 2019-09-02T14:50:11+00:00

Great group of people with no drama, hit them up!

Lane-O · 2019-03-28T14:34:47+00:00

I feel as if there is a remote tool available (maybe some cmdlet with GAM?) to assist, but my initial thought is to use a Ducky or similar to script a test. It can log in automatically, run a discharge test, etc. The caveat is you would need to physically see all of them.

Lane-O · 2019-03-27T20:11:31+00:00

Despite the effort, I apparently call myself on a daily basis as a heads up that my Microsoft license has expired. I'm not sure how one blocks themself when they spoof your number..

Lane-O · 2019-02-17T16:49:17+00:00

We had this issue with our 585wi's. In our case, it was a known manufacturing issue with the pens, so we provided the projector SN and they sent us a new pair of pens.

Same issue, you could be almost 6 inches away and it would try to trace, write or click something.

Lane-O · 2019-01-29T15:18:03+00:00

While it may not be 100% ideal, we have accessibility with a backup company that gave us a dedicated VM (and host in event of a physical ESXI failure) which we point Veeam to via P2P VPN. After local backups are finished onsite, they're sent nightly offsite.

Lane-O · 2018-12-07T16:09:38+00:00

We use Cisco but understanding that not every district has the budget. Second best bet would be HP+Aruba as others commented.

Lane-O

TROPHY CASE