Friday 24 February 2012

HyperV IaaS ,SCVMM and the Cobweb Control Panel

Cobweb provides many products other than Exchange. Through our Control Panel customers can choose web hosting, CRM, Sharepoint, Office Communication Server (Lync coming soon), Backup products, you name it.

A product we recently launched is dedicated virtual machines using Microsoft HyperV R2 with SP1.

We can provide dedicated Windows 2008 R2 vm's to customers, spinning them up on demand based on customers needs.

I recently trialled this service so thought i'd post on how easy the entire experience is.


Normally my login to the Control Panel looks like this. You can see I make use of many feature rich products and services

















Using a trial customer account I tried the HyperV product. You can see below that just HyperV is present. This is because this trial account does not have any other products or services assigned. If for example I wanted to purchase HyperV on my actual subscription, the HyperV option would be present with all the other services I currently have. This provides a seamless end user experience when managing all your Cloud applications and services from the Provider.

















So I was interested in what I could do with the virtual machine via the Control Panel. This is the view I was presented with when looking at the actual service. The two main options are Virtual Machine configuration and Parallels Plesk.

















So if I drill down into Virtual Machine configuration you'll see I have quite a few options. Firstly I have some pretty basic functionality like being able to start, stop or shutdown the virtual machine. Secondly I can manage lease IP addresses - this allows me to assign more public IP addresses to the server, should I need multiple addresses assigned.

Finally I can configure my virtual machine for vCPU, ram and disk. This is all purchased through billing, and once purchased immediately available to assign to my vm's.

















At the top is the Remote Console, when clicking this I can then get direct access through the browser to administer my vm via RDP over HTTPs. This is provided to the end user via SCVMM (System Centre Virtual Machine Manager) and is part of the SCCM suite.

















Out of the box direct RDP isn't available, but this is just a service desk call away to get configured - remember, you'll ideally need a static IP address to manage them this way.



Take Care


Oliver Moazzezi MVP - Exchange Server

Wednesday 15 February 2012

Released: Update Rollup 1 for Exchange 2010 Service Pack 2

The Exchange Team realsed RU1 for SP2 yesterday. For the full details and download please see here.

A copy of the article is below.

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Earlier today the Exchange CXP team released Update Rollup 1 for Exchange Server 2010 SP2 to the Download Center.

This update contains a number of customer-reported and internally found issues since the release of SP2. See KB 2645995: Description of Update Rollup 1 for Exchange Server 2010 Service Pack 2' for more details.

Note: If some of the following KB articles do not work yet, please try again later.

We would like to specifically call out the following fixes which are included in this release:

New updates for Dec DST - Exchange 2010 - SP2 RU1 - Display name for OWA.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2616230 Exchange 2010 CAS server treats UTF-7 encoding NAMESPACE string from CHS Exchange 2003 BE server as ASCII, caused IMAP client fails to login.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2599663 RCA crashes when recipient data is stored in bad format.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2492082Freebusy publish to Public Folders fails with 8207 event.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2666233 Manage hybrid configuration wizard won't accept domains starting with a numeral for FOPE outbound connector FQDN.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2557323 "UseLocalReplicaForFreeBusy" functionality needed in Exchange 2010.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2621266 Exchange 2010 Mailbox Databases not reclaiming space.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2543850 Exchange 2010 GAL based Outlook rule not filtering emails correctly.

General Notes:

For DST Changes: http://www.microsoft.com/time.

Note for Forefront Protection for Exchange users For those of you running Forefront Protection for Exchange, be sure you perform these important steps from the command line in the Forefront directory before and after this rollup's installation process. Without these steps, Exchange services for Information Store and Transport will not start after you apply this update. Before installing the update, disable ForeFront by using this command: fscutility /disable. After installing the update, re-enable ForeFront by running fscutility /enable.



Take Care


Oliver Moazzezi MVP - Exchange Server

Tuesday 14 February 2012

Source Side Operation Failed - Exchange 2010 DAG

I came across this today. I have no idea why the database failed to replicate correctly, especially as it was a new database with no users on it. However fixing it was fairly trivial.

The issue:

















Once I was back in the console I actually couldn't see the suspended and failed copy without having to restart EMC (a refresh would not work) however EMS did infact show it:










So via Powershell I simply ran the Resume-MailboxDatabaseCopy and this fixed the issue.


Testing via EMC I noticed once it was restarted I was able to see the failed and suspended database so could have performed it via the UI if I needed too.










Root cause analysis was not done as I was unable to replicate the issue. Hopefully this article will help any other Admins with the issue that may not be quite as quick at fixing it.



Take Care


Oliver Moazzezi MVP - Exchange Server

Wednesday 1 February 2012

Changing byte metrics in Powershell to MB or GB

By using Get-Mailbox and piping this to Get-MailboxStatistics, data is returned in varying metrics based on the actual mailbox size the users have.


To streamline this you can convert all values to MB or GB by using the following:


MB
Get-Mailbox -ResultSize unlimited Get-MailboxStatistics Sort-Object TotalItemSize -Descending ft @{label="Total Size (MB)";expression={$_.TotalItemSize.Value.ToMB()}} -auto out-file "X:\report.csv"

GB
Get-Mailbox -ResultSize unlimited Get-MailboxStatistics Sort-Object TotalItemSize -Descending ft @{label="Total Size (GB)";expression={$_.TotalItemSize.Value.ToGB()}} -auto out-file "X:\report.csv"




Where "X:\report.csv" is the where you want the file to be created.


Please note this simply exports the mailbox size values in MB or GB. It does not append the DisplayName of the user or anything else.


Take Care


Oliver Moazzezi MVP - Exchange Server