Quick Hit: Installing Pre-Reqs for Exchange 2010

This can be a bit tricky … and you can either get enough exposure by doing it so many times that you just know what needs to be installed before you start, or you can get through a bunch of steps in the setup before it stops to tell you that the right things aren’t installed and can’t continue.

Exchange 2010 requires Windows Server 2008 or Windows Server 2008 R2.  You can use Server Manager to install the Web Server (IIS) role, however, there are many, many pieces to IIS that are broken out into individual components in 2008.  Which ones are required to get you the prerequisites you need to get through the Exchange 2010 installation?

Instead, consider using ServerManagerCmd.exe, which is built-in in Windows 2008 to automate the role installation for you.  This command is very useful in installing new components and making sure that you have the pieces you need.  From a command line, run:

ServerManagerCmd -i RSAT-ADDS Web-Server Web-Metabase Web-Lgcy-Mgmt-Console Web-ISAPI-Ext NET-HTTP-Activation Web-Basic-Auth Web-Digest-Auth Web-Windows-Auth Web-Dyn-Compression RPC-over-HTTP-proxy Web-Net-Ext –Restart

This will install the necessary components including ADDS which needs to be installed for remote administration of Active Directory and for the Exchange 2010 schema extensions to be installed.  Once the command completes, the server will restart.  After that, you’re ready for your Exchange 2010 installation.

You can find more information on ServerManagerCmd.exe on Technet.

DIRECTV2PC: Love the idea; Can’t get it to work

Now you can watch your favorite shows on your PC. With your DIRECTV Plus® HD DVR receiver and PC connected to your home network, the DIRECTV2PC™ application allows you to stream the programs you recorded on your DVR to your PC, where you can watch them on your HD monitor.

Sounds like a pretty cool idea.  I installed it on my Windows 7 PC tonight.  The interface looks as if you were sitting in front of your TV.

The bad news was that after about five seconds the video stopped playing a dialog on the screen indicated that it “couldn’t apply hardware protection mechanism”.  In doing further research it appears that this has something to do with the video and support for specific features around protected content within the driver.  I am using an ATI Radeon X1650 Pro which is a dual port DVI out card that has 512MB RAM.  I thought this card would sufficient.  The built-in Windows 7 driver for it is up to date, and ATI doesn’t have any Windows 7 drivers for this model.  When you select Windows 7, it takes you to the Vista x64 drivers and says that “these should work” but are unsupported in Windows 7.  That’s kind of a bummer.

This weekend I will probably have to see what else I have laying around for video cards and give those a try.  I have heard that this actually works on a Mac when run from inside BootCamp, however, the DirecTV app is not supported on a Mac, only a PC.

If you want to give the DIRECTV2PC beta a try for yourself, click here.

Quick Hit: Export-Mailbox Cmdlet in Exchange 2007

Ever needed to export the contents of an entire mailbox (or mailboxes)?  The Export-Mailbox cmdlet that is available via the Exchange 2007 PowerShell console can export each mailbox to a PST file.  In addition, Import-Mailbox can be used to import the contents of a PST back into an existing Exchange 2007 mailbox.

Syntax:

Export-Mailbox –Identity <mailbox alias> –PSTFolderPath <path to PST file>

There are a number of additional parameters available to filter the contents and tweet the configuration of what exactly is exported.  Using Export-Mailbox can be very time-consuming. a 200 MB mailbox can take 20 minutes or more (or did so in my tests).

A few things to remember when using Export-Mailbox:

1. The account running the cmdlet must have full permissions to the mailbox in order for the export to complete successfully.

   

2. The export will export all mail contents including the contents of the dumpster for that mailbox.
3. Export-Mailbox requires that Outlook 2003 SP2 or later is installed on the machine from which the command is executed. 
4. Export-Mailbox can only be run using the 32-bit version of the management tools.  This means that you have will have to load the 32-bit management tools on a workstation, since production environments of Exchange 2007 run in 64-bit environments.

This is a perfect alternative to what required ExMerge in the past.

Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2.0 RC

If you haven’t checked it out, do it now.  The Web Platform Installer makes your life a lot easier, especially when it comes to installing and configuring applications like WordPress on your own server.

I provisioned a new Windows 2008 R2 Web Server and needed to move my websites off of an old 2003 server and on to this new box.  In the past, installing mySQL, PHP, and other required components to get WordPress to work properly on a Windows server was a huge pain, that is, until the Web Platform Installer came along.

A number of applications have decided to use the WPI.  Applications like WordPress , DasBlog, Visual Studio Express products, and even SQL 2008.  You click through an interface, select the stuff you want to install, enter the requested config info, and the WPI takes care of the rest.  I actually used it to install WordPress flawlessly today.  It identify pre-reqs and other requirements and makes sure you have what you need before it gets started.

You can read more about, and download the Web Platform Installer here.

Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT) for Windows 7

Not that all my desktops and laptops are running Windows 7, I wanted to get the newest tools for administering my Windows environment, including Hyper-V.

It took a little bit of searching, and a lot of the search results pointed to the beta tools or the RSAT for Windows Vista, neither of which will work with the released version of Windows 7.

So, if you’re looking for the link, here it is:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=7d2f6ad7-656b-4313-a005-4e344e43997d&displaylang=en#filelist

From there, you’ll find the direct download links to both the x86 and x64 versions of the tools.  Happy administering!

Compellent Disk Management with PowerShell: Windows Server 2008 Disks

I was provisioning some Compellent storage today for a a series of tests that I am working on that required 62 volumes per server on two different servers.  These volumes are multi-pathed and although using the Compellent Storage Center GUI is easy and straightforward, completing this process would take a long time doing by hand and seemed fit to be automated using the Compellent Storage Center Command Set for Windows PowerShell.

I wrote a script a while back that handles my provisioning for me; in this case a couple of mount point root volumes followed by data volumes that would be accessed by mount point instead of drive letter.  The script is flexible enough to handle different volume counts and whether or not drive letters would be used, but the catch was I had only used it with Windows Server 2003. 

I tried to run the script this morning and found a flaw pretty quickly.  The volume was created on the Storage Center, mapped properly across the available paths, but when the script tried to initialize the volume in Windows, it would come back as “failed to initialize” with VDS error code 80070013.  This VDS error code indicates that the “media is write-protected”.  How could that be on a new volume?

Windows 2008 changed the way disk management is handled especially around delivery of the disk to the server.  By default, a disk mapped to a Windows 2008 server via VDS will be delivered in offline mode and also read-only.  In Windows Server 2008 there is a policy new to Windows related to SAN disks. This "SAN policy" determines whether a newly discovered disk is brought online or remains offline, and whether it is made read/write or remains read-only.  By default, the “Offline All” policy is set.  This means All newly discovered disks remain offline and read-only.  You can change this default policy in DISKPART by running the SAN POLICY=<POLICY NAME> from a DISKPART command prompt.

changing the default SAN policy in DISKPART

You can read more here, but in the meantime, the fix for this from a scripting perspective is quite simple.  The inability to initialize the disk because it was read-only was due to the SAN policy which presented the volume in a read-only fashion (and offline too).  We can change the disk attribute  of the volume so it is not read-only and then we can bring the disk online so it is usable.  Here is a sample of how to use the Command Set to change the read-only attribute and the state of the drive:

Write-Output "Bringing Disk Online..."

Set-DiskDevice -SerialNumber $scvolume.SerialNumber -Online

Set-DiskDevice -SerialNumber $scvolume.SerialNumber -ReadOnly:$false

$scvolume is a variable that refers to the volume object that is created when we create a new volume using New-SCVolume.  The serial number is used to identify the disk mapped to the Windows Server.  It is also important to note that although the “Online” and “ReadOnly” switches come from the same cmdlet, these must be executed separately as they are in the sample. (Thanks for that important tidbit, Sean!)

Checking Partition Alignment with PowerShell

Here is an easy way to determine the partition alignment of any given disk on the local system or remotely.

$OffsetKB = @{label=”Offset(KB)”;Expression={$_.StartingOffset/1024 -as [int]}}

$SizeMB = @{label=”Size(MB)”;Expression={$_.Size/1MB -as [int]}} 

Get-WmiObject -ComputerName "localhost" -Class "Win32_DiskPartition" | ft`

SystemName, Name, DiskIndex, $SizeMB, $OffsetKB  -AutoSize

This will output table that looks like this:

Why should you care about this?  This is particularly useful for determining partition alignment of existing disks that may be running applications like Exchange or SQL.  Exchange recommends a 64K partition alignment as does SQL in most cases.  In Windows Server 2008, partition alignment is automatic and defaults to 1024KB for new partitions. Note that the alignment of partitions on servers that were upgraded from Windows 2003 to 2008 are not changed.

PowerShell v2 & Compellent Storage: What’s New?

I contributed a couple of postings to the Compellent “Around The Block” blog this last week.  These postings cover the new features in PowerShell v2 and how they can be leveraged with the Compellent Storage Center Command Set.

Here are links to the postings:

Part 1

Part 2

You can download CTP3 of PowerShell v2 here.

Are The Technology Gaps Ever Filled?

First and foremost, I am a Windows user. I have been forever. I was a “blue badge” so I was very much a “fanboy” of Microsoft from the platform to desktop apps to mobile devices and still pretty much am. I have also opened my eyes to other computing technologies like the Mac and iPhone.

I used to try to make my Microsoft software work the way I wanted in every case. There really wasn’t any other solution. I have moved away from that thought process, and accepted that some other technologies do the job better.

Take Windows Mobile for example. I owned no less than 10 devices in a matter of less than five years because I thought that the issue had to be the device, not the platform. Last year, I finally purchased an iPhone. I absolutely love this device and it will take me a long time to go back to Windows Mobile. Perhaps if Microsoft controlled the hardware platform for Windows Mobile devices, they might share the same success that Apple has had.

I also have a MacBook Pro, which runs virtualization software so I can run Windows. Since most enterprise companies still use Windows as a primary platform, I too still use Windows for 95% of my work-related business. I have had few issues with the Windows platform for the most part; I was even a fan of Vista. I didn’t see all of the same issues that caused droves of people to jump on the anti-Vista bandwagon. I still prefer Vista to Windows XP, a sentiment that isn’t shared by many. But at the end of the day, I run it on my MacBook. I do most of my blogging from a Mac now, I get all of my newsfeeds on the Mac, and Twitter too! Bottom line, a lot of Mac apps offer better stability and robustness compared to their Windows counterparts. Whether this is related to the platform or just bad coding, that’s a topic for a different day. Microsoft wins at a lot of battles – I favor Visual Studio and Office 2007. Those have been solid, just as a lot of the server apps like Exchange, SQL, and SharePoint.

Since I have had my Mac I have looked for ways to synchronize files and folders. Between my Macs would be fine, but across platforms would be even better. Apple’s MobileMe is a nice solution, although I don’t believe $99/year is worth what it gives me. Yesterday I was searching around for file sync tools on the Mac again and came across Microsoft Live Sync. I’ve used Live Sync for file storage on the PC side, but I was surprised to find that a Mac client was available. I installed it on both of my Macs, as well as my Vista laptop and work laptop too. I started syncing folders and they appeared across the platforms. Amazing! (and free too).

Looking further, I started digging into Microsoft Live Mesh which bridges the gap for connected devices allowing them to sync files and access their desktops all over the Internet. This provides the ability to access applications on one system that might not be available on another. Better yet, Mesh incorporates mobile devices and Macs. File synchronization is great across platform, but I wish I had the ability to remote control my Mac from one of my Live Mesh PCs. Since the remote control uses an ActiveX control in the browser, this is not possible on the Mac, but bringing a Java applet into the mix might take away this barrier.

I would say that in the last 2-3 months, Microsoft has introduced some very interesting technologies like Bing and Live Mesh (beta). Bing is closing in on it’s Google competition, and I have even started using it as my primary search engine. We’ll see how the landscape changes when Google finishes their open source OS.

So, with all this being said, it’s really not about being an Apple Fanboy or a Microsoft Fanboy, but more-so about who delivers the best solution for the problems at hand.

Windows 2008 Hyper-V Resource Kit Now Available

On June 10, Microsoft Press published the new “Windows 2008 Hyper-V Resource Kit” by Robert Larson and Janique Carbone.

For the past year, Shane Burton a fellow Microsoft Product Specialist here at Compellent, and myself have been working with Robert and Janique on this project and providing content, particularly “Notes from the Field” for the book, while our Compellent Marketing Alliance partner, John Porterfield kept us in line.

Compellent is a project sponsor at the Microsoft Partner Solution Center and provided Robert and Janique access to a Compellent Storage Center for testing storage-related scenarios that are included in the book. Compellent users will recognize a lot of the screenshots which were taken directly from the Storage Center Manager.

Shane and I are proud to be contributing authors on this project. We hope the Windows 2008 Hyper-V Resource Kit will prove to be an invaluable reference for administrators and IT pros who are responsible for the architecture, design, implementation and ongoing maintenance of a Hyper-V environment.

The book is now available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.