After adding additional mailboxes to Outlook (Tools > Email Account > Change > More Settings > Advanced > Add), when you retrace your steps you may find that you are unable to remove the additional mailbox(es) because it isn’t listed, even though the mailbox is still visible in the main Outlook pane. When right-clicking on the mailbox and selecting “Close Mailbox – Name” you may receive the following error:

Solution:

Navigate to the following in the registry:

HKCUSoftwareMicrosoftWindows NTCurrentVersionWindows Messaging SubsystemProfilesDefault

Look through each of the folders, and delete the folder that correspond to the additional mailbox(es) causing an issue.

Just to let you know Exchange 2007 SP3 Rollup 6 has been released

You can download the rollup from http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=28751

Rollup 6  contains the following fixes (Referenced from http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=2608656)

• 2289607 - The week numbers displayed in OWA do not match the week numbers displayed in Outlook for English users and French users in an Exchange Server 2007 environment
• 2498852 - "0×80041606" error message when you perform a prefix search by using Outlook in online mode in an Exchange Server 2007 environment
• 2499841 - An arrow icon does not appear after you change the email message subject by using OWA in an Exchange Server 2007 SP3 environment
• 2523695 – A "System.ArgumentOutOfRangeException" exception occurs when you click the "Scheduling Assistant" tab in Exchange Server 2007 OWA
• 2545080 - Users in a source forest cannot view the free/busy information of mailboxes in a target forest when the cross-forest Availability service is configured between two Exchange Server 2007 forests
• 2571391 – Applications or services that depend on the Remote Registry service may stop working in an Exchange Server 2007 environment
• 2572010 – The Microsoft Exchange Information Store service may crash after you run the Test-ExchangeSearch cmdlet in an Exchange Server 2007 environment
• 2575360  – A new feature is available to automatically stop the Microsoft Exchange Information Store service when a time-out is detected in an Exchange Server 2007 SP3 environment
• 2591655 – A journaling report remains in the submission queue when an email message is delivered successfully in an Exchange Server 2007 environment
• 2598980 – The PidLidClipEnd property of a recurring meeting request has an incorrect value in an Exchange Server 2007 environment
• 2616427 – An Outlook Anywhere client loses connection when a GC server restarts in an Exchange Server 2007 environment
• 2617784 – Journal reports are expired or lost when the Microsoft Exchange Transport service is restarted in an Exchange Server 2007 environment
• 2626217 – Certain changes to address lists may not be updated in an Exchange Server 2007 environment
• 2629790 – The Exchange IMAP4 service may stop responding on an Exchange Server 2007 Client Access server when users access mailboxes that are hosted on Exchange Server 2003 servers
• 2633801 – The SCOM 2007 SP1 server cannot alert certain issues in an Exchange Server 2007 organization
• 914533 – The Microsoft Exchange Information Store service may stop responding on an Exchange Server 2007 server
• 976977 – The scroll bar does not work in OWA when there are more than 22 all-day event calendar items in an Exchange Server 2007 user’s calendar
• 2641312 – The update tracking information option does not work in an Exchange Server 2007 environment
• 2653334 – The reseed process is unsuccessful on the SCR passive node when the circular logging feature is enabled in an Exchange Server 2007 environment
• 2656040 – An Exchange Server 2007 Client Access server may respond slowly or stop responding when users try to synchronize the Exchange ActiveSync devices with their mailboxes
• 2658613 – The "PidLidClipEnd" property of a no ending recurring meeting request is set to an incorrect value in an Exchange Server 2007 environment

Today, Microsoft announced the general availability of System Center Advisor (formerly Microsoft codename ‘Atlanta’) enabling IT Professionals to proactively avoid server configuration problems by assessing static, runtime and operational data to identify potential issues that cause outages or poor performance.

System Center Operations Manager is great at alerting you to server issues as they happen, enabling you to quickly respond – but what if you could actually prevent server configuration problems before they ever impact your server’s performance or availability?

Read more HERE

Cheers
SteveH

After resetting your password and signing into Lync, you may be repeatedly prompted to enter a user name and password so Lync can connect to Outlook. See below:

Solution

Remove the Microsoft_OC1:uri=username@domain.com:specific:EWS1 entry from Credential Manager (Windows Vault)

We had an issue recently with End User Recovery for DPM 2010  recently , where on certain shares on a file server we were backing up didn’t show previous versions, with the following error “There are no previous versions available”.

Working Previous version on file share

Failing Previous versions on the same file share

To resolve this issue we had to do the following

• First log on your DPM 2010 server
• Open Server Manger
• Expand Roles > File Services
• Choose Share and Storage management
• Navigate to the Shares tab
• Now right click the share thats shows no recovery points and choose Stop Sharing

Now we’ve removed the share from DPM we will need to do some changes in AD via ADSI Edit.

The first thing we need to do is find the canonical name of the share, so if you open command prompt on a server with AD tools and Asdiedit installed such as a DC and run the following command.

Change the below in Bold to match your domain

dsquery * cn=ms-sharemapconfiguration,cn=system,dc=Domain, dc=com –attr ms-productionSrvShare cn -limit 1000 > C:shares.txt

Once you have run the above command open the shares.txt file on the C drive that would of been outputted

Example of outputted file

ms-productionSrvShare                                                            cn                                   
                                                                                                            MS-ShareMapConfiguration             
\ServerShare                                                                            def225c9-0816-4192-bcea-46f1fb71f5b6

Now open ADSIEDIT but keep the shares.txt file open so we can refer to it

• Open ADSIEDIT
• Expand Domain
• Expand DC=Domain, DC=com
• Expand CN=System
• Now select CN=MS-ShareMapConfiguration
• Now we need to refer back to our shares.txt file to find the CN name of the share we need to fix the previous versions for
• now delete the object that matches the CN file from the shares.txt file

Once that has been done wait for your AD to replicate or force replication.

Now you need to modify the protection group that is backing up the file share in question.

• Exclude the folder with the issue with previous versions from the backup and update the protection group and wait for consistency check to complete
• Re-add the folder we just excluded and update the protection group again

Wait for the consistency check to complete and then previous versions should be working again

Microsoft have recently announced they will be releasing MCITP certification for Office 365. These will be in the form of two exams:

Exam 70-323: Administering Office 365 intended for IT professionals who administer Microsoft Office 365 in an environment that may include Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Lync, and/or Microsoft SharePoint – link . Once passed you will be awarded with Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS): Administering Office 365.

AND

Exam 70-321: Deploying Office 365 intended for consultants and IT professionals who plan and implement Office 365. This includes migrations to Office 365 (simple and hybrid deployments) – link . Once passed you will be awarded with Microsoft Certified IT Professional (MCITP): Office 365 Administrator.

Cheers

Paul

For all those out there who are looking to move some of their services to the cloud, there is an free online resource from Microsoft that will take you though the steps required in order to set up your environment for a move to the cloud:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/hh699847

You only need Silverlight installed and each lab is around 20 to 30 minutes in total. It also covers Exchange Online and SharePoint Online.

Used in conjunction with other online documentation answered a lot of questions that I had about setting this up.

Cheers

Paul

We had an issue recently when trying to access an external FTP site. We tried to open the FTP website via Windows Explorer, we typed our credentials in and we got the following error.

The part we are interested in is the “502 Active FTP not allowed” , this is due to the fact that Active FTP is automatically disabled via TMG.

To allow Active FTP in TMG do the Following

1. Open The TMG Management Console
2. Press System and go to the Application Filters tab
3. Right click the FTP Access Filter and press properties
4. Go to the FTP properties tab and select the tick box “Allow active FTP access”

Also do the following on the access rule you created to allow FTP access

1. Right click access rule and choose Configure FTP
2. Uncheck Read Only

You will now be able to access the FTP site

Re-post from; http://www.windowsitpro.com/content1/tabid/57/catpath/virtualization/topic/windows-server-8-hyperv-30-evens-odds-vsphere-140573

At the recent Windows Server Workshop at the Microsoft campus in Redmond Washington Jeff Woolsey, Principle Program Manager Lead for Windows Virtualization in the Windows Server and Cloud division presented the new features in the next version of their Hyper-V virtualization platform. In the introduction to the workshop Jeffery Snover, Distinguished Engineer and the Lead Architect for the Windows Server Division made the bold statement that with Microsoft it’s the third release is where Microsoft really gets it right and with regard to what Microsoft demonstrated in the next version of Hyper-V this is definitely true. The upcoming Hyper-V 3.0 release that’s included in the next version of Windows Server has closed the technology gap with VMware’s vSphere.

Hyper-V 3.0 Scalability

The days when Hyper-V lagged behind VMware in terms of scalability are a thing of the past. The new Hyper-V 3.0 meets or exceeds all of the scalability marks that were previously VMware-only territory. Hyper-V 3.0 hosts support up to 160 logical processors (where a logical processor is either a core or a hyperthread) and up to 2 TB RAM. On the VM guest side, Hyper-V 3.0 guests will support up to 32 virtual CPUs with up to 512 GB RAM per VM. More subtle changes include support for guest NUMA where the guest VM has processor and memory affinity with the Hyper-V host resources. NUMA support is important for ensuring scalability increases as the number of available host processors increase.

Multiple Concurrent Live Migration and Storage Live Migration

Perhaps more important than the sheer scalability enhancements are the changes in Live Migration and the introduction of Storage Live Migration. Live Migration was introduced in Hyper-V 2.0 which came out with Windows Server 2008 R2. While it filled an important hole in the Hyper-V feature set it wasn’t up to par with the VMotion capability provided in vSphere. Live Migration was limited to a single Live Migration at a time while ESX Server was capable of performing multiple simultaneous VMotions. In addition, vSphere supported a similar feature called Storage VMotion which allowed a VM’s storage to be moved to new locations without incurring any downtime. Hyper-V 3.0 erases both of these advantages. Hyper-V 3.0 supports multiple concurrent Live Migrations. There are no limits to the number of concurrent Live Migrations that can take place with Hyper-V 3.0. In addition, Hyper-V 3.0 also provides full support for Storage Live Migration where a virtual machine’s files ( the configuration, virtual disk and snapshot files) can be moved to different storage locations without any interruption of end user connectivity to the guest VM.

Microsoft also threw in one additional twist that vSphere has never had. Hyper-V 3.0 has the ability to perform Live Migration and Storage Live Migration without the requirement of a shared storage on the backend. The removal of this requirement really helps bring the availability advantages of Live Migration to small and medium sized businesses that came afford a SAN or don’t want to deal with the complexities of a SAN. The ability to perform Live Migration without requiring shared storage really sets Hyper-V apart from vSphere and will definitely be a big draw – especially for SMBs that haven’t implemented virtualization yet.

VHDX, ODX, Virtual Fiber Channel & Boot from SAN

Another important enhancement with Hyper-V 3.0 was the introduction of a new virtual disk format called VHDX. The new VHDX format breaks the 2TB limit that was present in the older VHD format and pushes the maximum size of the virtual disk up to 16 TB per VHDX. The new format also provides improved performance, support for larger block sizes and is more resilient to corruption.

Hyper-V 3.0 also supports a feature called Offloaded Date Transfer (ODX). ODX enables Hyper-V to take advantage of the storage features of a backend shared storage subsystem. When performing file copies on an ODX enabled SAN the OS hands off all of the data transfer tasks to the SAN providing much high file copy performance with zero to minimal CPU utilization. There is no special ODX button. Instead ODX works in the backend. ODX requires the storage subsystem to support ODX.

Companies that use fiber channel SANs will appreciate the addition of the virtual Fiber Channel support in the Hyper-V guests. Hyper-V 3.0 guests can have up to four virtual fiber channel host bus adapters. The virtual HBAs appear in the VMs as devices very like virtual NICs and other virtual devices. Hyper-V VMs will also be able to boot from both fiber channel and iSCSI SANs.

Extensible Virtual Switch & NIC Teaming

In keeping par with the sweeping changes in Hyper-V’s compute capabilities and storage Microsoft also made a some of significant enhancements to Hyper-V’s networking capabilities. First, they updated the virtual switch that’s built into the Hyper-V hypervisor. The new virtual switch has a number of new capabilities multi-tenant capability as well as the ability to provide minimum and maximum bandwidth guarantees. In addition to these features the new virtual switch is also extensible. Microsoft provides a API that allows capture, filter and forwarding extensions. To ensure the high quality of these virtual switch extensions Microsoft will be initiating a Hyper-V virtual switch logo program.

Another overdue feature that will be a part of Windows Server 8 is the built-in ability to provide NIC teaming natively in the operating system. VMware’s ESX Server has provided NIC teaming for some time. Prior to Windows Server 8 you could only get NIC teaming for Windows via specialized NICs from Broadcom and Intel. The new NIC teaming works across heterogonous vendor NICs and can provide support for load balancing as well as failover.

The Magic Number 3

As Jeffery Snover pointed out three does seem to be the magic number – at least for Hyper-V. Hyper-V 3.0 brings Microsoft’s virtualization on par with VMware’s vSphere. Businesses that are just getting into to virtualization or those businesses that may be bulking at VMware’s latest price increases will find Hyper-V to be a very cost effective and highly competitive alternative.

Smart Teaming

Risual are one of 21 partners within the Microsoft Consulting Services Smart Teaming Agreement. Established in January 2011 the Smart Teaming agreement has been setup to enable efficient, predictable, and transparent partner sub-contracting relationships by standardizing the engagement process, sharing skills / capability, demand data, and driving consistent value for Microsoft and its partners.

The Smart Teaming agreement runs for three calendar years ensuring a strong relationship is established and maintained between partners and Microsoft Consulting Services. The agreement enables partners to support Microsoft with augmenting key engagements by providing skills that cover the Microsoft stack and also supplying niche and in demand skills.

In the UK, Microsoft are committed to ensuring 80% of all sub-contracting is covered by the Smart Teaming partners and to date has been a great success in achieving this metric.