So you’ve created your VM and know you would like to create a template so this VM can be distributed onto multiple VM’s.

SCVMM will take care of this for you, so there is no need to sysprep your machine as the template procedure does all this for you.

Please Beware that creating a template destroys the VM !!!

Creating a Template

1, Press the Virtual Machine Tab and go to your VM.

2, Turn off the VM and then single click the VM

3, Now the New Template option on the right hand window should be accessible, so press this.

4, If you then complete the wizard and hit create this should then start creating your template.

5, The Job pane will then pop up on your screen and start completing the steps that are shown below, once this has completed you’ve successfully made a template.

Two of the many significant changes coming with Exchange 2010 are the change to DAG’s and to terminate MAPI connections at the Client Access Layer. 

Under Exchange 2007 an Outlook user has the server name configured to that of the mailbox (server / cluster) name, under Exchange 2010 with the concept of DAG’s you no longer connect to the exchange mailbox server directly, your server name is one of your Client Access Servers.  In its out of the box configuration its not very fault tolerant, if the client access server is unavailable the client wont be able to connect.  Client Access Arrays along with load balancing (can be NLB, Forefront TMG or another solution) are the way to tackle this issue.

In this example I have a Forefront TMG (beta 3 – I’ve not upgraded to the RC yet…) server exposed to the internet, behind this I have two Exchange 2010 servers both running Hub, Client Access and Mailbox roles.  There is also a supporting AD, DNS, Certificate infrastructure etc… however I’ve not shown it in the interests of keeping this simple, thanks to Visio it looks like this:

I am publishing the following external names:

autodiscover.contoso.com – Exchange autodiscover

mail.contoso.com – OWA, OA, EWS, ECP, EAS

As we want to load balance / provide fault tolerance for our Exchange 2010 services we have a web farm created with Exch2010.contoso.com & Exch2010-2.contoso.com using HTTP / HTTPS GET requests to verify connectivity. 

Three publishing rules have been configured as follows:

All publish to the web farm containing the two Exchange servers.  Again in the interests of keeping this simple I’ve not gone into SSL offload & authentication delegation – best practice would have multiple listeners – FBA for OWA, NTLM for OA etc… but I’ve got one public IP so one listener it is!

To configure a client access array the following steps need completing (I’ve not documented the usual steps you would go through to configure your internal and external URL’s – you set these up as usual):

• Create a client access array

Creating the client access array is simple, all that is needed is to specify an FQDN (an internal name which doesn’t resolve on the internet is fine – the name doesn’t get registered in DNS) and name, in this case I used cas.contoso.com (original eh!) and the AD site the array will serve:

New-ClientAccessArray cas.contoso.com -FQDN cas.contoso.com -Site Default-First-Name-Site

This will create your new array & place all Exchange servers with the client access role in the site specified into your array.

• Configure mailbox databases to use the client access array – this information is then passed back to the client via autodiscover.

When the mailbox database has the RPCClientAccessServer field completed this specifies either a client access server or client access server array to be returned to the client through autodiscover. 

Simple enough to do, this is the command I used:

Set-MailboxDatabase testdb -RpcClientAccessServer cas.contoso.com

Once this has been set, allow a few minutes for replication & client connections will start to be directed to cas.contoso.com from autodiscover & existing clients will begin to update their configuration – the Exchange Server field in outlook will become cas.contoso.com.

So should one of your client access servers go offline TMG will send the connection to another server in the farm and the client will continue to work as it has as CAS array name specified rather than an individual server.

There is documentation on technet about this, however it’s still quite vague – as you would expect at this stage, more will come in due course.

Exchange… awesome product! 

You may come across an issue when trying to backup a Windows 2008 System State, where the backup keeps failing with a 30214 error.

“DPM failed to create the system state backup. If you are trying to create the system state of a Windows 2008 Server operating system, verify that the Windows Server Backup (WSB) is installed, and that there is enough free disk space on the protected server to store the system state. (ID 30214 Details: Internal error code: 0x809909FB).”

This issue occurs because Windows Server backup needs to be installed on the Windows 2008 server for you to be able to perform a system state backup.

 Installing Windows Server Backup

1, Open Server Manager and press features.

2, Now go to add features

3, Finally select the following features and install them.

Now your System State backup should complete successfully.

With Windows 2008 SYSPREP is actually included in the installation of the OS. The SYSPREP procedure on Windows 2008 is really simple.

First navigate to “<system root>System32sysprep”

If you run sysprep.exe a wizard should pop up.

If you select the above options and make sure to tick generalise, to make sure all SID’s get regenerated. Once the machine has shutdown, you will be ok to copy the SYSPREPED VM’s VHD onto multiple VM’s and not face any SID issues.

Daniel Davies

Microsoft have released a free eBook that contains useful content from both the Microsoft Press Windows 7 Resource Kit and Technet, its available for download from the following link;

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=EE2A1D38-88A9-43B3-95BC-7E962F0B6030&displaylang=en

Enjoy!

Just found this gem of information on Anderson Patricio’s blog, something which stumped me when setting up some 2010 HA demo’s. 

Exchange 2010 allows you to create a highly available implementation with just two servers (excluding edge), you can combine mailbox, hub and client access on one box, do this twice & use a DAG to replicate the databases & you have highly available Exchange (you can use Forefront TMG to load balance). 

The Exchange 2010 DAG functionality replaces the CCR / SCR technology in Exchange 2007, like CCR DAG requires a file share witness to prevent split brain syndrome.  Typically in Exchange 2007 you would place this on a Hub transport server (having manually created the share & permissions), Exchange 2010 has a wizard to create the FSW on a remote server for you which is handy, however as I found out when I tried to use it against a non Exchange server it didn’t work, I manually created the FSW – putting it down to a Beta / RC bug, however it would appear that you need to add the Exchange Trusted Subsystem group to the local administrators group on the target server to allow the FSW wizard to work.

Rob

editorial welcome to our first issue!

Hello and welcome to the first issue of our monthly newsletter from the support services team at risual. Each month we will be sharing our progress as we improve the services we offer to our clients.  We will keep you updated on technology developments, and share our experi­ence of managing hundreds of servers and clients for many customers.

This month as the memories of long summer days leave us behind and our attention focuses on the impending clocks going back, we look at ways to improve your organisation’s backup and data retention, along with details of risual’s events programme and our adoption of in­dustry recognised standards to improve the service we offer you.

Regards, Kate Lincoln, Editor

P.s. Also this month we have launched our new blog site at www.risualblogs.com and you can stay in touch with our twitter feed at www.twitter.com/risual

service focus fully managed DPM solution

A new risual support service, Managed DPM, provides businesses with the peace of mind that important data, applications and services are fully protected and managed daily by risual. Under our Managed DPM service, risual will manage your on premise Microsoft Data Protection Manager (DPM) server instance/s including services for data protection, recovery and full return to service capability. This, coupled with tape data being stored off site in secure and environmentally controlled vaults, offers a flexible and reliable Disaster Recovery solution and service. risual will provide remote administration and operations for your DPM servers and take control of user and application data protection and recovery. The risual service goes a stage further, provisioning a full return to service solution for Microsoft applications and services. Couple this with secure weekly off site tape data storage and all your protection, recovery, and disaster recovery scenarios are covered.

So, what is included in this Service?

Sound interesting? email support@risual.com or hardeepb@risual.com

Hardeep Bains, Support Lead

risual event smart communicator

did you know?

Risual’s phone system is 100% based on Office Communications Server 2007 R2. The unique features allow us to provide single number reach for consultants and directors, dynamic routing for in or out of hours access for support and has allowed us to cut our call charges and provide our own conferencing service.

next month

Risual has recently achieved several ISO accreditations, find out how these enable us to deliver a world class service for our customers.

risual group ltd the company

risual is a dedicated Microsoft solutions partner delivering cutting edge technology solutions and consultancy enabling businesses to gain the most of their technology and their technology investments. As a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, using our high level competence and expertise with Microsoft technologies and business solutions, risual deliver customer focused Consulting; Solutions and Support services. Our breadth of experience and depth of knowledge allows us to provide a best fit solution for your organisation.

We are interested in the issues facing your business and how we can assist you in utilising the technology available to resolve these.

You may have an issue where you are struggling to remove a hyper-v host for a reason such as you, re-installed the OS on the machine and not removing the SCVMM agent first and when you go to remove it from the SCVMM console it just fails as it can’t communicate with the hyper-v host.

To Forcefully remove the Hyper-V Host you first have to open SCVMM’s Powershell.

Then run the following command “Get-vmhost changetoservername | remove-vmhost –force” .

The Hyper-V host will now be gone.

Daniel Davies

I came across an issue on Exchange 2007 a while back now. Basically we received a few alerts on SCOM regarding the Hub Transport Service being stopped on an Exchange Server.

So i jumped onto the server in question and came across the following events in the event log.

“Event Type: Error
Event Source: ESE
Event Category: Transaction Manager
Event ID: 623
Date: 
Time:
User:  N/A
Computer:
Description:
edgetransport (5612) Transport Mail Database: The version store for this
instance (0) has reached its maximum size of 249Mb. It is likely that a
long-running transaction is preventing cleanup of the version store and
causing it to build up in size. Updates will be rejected until the
long-running transaction has been completely committed or rolled back.
Possible long-running transaction:
SessionId: 0×0000000005217400
Session-context: 0×00000000
Session-context ThreadId: 0x00000000000014F8
Cleanup: 1

Event Type: Error
Event Source: MSExchangeTransport
Event Category: Storage
Event ID: 17017
Date:  
Time: 
User:  N/A
Computer:
Description:
Transport Mail Database: Quota exceeded while performing a database
operation. The Microsoft Exchange Transport service is shutting down.
Exception details:
Microsoft.Exchange.Isam.IsamVersionStoreOutOfMemoryException: Version store
out of memory (cleanup already attempted) (-1069)
at Microsoft.Exchange.Isam.?A0x051b51e0.HandleError(Int32 err)
at Microsoft.Exchange.Isam.Interop.MJetSetColumn(MJET_TABLEID tableid,
MJET_COLUMNID columnid, Byte[] data, MJET_GRBIT grbit, MJET_SETINFO setinfo)
at
Microsoft.Exchange.Transport.Storage.DataStreamImmediateWriter.Write(Int64
position, Byte[] data) ”

So i started the Hub transport service again and then had a quick look at the mail queue via queue viewer. In The queue viewer i spotted a 250mb e-mail and consequently was just too big for the hub transport to handle and causing the service to stop.

To get his issue fixed i had to get rid of this mail out of the queue, first i tried removing the mail with no NDR, this got rid of the mail, however 20 seconds later it reappeared again.

So what i had to do was recreate the queue, so it basically got rid of all mail that was currently in the queue. The downside to this is that other mail still queuing up on the Hub Transport server will be lost to.

Resolution

1, Make sure the MS Exchange Transport service is stopped.

2, Rename the following directory “<drive>Program FilesMicrosoftExchange ServerTransportRolesdataQueue” to “<drive>Program FilesMicrosoftExchange ServerTransportRolesdataQueue_old”

3, Start the MS Exchange Transport service

4, This Should Recreate the Queue folder and the “MS Exchange Transport” will no longer stop.

This Should Resolve Your Issue.

Daniel Davies

I have come across an issue recently where Servers with a SCOM Agent installed are running at 100% CPU, and when you look at task manager on the server you can see multiple CSCRIPT.exe processes running.

CSCRIPT.exe is what SCOM uses to run scripts on the SCOM agents.

The simple fix for this is to upgrade WSH to version 5.7 and the issue with the CPU just simply goes away.

Daniel Davies