Confessions of an IT Geek

Group Policy Best Practices Analyzer

Over the last couple of years Microsoft has begun creating Best Practices Analyzers. The first one I  believe was released as a non-supported tool for Exchange Server 2003 as what seemed to be at the time almost a whim. Fortunately people saw very quickly how important a tool like this (especially a free tool) could be. So much so that now the Exchange BPA is a part of the product.

Microsoft has just released a Group Policy BPA tool to analyze your GPO environment and individual GP to make sure that you have stable environment that will reliabily enforce policies on your users and computers connected to Active Directory. There are four versions on the tool depending on what platform you wish to run the tool on.

You Had Me At EHLO... : Client Network Traffic with Exchange 2007 SP1

The Exchange team has provided some detail on how to estimate the total amount of network traffic that would be generated by a set of Exchange clients against an Exchange 2007 SP1 server. In the article there is also a link to one of my favorite white papers that goes into this same subject in great detail for Exchange 2003.

Link: You Had Me At EHLO... : Client Network Traffic with Exchange 2007.

Dallas Windows Server 2008 Launch Event

Attended the Dallas version of the Windows Server 2008 launch event today. Overall I think the event was useful. I stayed within the IT Infrastructure track. John Weston of Microsoft hosted the infrastructure breakouts sessions and did a great job. Let me run through a few random notes that wasn't completely aware of that I learned today (and hopefully you will learn too!)

• Hyper-v - this is still scheduled for final release in August of this year. John did discuss the OS licensing for the VMs though. If you are running a Windows Server 2008 server with Hyper-v you have licenses to run up to 4 Windows Server 2008 VM without the need to purchase additional licenses. If you need to run 5 server VMs then you will need to purchase an additional Windows Server license. This does not give you licenses for running any other OSes in the VMs (e.g. Windows Server 2003). If you are considering migrating existing Virtual PC or Virtual Server 2005 VMs over, think again. Apparently it takes a large effort do to so (hopefully MS will come out with a migration tool but I am not holding my breath).
• John made a lot of use of the Zoomit utility for blowing up small text areas of server desktops during the demos. Made it a lot easier to read stuff. Check it out!
• In the GPO Management Tool when editing individual settings on a GPO, there is now a Comment pane available that allows you to comment on why you made a specific configuration setting.
• Windows Server 2008 R2 is apparently on the roadmap. Currently scheduled for 2009 but we will see....

Check out John's blog for a large number of links on Windows Server 2008. Also if you were not able to make one of these launch events, the slide decks for the infrastructure track can be accessed here.

Xmote?

Looks like Microsoft has taken notice of the Wii and the rumor is that there is going to be an Xbox version of the Wiimote by the end of the year. I guess we will see.

So does that mean we are going to see bowling come for the  360????

Exchange CCR Videos out

If you have been considering deploying continuous cluster replication but you have been reluctant to do so because of the complexity or maybe you are just a bit intimidated, the Exchange team has released some videos show how to do this. Check it out.

Exchange CCR Video Post

New OCS 2007 Stencil

OK I am always looking for new stencils for MS Visio. Microsoft just released a new Office Communication Server 2007 stencil. Take a look at it. It is one of the better ones I have seen them release in terms of the number of individual objects and the art work is good too.

While I am at it in case you are looking for other Visio stencils, take a look at VisioCafe. They have a good number of stencils for specific computer/networking hardware like servers, router, hubs, etc. These are great when you need to create a diagram showing rack layouts rather than something logical.

Enjoy!

Creating Exchange Clusters in VMWare Workstation 6

Recently I was in need of creating a 2-node Exchange 2003 cluster in VMWare Workstation 6. Unfortunately I wasn't able to find any single procedure for doing so. Left me to figure it out on my own which I did. Wanted to share it here in case anyone would like to see how to do this.

First I needed to just create the virtualized hardware setup in VMWare. Here is a good link that provides you the steps for setting up the virtual nodes in VMWare Workstation 5. Fortunately this procedure also works in 6. The only comment I"ll make is that you may want to go ahead before installing Exchange and get another shared virtual drive for the DTC virtual server created at this point in addition to the Q: drive (Quorum) as it is best practice to put the DTC VS on a separate drive. Also if you are going to create multiple storage groups you probably should create additional shared virtual drives for each SG (remembering to keep the transaction logs for each SG on separate drives)

After doing this I was ready to get the Exchange cluster installed and configured. Microsoft does provide a good deployment guide for doing just this.

One last note. You may need to remove the physical drive resources from the default cluster group and then adding them to a new Exchange virtual server cluster group before you can start up the SA service.

Well Here We Go Again....

Well just after we deal with the changes in Daylight Saving Time (DST) earlier this year now it looks like we will be dealing with it again. If you are running Windows servers/desktops and Microsoft Outlook you had to deal with several patches as well as running an update tool to modify meeting times in the user's calendar before DST took affect earlier this year.

Now due to additional changes in the law since the first set of patches were released we now have another set of patches to reapply. While it would nice to be able to blame Microsoft for all of this work, you can't. Rather blame the government for the additional law changes. The additional countries that made law changes include Australia, New Zealand, Egypt and Venezuela. But if you are thinking that you are a US only based entity don't think you are immune to the need to apply patches. There unfortunately are 5 counties in Indiana, USA that didn't make the DST changes earlier in the year as the rest of the country did so now you may to check to see if you have any users or servers in these areas and apply the updates appropriate. What a mess...

Here are some links to more information.

http://support.microsoft.com/gp/cp_dst

http://support.microsoft.com/gp/dst_hottopics

http://support.microsoft.com/gp/dst_prodlist

Welcome!

Well first let me welcome you to my blog! Been meaning to do one of these things for a while and finally got motivated to get things going. So first a bit about me. Professionally I am an Information Technology architect and engineer working the industry since 1990. I have been working primarily with Microsoft technologies and more specifically with Active Directory and Exchange Server. I have also had opportunities to speak at conferences and seminars related to these Microsoft technologies including the Microsoft TechEd conference as well as the TechMentor conference. I have also been lucky enough to be able to publish a book on Active Directory. The book title is MCSE Designing a Windows Server 2000 Active Directory Infrastructure for Dummies. My professional certifications include MCSE and MCT.

What about in my leisure time? My main hobbies are music (I play Trombone in a couple of jazz groups as well as at church) and playing Xbox. Between that and spending time with my wife and my dog (a Westie) that pretty much keeps me busy and entertained. I am also a big A/V nut. Just built out my home theatre and am always fiddling around with it.

So what is it that I am going to attempt to cover in this blog? Well obviously I want to be able to facilitate discussions on various technology topics as well as any other topic that is of general current interest. So I do my best to stay focused on the subject areas I have mentioned above but you never know where this blog will go......