BlankMan's Blog

On the 30'th of April 2008 we held the Heroes happen here community launch for Windows server 2008 in Cape Town. I spoke on Windows Server 2008 new features with particular emphasis on the Hyper-V role.

What made this launch event really special for me is that I managed to get by with zero slides, due to a fully functional Intel server kindly loaned to me by Intel and Microsoft Partners netService in Cape Town. Having this kind of hardware available to a community demo, made the difference between "yet another demo" and "Oh Wow", which is what Server 2008 new features are about.

I managed to show the native Hyper-V support in the Windows 2008 server kernel, and feedback was awesome. One of the attendees said "I finally understand the hype about Hyper-V" - more to follow towards the end of the post.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I needed a hardware sponsor to do a large amount of virtualization. At the same time I had a the Windows 2008 Community launch coming up. netService kindly custom built me an Intel server to use for the demo!

The server used an entry level server board the S3200SH. What makes this board so amazing is that I could use desktop components to build a server platform, since the board accepts both server and desktop spec hardware. The server configuration was as following:

Intel S3200SH

Intel Core 2 Duo Desktop processor E8200, 2.6 GHZ 133FSB with 6MB cache

4 x 2GB Trancend DIMMS

2 x 500GB Seagate SATA drives with 32 MB Cache, RAID 1 hardware mirror

This effectively allowed me to demo the Hyper-V capabilities using hardware virtualization made available courtesy of the server board and a total setup cost around the R10 000 mark excluding software and CALs. That's right, IU was able to demonstrate hardware based virtualization on server hardware in a rack-able chassis for around R10 000. At our current Exchange rate, that's just under $1500.00 US. This same platform can easily run SBS 2008 or EBS 2008.

Let me get back to the big deal here: Yes, Hyper-V is still in beta, and so are the System Centre extensions for it and everything else, and yes ESX has been doing this stuff for 7 years and is really good at it, BUT for someone like me who spends a LOT of time building and running VM's, and for most small businesses who'd like to virtualize their apps, this SERIOUSLY lowers the barrier to entry, especially if you've had a look at the ESX HCL lately! I can run hardware based virtualization on a 64 bit platform for not much money at all, and that's a big deal!

Quite seriously I am. most of my life is spent building and running virtual machines, and often my Vista powered notebook with several external drives runs out of steam. With this in mind I'm looking for a hardware sponsor who would like to know how their kit runs using Windows server 2008 and Hyper-V and/or any other virtual environment at all, since I run most of them - laptop and all.

If a hardware vendor or OEM is interested, then I'll happily speak on their behalf on their hardware's performance and work with their technical team on feedback.

Ping me on nicolas dot blank at gmail dot com or nicolasb75 at hotmail dot com.

DPM rocks. After years of stuffing around with backup, I found a Microsoft centric backup solution which I would trust, and ironically it's from Microsoft. The nice thing is that hitting the DPM homepage immediately gives you useful white papers on how to use the product, calculate sizing on backup solutions by product, etc. Stuff that's useful.

http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/dpm/default.mspx

Now, something I have the luxury of being an MVP is: expressing my opinion and not being part of the marketing engine, and if you've been to my talks you know that I don't mind calling a spade a spade. And with that in mind, I do recommend a serious look at DPM. It's not a silver bullet, nor is it a cure all to everything that needs to be backed up, however it deserves a SERIOUS look, even if you have OTHER kinds of backup in place.

Living on a bandwidth and power challenged continent, I have new hope for backup, since using DPM, I can backup DPM to another DPM instance, but still restore the original item I backed up, no matter which DPM site it's coming from. Before I ramble on to much about how cool DPM is and the other stuff it can do for vitalization and the awesome Powershell support (yup, I managed to sneak a PowerShell reference in there), the long and the short of it is, why wouldn't you trust the guys who wrote SQL and Exchange to back them up?

While you're at it you may want to have a look at two useful blogs:

DPM Product Team Blog
DPM Product Manager's blog

And let me know what you think.

Nic

Eating Clam chowder at Pike Place in Seattle, WOW! It was that good.  Food in Seattle is fantastic. Generally I have not been disappointed, and living in South Africa for a few years, I've missed being able to have bagels on tap!

The other thing I'm really chuffed about is DEFINITELLY the coffee. Starbucks in Seattle is a cut above. Enough about rambling about Seattle. Talk about the MVP summit where I am fairly soon.

What a strange title for a post?

I was browsing a few minutes ago until my browser stopped responding. Since I'm trying to apply Powershell in most situations I fired it up and ran:

ps | where {$_.responding -eq $false} | kill

which get's all running processes, filters by which one's are not responding, and hands them over to the kill object.

How did I know that the "responding" property even existed?

I picked an arbitrary process I knew was running and I ran the following:

ps notepad | fl * | more

Which run's get-process (ps is the alias for get-process), pipes it to format-list (fl) listing all properties and piping again into more.

You'll find that there's a TON of stuff you never knew existed if you start looking for extra properties and it might just be that property you needed to get the job done !

Looking at my last post on this topic, gathering and analysing remote logs rather bleak compared to local CMDlets however I'll give you a really hot clue on how to do this with very little effort.

PowerShell 2.0 remoting functions.

Think of the power of local CMDlets available remotely and you're not making remote WMI calls, but using native PowerShell CMDlets to do your bidding. I hope I'm wetting your appetite!

More on this later.....

You might be wondering why I'm posting so much about PowerShell since I'm an Exchange MVP. I'm going to try and expand on this a little bit and add as much clarity as I can.

Jeffrey Snover has spoken about this a lot in his introductory sessions on PowerShell and I'd like to amplify this as well. PowerShell is CURRENTLY supported on the following to name a few:

• Exchange 2007,
• MOM 2007,
• Virtual Machine Manager 2007,
• Lotus Domino Transporter Suite,
• Data Protection Manager,
• Compute Cluster Tool Pack,
• Windows Server,
• Backup
• Vista
• Windows XP
• SQL 2008

Notice Windows Server, Windows Vista and Windows XP. That means that due to the far reaching implementation of WMI, event logs, registry and file system support, there's not much that can't be managed relatively easily, or at least MUCH easier than VB script. At minimum PowerShell will help the administrator add value to all of the above mentioned.

But what about SBS, NT, Exchange 2000/2003, older/other........?

YES!

What do I mean by that? PowerShell supports the windows platform. Which even in the case of NT means, that while you may not be able to run it on an NT server, you are able to access it remotely, and virtually anything else which allows WMI. That may broaden your horizon dramatically. If you've been to one of my talks, then you may have heard me talk about learning how to PowerShell from inside the shell.

Having free data manipulation and export tools in the shell is part of the deal, allowing me to create a company wide report of current mailbox sizes in a few lines of code, AND compare that report against yesterdays snapshot.

In summary, if you're an Exchange administrator who needs to do more, has no money for tools, has tools that may not be doing the job, needs to do add-hoc reporting and management, there's a free shell out there that you may just want to look at. Since being an MVP is about trying to add value to our community, I would be amiss if I didn't try to make this point as hard as I could, since the value in both PowerShell 1.0 and 2.0 is incredible.

Oh, if you don't know yet - it's for free.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/technologies/management/powershell/download.mspx

In this post I’m going to cover how to deal with event log’s on remote servers. The reasoning here is that most server exist in a locked down environment and the average admin will be running admin scripts on his/her local workstation.

How do we do it?

Again were going to turn to WMI. PowerShell 1.0 has some great event log cmdlets for local event log management, these same cmdlets don’t allow access to a remote machine.

Let’s start off by querying WMI for a list of event logs using the NT event log class

Were going to be using the same commands we’re familiar with by now to query a WMI class on a remote machine and format the output.

Get-WmiObject Win32_NTEventLogFile –ComputerName 2003Server | Format-List

While informational, this isn’t to useful yet, although I can see what Event logs exist on this machine.

To get INTO the event logs and see the contents, we need to use a different WMI class – Win32_NTLogEvent

Get-WmiObject Win32_NTLogEvent

However, all this will give us is a long list of every event in every event log. Not all that useful. By using the WHERE cmdlet we can severely limit the output to one log only. For example

Get-WmiObject Win32_NTLogEvent -ComputerName 2003Server | where {$_.logfile -eq "System"}

returns every event log in the System event log. Again, to much information. Let’s limit the output again by expanding our WHERE cmdlet and adding some formatting, and selecting only the fields we want :

Get-WmiObject Win32_NTLogEvent -ComputerName 2003Server | where {$_.logfile -eq "System" -AND $_.type -EQ "Error”} | Select TimeGenerated, Message | Format-Table –Auto

You’ll notice though that this takes several minutes to return and is nowhere near as efficient as the built-in event log cmdlets. A different way to run the same query would be:

Get-WmiObject -query " Select Logfile, Eventcode, TimeGenerated, Message from Win32_NTLogEvent where LogFile='Application' AND EventCode='1001'" | Select TimeGenerated, Message | Format-List

Notice that each query needs a bit of time to run as the event log is parsed every time a query is run. A more efficient way to do this would be to dump an entire event log into a variable periodically and search the variable. But that’s going to be for another post.

If you're STILL looking for easy ways to learn PowerShell and you haven't been to one of my talks about learning PowerShell from INSIDE PowerShell, then have a look at PowerTab. It's FREE and it's so useful I may trade in a less useful body part or two in exchange ;)

get it here: http://thepowershellguy.com/blogs/posh/archive/2007/06/05/powertab-0-93-and-bdd-2007-teaser.aspx

One of the awesome things is WMI tab completion. Install PowerTab, start typing

gwmi win32_

and press TAB.

You should see the following:

This is enormously useful.

www.exchangeserver.co.za, however since this is a site FOR the community by the community, please take a moment to have a look at the forums and post what you think YOU would like to see on the site?

http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2005/03/14/395229.aspx

This is an older article, however this article is also being referenced in the Exchange 2007 deployment guides. Remember that Exchange 2007 still uses the ESE engine, and as such a lot of what we've learnt over the years still applies.

In summary: Critical top level folders should have no more than 5000 items max. These include, Inbox, Sent Items, Calendar, Contacts. after this, create sublevel folders. If your mailbox is over 2GB's, switch off Cached mode, and try to limit the number of apps on your machine that use MAPI, search engines fall into this category as well.

Exchange 2007 Messaging Records Management can help lessen this load, but make sure you understand the implications around this topic. Messaging Record Management is a nice change from the old Mailbox Manager, however some features require Outlook 2007. Check it out here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb123548.aspx

With enough memory, Exchange 2007 can reduce the number of read/write ratio's to 1 read for every 1 write. This directly affects things like sort speed, retrieval speed, folder rendering and changing views, etc. This makes a really good argument for examining your disk infrastructure and how your disks are arranged - RAID, stripe, JBOD, etc. Knowing that a lot of Exchange Mailbox servers at Microsoft use RAID 10 configurations, striping is SERIOUSLY back in fashion - if you can afford it!

Well, only in the virtual sense, and then only if you're a nerd, and then only if you happen to be looking at http://www.virtualteched.com/Pages/default.aspx the landing page for virtual Tech-ed and the Tech-ed videos.

I did a seven minute interview on - you guessed it, Power Shell and Exchange 2003, same as my Chalk and Talk at Tech-Ed Africa this year.  I can be found here: http://www.virtualteched.com/pages/videos.aspx - go check it out and don't laugh too hard at my first interview on camera! ;)

Just trying to catch up with a bunch of stuff while I was out of the office. I'll be posting feedback and updates soon. In the meantime, if you're coming here because of my chalk and talk at tech-ed where I mentioned the community involvement, please go to www.exchangeserver.co.za and register. Take a moment to hit the forums and talk about WHAT you'd like to see in the community and what kind of activities you'd like to see? Should we be online only, should we have regular meetings, how often, etc etc. So in essence what is the nature of the community that you guys and girls want to be part of.

See you online!

As I came into the office this morning I was told that my SBS server had gone off the radar for hours.

I RDP' d (Remote Desktop) into the box and managed to get a task manager up for long enough to see that mmc.exe was hogging the processor. After that task manager itself became rather unresponsive. Seeing that I've been preaching the Powershell and remote management message, I thought this is a perfect example to blog about.  I saw from task manager that the process was called "mmc.exe".

I fired up PowerShell and used the get-wmiobject command - abbreviated gwmi - locally to see where I would find the name of the EXE. So on my machine I typed

PS C:\> gwmi win32_process

I could see that the "name" and "processname" properties carried the name of the exe. I then issued a get-method command to see what I could do TO the process. one of the methods was cunningly named "terminate()", which gave me a clue that I could kill the process from the command line. Since my server was unresponsive, I didn't want to waste any time time by making a remote call to interrogate the server for all running processes.  This is why I looked to my local machine for property names and methods.

In order to call the method I assigned a variable "$S" containing a reference to the process on my server called "2003server".

In English the line below reads: Declare a variable called "S@". Get a GMI object called "win32_process" from a machine named "2003server". Take the result of that and pipe it "|" to the command that only selects a process by the name "mmc.exe"

I waited a few minutes for the command to execute - my machine was locked up THAT badly!

I then called the terminate method of the wmi object containing the reference to mmc.exe -  "$s.terminate()"

My server responded immediately and started serving mail requests. The entire command line session is pasted below:

PS C:\> $S = gwmi win32_process -computername 2003server | where {$_.Processname -eq "mmc.exe"}
PS C:\> $s.Terminate()

__GENUS : 2
__CLASS : __PARAMETERS
__SUPERCLASS :
__DYNASTY : __PARAMETERS
__RELPATH :
__PROPERTY_COUNT : 1
__DERIVATION : {}
__SERVER :
__NAMESPACE :
__PATH :
ReturnValue : 0

In conclusion, by understanding a bit about WMI and using Powershell to interrogate the methods available to the WMI object, I was able to regain control of my server while the GUI remained unresponsive.

Microsoft has released The Microsoft Baseline Configuration Analyzer (MBCA). What does it do? good question. according to the readme the tool analyzes a system’s configuration based on a predefined configuration baseline model obtained from Microsoft.

You can download it here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=db70824d-abae-4a92-9aa2-1f43c0fa49b3&DisplayLang=en

To summarize, right now in terms of what it CAN do - it doesn't do much. BUT soon and very soon (days or weeks), after installing the MBCA tool, windows update will inform you that there are new configuration baseline models available for download. The readme also talks about a desperately available GUI.

Now some of what I'm about to say is presumption, however I do see this as being a good thing. I'm talking to folks who don't have an idea about what a good configuration is and what context this may apply to - and where do you even start. To give you an idea - a question I get a lot is: "I'd like to know how to build a suitable configuration for an Exchange server". Without knowing a) what version, b) what role c) what load d) security context e) directory context this question is about as open ended as - "what car should I buy"

I'm hoping that in  the next few weeks we should have some pleasant surprises coming out of Microsoft, and even that GUI they're talking about ;)

I have recently had a number of run-in's with the SBS 2003 POP3 connector and the thing's it DOESN'T do properly, such as not duplicate mail incessantly or just plain drop mail addressed to BCC - blind carbon copy recipients.

With that in mind, I've looked at the options for a POP connector replacement which essentially boils down to

a) connecting to a catch-all or list of defined mailboxes

b) download the mail and in SBS's case, forward all downloaded mail to the local SMTP stack for delivery, or deposit downloaded mails into the Virtual SMTP pickup directory.

There are a vast number of options to choose from. A number of commercial solutions can be found on Msexchange.org, freeware or open source solutions are available as well, and are very well implemented. One of the largest pains that follows POP based mail is the lack of native SPAM filtering, dude to the POP connector bypassing IMF altogether. The POP connector uses CDO to deliver mail as opposed to submitting it to the SMTP stack for pickup, classification and routing.

I have found a really good, solid replacement for the POP connector in the form of Chimera Computing's free (you heard right) pop connector. you can find them here: http://www.chimera.co.nz/ . Their connector is functional and cheap if you need to license it - advanced functions need activation, however to troubleshoot POP their free connector is awesome!

When it comes to a POP connector with LOADS of ANTI spam features - checkout GFI. They're a bit light on pure POP functionality, however they're quite feature rich in terms of SPAM and Exchange 2003 anti SPAM feature integration.

Tafiti, which means "do research" in Swahili, is an experimental search front-end from Microsoft, designed to help people use the Web for research projects that span multiple search queries and sessions by helping visualize, store, and share research results. Tafiti uses both Microsoft Silverlight and Live Search to explore the intersection of richer experiences on the Web and the increasing specialization of search.

Click here for Tafiti

Well that's how the official FAQ descibes it. In practice - WOW! Animated searcing is too simple, however Silverlight is a big part of Tafiti, and the search experiance is QUITE different to the same old, same old search we use currently.

If you even have the slightest interest in Powershell, then check out PowerGUI. PowerGUI is a REALLY nice extensible wrapper around Powershell. You can learn a lot from the script source that's included in the product and there's a TON of Exchange 2007 stuff that you can do from PowerGUI that's hard to do from the existing management tools, or only implemented in Powershell.

Best bit - it's free! Check out http://www.powergui.org/index.jspa for really nice forums and a free download. You may want to apply what you're learning about PowerShell and Exchange 2000/2003 and extend PowerGUI to suit your own admin needs.