himuraken

VMUG: Tech Data in Clearwater, FL.

Attended my second VMware User Group Meeting (VMUG) today. The first meeting that I attended was held at the Southwest Florida Water Management District’s office a couple of month back. Today’s meeting was sponsored by Tech Data and held at their Clearwater, FL headquarters.

First up was VMware which gave a presentation of upcoming features in View 4.5. Numerous alpha/beta screenshots were displayed which showcased numerous improvements and new features. We were asked as group not to share the exact features as this is still a work in progress so I will end that there.

Next up was IBM with a more hardware CAPEX/OPEX oriented presentation. Some of the hardware that was discussed was really impressive, things like 2TB of system RAM, blade enclosures, and 1.8″ SSD “flash packs” that cut costs and push IOPS through the roof.

The final presenter Qlogic, was pretty interesting. The presentation included 8Gb FC, fibre channel over ethernet, and 10Gb copper.

After the presentations everyone broke up into groups and went on tours of the Tech Data Solutions Center and then into discussions with each of the three presenters.

See you at the next VMUG.

–Himuraken

Crontab Generator Makes Scheduling Even Easier

For those that have never used crontab, it can be a daunting task to schedule a simple script. As with all things, I highly recommend that you learn the meanings of CLI programs and their usage etcetera. With that said, I wanted to check my crontab job against a generator of sorts just to be sure I had it right. If you want a simple click and go on crontab generator, I recommend using the one provided by HTML Basix. Enjoy!

–Himuraken

Recreate OWA Virtual Directory IIS7 / Exchange 2007

Ran into an issue today where a clients SBS 2008 server stopped servicing requests made to hostname/owa. I am still unsure as to what caused this issue but find a fairly simple way to recreate the OWA virtual directory for IIS. Many admins are familiar with this procedure / howto for Exchange 2003 but are unable to find something similar for Exchange 2007. While the step that I will describe below is not as in depth as the previous link, it did resolve my issue.

If your OWA is giving you the dreaded 404 treatment try this: Open IIS Manager and delete the OWA virtual directory. Next you will need to open the Exchange Management Shell. Enter in the following command and press enter afterwards: New-OWAVirtualDirectory -OwaVersion:Exchange2007 -Name "OWA" .

That will rebuild / recreate the OWA virtual directory and start accepting client requests immediately. Please note that this recreates the OWA virtual directory under Default Web Site, not under SBS Web Applications like a default SBS / Exchange 2K7 install.

Hopefully, this one liner will save you some trouble.

–Himuraken

The Beauty of Being Hardware Agnostic

We can all agree that virtualization has numerous benefits. One of the obvious benefits is that virtualization makes systems hardware agnostic. This is one of my favorite features of going virtual. I am responsible for the network operations of many businesses and being able to forget about hardware compatibilities on the OS level is a major advantage.

We experienced the benefits of this ourselves today while upgrading one of our servers. We added additional RAM and changed CPUs. The memory was no surprise, it is rarely an issue. When it is, it is a hardware issue not an OS one. CPU swaps are generally more complex. I have seen many Windows systems become unstable after increasing or decreasing the number of processors/cores.

So when we got the chance to upgrade one of our ESXi servers from two dual core processors over to two quad cores we had to test it. In true anticlimactic fashion everything worked perfectly. The VMware server booted flawlessly and now shows the additional cores and RAM.

So if you can get your hands on upgrade parts or new servers all together, go for it!

*Update* We have since bumped the server up to 32GB of RAM, great stuff. We plan to upgrade the CPU’s again in the near future. It just keeps getting better.

–Himuraken

Breath a little life into your Small Business Server

This one seems like an obvious one, but I will post it anyways. Chances are that you have deployed and/or maintain Windows 2003 Small Business Server. Many small businesses purchased SBS during “the good times” of 2003-2008.

Due to the licensing restrictions imposed on the product by Microsoft, these servers are always one boxed. That is to say that they have too many servers and services on the same hardware. Most of these systems are reaching their end of life and are running slower than ever.

These 32bit boxes are usually maxed on RAM (4GB) and are starving for more. Lately I have been auditing the list of installed applications and removing as needed. The memory hog is usually some SQL server running even though it isn’t in use. Take into account Backup Exec, WSUS, SBS Monitoring, and Sharepoint and you begin to see where all that RAM is going. Almost all of my clients have been moved over to a managed services platform which handles Windows Updates and system monitoring. That takes out two standard SQL databases/instances right off the bat.

So the long story short is this: Reevaluate the needs of your aging servers and get more from them by removing obsolete tools.

–Himuraken