Virtualization

VDI and BYOD - Bring your own device

Wednesday, March 7, 2012 by Darren Sieck

VDI (BYOD) Bring your own device

As many SMB’s rise slowly out of the recession and have begun to invest in the latest technologies, they are finding their new software and IT systems may support iPhone, iPad, Android, PC or Mac. All this connectivity ushers in a new ways to conduct business. The variety of these devices can be used to provide better communication and flexibility in the workplace and thus improve business agility. BYOD can also provide both hard and soft returns for the organization’s IT investments. The hard returns of BYOD materialize as savings to your organization simply because it no longer has to shell out funds for the latest and greatest devices. The soft return may be happier employees and morale because they can leverage their device of choice to connect to company resources, instead of having IT and corporate dictate specific devices. It is important to point out BYOD also brings with it a host of cons that must be considered and controlled by the corporations acceptable use policy and IT security experts.

The first and foremost consideration is data security: A company must consider the pros and cons before they allow company data on an employee’s personal device. Once a company allows an employee to download data to a personal device, the company has little or no control or management of its data. This may also bring up legal issues over ownership of the data should the employer or employee relationship turn sour. For example a company’s intellectual property or contact lists could easily be harvested and brought to a competing business. There are many other variables to consider, such as a well-intentioned employee device may malfunction, damaging or deleting email or contacts on the company mail server. The employee may load an unsecure app whose goal is to leach or damage corporate data. The employee may load an app then walk into the business, connect to WiFi with a potential Trojan horse causing a devastating data loss. For some organizations this is an acceptable risk, and steps can be taken to help mitigate some of these concerns, however for most organizations this is not tolerable.

BYOD introduces a fine line to saving money. There are additional IT and business costs in supporting multiple platforms. For example; IT must configure the company mail server to support Blackberry, iPhone, iPad and Android. IT must track and try to enforcesuggest a baseline of mobile security. This was a difficult enough task on a single platform, with BYOD this becomes 3X more difficult and time consuming. Fixing one issue for iPhone users may break something for the others. There are also support and security benefits of supporting a single corporate platform. This conservative thinking brought stability and security to organizations for years.

So where does that leave us? Should an organization allow BYOD or not? There is no right or wrong and only an organization can choose whether the benefits can outweigh the risks. Chances are in a small organization this can be managed on an individual basis. Anything beyond a small business or a business that lives or dies by its data needs to seriously consider the implications of introducing unmanaged personal devices into their organization. However what we have discussed so far assumes an organization allows an employee devices to directly connect, sync, and interface with company assets.

Are there other options or solutions? Absolutely! VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure). The industry has been virtualizing servers for years, VDI technologies are one of the hottest topics in IT. VDI leverages the benefits and investments in server virtualization and extends them to the desktop and mobile device space. VDI software such as VMware View, Citrix XenAPP or Citrix XenDesktop allows secure data access for BYOD’s users. The biggest VDI benefit is that corporate data can be extended to all main stream devices and no actual copy of the data is stored on the device. Rather all data is stored, maintained, and secured in the organizations IT system. The VDI software client is also agnostic to the device or platform it runs on, thus eliminating the actual work in configuring the entire system to work with multiple platforms. VDI allows the organization to maintain control over its data while still leveraging the benefits of BYOD.

SkyByte is a VMware Professional Partner and a Citrix Solution Provider. Contact us today for a server virtualization or VDI evaluation.

Installing full feature print drivers onto a Citrix Xenapp Server - Citrix Xenapp Support

Tuesday, January 17, 2012 by Greg Bock

SkyByte Consulting knows the benefits of using Citrix XenApp, and one of those benefits our clients cant live without is the ability to print to a locally attached printer such as a home or personal printer. Citrix admins know printing can make or break Citrix, so installing printer drivers should always be performed with caution. The majority of our clients with a Citrix Xenapp installation, use Citrix to access their company resources securely and enjoy the ability to print to their home or personal printers. When printers are mapped during logon, any client created printer will attempt to match your local print driver with the same driver if its available on the Citrix server. If a matching driver is not available, it will default to use the Citrix Universal Driver. The Citrix Universal Driver has been refined with every new release, and is almost compatible with virtually any printer. But occasionally there are times when the Citrix Universal Driver performance just cannot match the native print driver. Whenever possible I recommend using native print drivers to minimize print problems.

Printer manufacturers offer downloadable drivers on their website. When installing a print driver to a Citrix XenApp server, you only need the basic print driver. Keep in mind, most home printers come with alot of extras that are not needed on the Citrix server. To make things more difficult, the entire software package is only available. Extracting the driver can be difficult but can be performed.

Recently I was asked to install a driver for an HP Officejet 8600. HP offers the full software, but also the basic print driver on their website. I downloaded the basic driver which was a single .exe self extracting file. After the automatic extraction was complete, a setup wizard began and immediately told me my OS (Windows Server 2008 R2) was not supported. This was very disappointing, but I found a work around to getting the driver installed. The self extraction extracted all of the files including the driver into the C:\users\username\appdata\local\temp directory. Simply pointing the add printer driver wizard to that directory made installing the driver extremely easy.

If you find no choice but to install the full feature driver there are ways to getting just the basic driver installed. If you are installing from a disk, there may be a folder containing the drivers. Also check out my other blog explaining how to remotely install print drivers from another machine here.

Virtualization Success: VMware vSphere transforms a Chicago area park district

Monday, January 16, 2012 by Darren Sieck

SkyByte Consulting is a premier provider of Virtualization solutions and technologies.

Recently SkyByte won an RFP for a major suburban park district near Chicago. SkyByte successfully beat out four other Chicago IT firms with our design and project pricing. The park district had approximately thirty aging physical servers well beyond their effective service life. Their server room consisted of two 42U racks full of old server equipment. SkyByte proposed a four server VMware vSphere Cluster connected to a NetApp 2040 SAN. Cisco switches were chosen and NFS was utilized for the storage area network. SkyByte architected a secure DMZ along with multiple production internal networks. The project had the added benefit of centralizing all of the organizations data within the new NetApp SAN. This further improved the organizations disaster recovery options.

SkyByte installed the new VMware vSphere cluster and virtualized all the old servers from P to V. The virtualization candidates were Microsoft Exchange, four Microsoft SQL database servers, file and print servers, application servers and many F5 load balanced web servers. Upon completion of the project all old server equipment was removed, and a complete 42U rack was removed from the room. 84U U’s of space were reduced to 15U’s. Power and cooling requirements for the data room were reduced by more then 50%. The park district gained fault tolerance, and high availability; the system is designed to continue business operations with a two host failure. The organization also gained much more flexibility within their system to meet the public's needs. Other benefits have been much better performance logging and reporting. The organization has acknowledged system performance was dramatically improved across all servers.

SkyByte has been working with Virtualization technologies since 2003. Over the last several years we have focused our infrastructure practice on server virtualization and server consolidation through the use of VMware vSphere Clusters and standalone ESX and ESXi hosts. He have aligned ourselves with NetApp and EMC for storage solutions. SkyByte has found VMware’s virtualization product suite to be vastly superior to the competing server Virtualization software such as Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer. Specifically the levels of refinement, flexibility, reliability and support are much better with the VMware products.

Contact us today for a free evaluation of what Virtualization can do for your organization. 847.574.6256 or info@skybyte.com

VMware Horizon Mobile And Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP) Are Coming Next Year

Saturday, November 26, 2011 by Mario McGuire

VMware is constantly pushing boundaries on the virtualization front and sometime next year will release MVP or Mobile Virtualization Platform. This exciting technology will allow a single phone to become your personal and business cell phone all in one. With MVP companies IT teams can enforce security and compliance policies, ease management, and reduce capital expenditures while giving the employees the freedom to use the mobile device of their choice.

Secure employee-owned devices with access to corporate resources.
Manage and provision all mobile endpoints and desktop from a single interface.
Reduce costs and allow employees to use their own mobile device for work.
Safely support a wide variety of mobile phones connecting to a company network.

More and more users are asking their IT departments to support their Android, iOS, and Blackberry units this is called "Consumerization of IT". There are many challenges for IT departments to keep up with security, compliance and ease of management. VMware MVP will allow enterprises to get the security and ease of management they require while reducing the costs involved.

Deploying a corporate profile on an employee-owned device allows IT departments to enforce security and compliance policies. With VMware MVP, a personal profile and a company profile can securely and simultaneously run on the same device instead of having two separate devices. Corporate applications and data are securely isolated from an employee's personal profile.

Management of mobile devices has always been a tough task. With VMware MVP you can remotely provision, manage and update corporate profiles in a streamlined manner no matter what device the user carries. Employees can use the personal devices to connect to their corporate network from a profile that was provisioned and managed by their companies IT department. IT administrators can manage mobile end-points and desktops from a single interface.

The ever growing mobile market will continue to present IT departments with new challenges. There are a few companies out there like VMware that are working to make these devices easier for IT to administer and more productive for the end-user. Look for more information on this product in the coming months. This will be a very anticipated release for coming year.

Desktop icons launch with a single click - Citrix Xenapp Support

Saturday, November 26, 2011 by Greg Bock

SkyByte is currently in the process of deploying a Citrix Xenapp installation and upgrade for a 40 user environment.   The new Xenapp 6.0 farm includes four virtual Windows 2008 R2 servers and a variety of published applications. The farm is running of a VMware Vsphere cluster with end users using some of the latest thin client technology. The current farm runs Citrix Presentation Server 4.0 on several Windows 2003 servers. The major drawback to the current system is the 32 bit hosts and the 4GB memory limitation.   The 64 bit architecture will allow us to handle more users per host and more importantly, allocate more resources.  Each host can efficiently run resource rich applications such as Microsoft Excel 2010.

Testing has showed small tweaks were needed.  One behavior we discovered that I want to mention was everything opened with a single click instead of the traditional double click.   We felt most users are accustomed to double clicking so it needed to be changed.  It can be too easy to accidentally launch programs and unnecessary change things while single clicking things on their desktops.

To change the setting from single to double clicking, a change was needed in group policy.  Even though it shows double clicking is enabled under folder options in 2008 R2, group policy was overriding it. The setting "Turn on Classic Shell" must be Disabled under:

User Configuration\Policies\Administrative Templates\Windows Components\Windows Explorer

Once the policy takes place, normal double clicking behavior was restored.

Using Windows 7 Backup Image .VHD File in Microsoft Hyper V Server 2008

Monday, November 7, 2011 by Mario McGuire

I recently ran into a situation that required me to get some information off of a Windows image backup. The file that Windows backup outputs is a .VHD file which is the same type that Hyper-V creates. I created a new virtual machine and attached the .VHD of the backup as the hard drive. When booting I received an error telling me "Boot Failure. Reboot and Select proper Boot device or Insert Boot Media in selected Boot device". After some digging around on the Internet I found some information explaining why it would not boot.

The .VHD file that Windows backup creates is just a data only file. These are not bootable and cannot be made bootable this is by design. There were some mentions of people getting this to work, but there were many who tried and failed. This .VHD file is intended to give you access to the file system on your old machine but not to be loaded into a virtual environment. To do this you would have to use the convert physical machine selection in Hyper-V or System Center Virtual Machine Manager to use the machine in a virtualization environment.

With the popularity of Server Virtualization Systems on the rise, maybe Microsoft will include an option on the backup and restore for Windows 8 that will allow for converting a physical to a virtual. This could even be just for Professional, Ultimate and Enterprise versions.

Adding 32 bit printer drivers to a 64 bit print server - Microsoft Server Support

Wednesday, October 19, 2011 by Greg Bock

Many of our clients have performed server upgrades to replace aging 32 bit hardware with 64 bit hardware.  Many have taken advantage of virtualization, allowing you to efficiently run multiple virtual servers on one piece of hardware. One of the VMware virtualization benefits is the ability to run a 64 bit guest OS.  When it comes to a new 64 bit print server, you may need to support print sharing for a mix of 32 and 64 bit workstations in your environment.  To properly share a printer for both architectures, both 32 and 64 bit drivers must be installed on the server OS. Windows Server 2008 R2 includes a large selection of printer drivers included with the OS, however, only 64 bit drivers are included. When you try and add 32 bit (x86) driver, you will find no drivers are available on the system.  This means you have to find 32 bit drivers from the printer's installation CD, the vendor's website or a 3rd party. The best advice is start at the vendor's website for most up to date drivers.

To add to the challenge, many older printers don't offer 64 bit drivers. Microsoft has done a good job supporting older printers with it's own native 64 bit drivers with the OS itself and through Windows Update.  This is very helpful and can save you from having to purchase a new printer.  However, you also need to add a 32 bit version to support any 32 bit clients, and this is where the next challenge lies. In order to share a printer with both 32 bit and 64 bit drivers, the driver names must match.  If they don't, Windows may reject the driver from being installed.

For example, you need 32 and 64 bit drivers for a HP Laserjet 4200, but HP only has 32 bit drivers available on their website. Windows 2008 R2 has a native 64 bit driver for the printer and it installs as "HP Laserjet 4200 PCL6". You download the 32 bit driver from HP's website, and the driver you download is called "HP Laserjet 4200 PCL 6" (added space between PCL and 6). When you attempt to install it rejects the driver since the name does not match the 64 bit driver.  This is very common and SkyByte Consulting has seen this countless times.

In this situation you have some options. You can try obtaining 32 bit native drivers off a Windows Server 2008 32 bit disk, or through Windows Update. If neither help, what I have found to work the best is find a Windows Vista or Windows 7 32 bit machine joined to the same network with administrative rights. Both OS's will come with their own 32 bit native drivers that should match the name as the 64 bit native drivers on the 2008 Server. In order to add these drivers, you need administrative rights to connect to the print server.

1. On a Windows Vista or 7 32 bit machine, open Print Management in the Administrative Tools.
2. Right click on Print Servers and choose Add/Remove Print Servers...
3. Add the host name of the 64 bit print server. If successful it will appear below.
4. Expand the hostname and click on drivers. You will see all the 64 bit drivers installed to the system.
5. Now add the 32 bit native drivers found on the native 32 bit OS.  They will automatically install to the 64 bit print server.

Verify the drivers installed onto the 2008 R2 server in the Print Management console.  You should now be able to share printers with both 32 and 64 bit drivers ready for your clients.

Using e-Sata or USB 3.0 Drives to host VHD Files - Virtualization

Wednesday, October 19, 2011 by Mario McGuire

How many times have you not had sufficient space on your virtual server due to growing exchange data stores, SQL databases, or Data Protection Manager backups? It can be a daunting task, in smaller networks, to have sufficient drive space on VM hosts. Using Microsoft Hyper V server 2008, I've setup test and dev machines and just hosted the VM files off on an external hard drive.

In the past external hard drives running USB 1.1 and 2.0 were too slow to host a file such as a .VHD effectively. Within the last couple of years technologies like e-Sata and USB 3.0 have emerged as great choice's for an external interface. These newer external ports offer superior read and write throughput performance for hard drives. You can purchase expansion cards that give your server the ability to have these ports. In the case of e-Sata, you can also employ Raid setups using external drive housings that support raid 0,1,5,10 and others.

I've found that, depending on your virtualization hosts configuration, you can setup or relocate .VHD files onto an external drive. Also you could add an external drive to house all of your machine backups and images on drives up to 3TB in size. With the performance of both USB 3.0 and e-Sata you can create, deploy, and restore in a fairly quick amount of time. Non-essential or lightly used VM's could be hosted on a single external drive with higher use possible using an e-Sata Raid setup. This solution would be very easy to implement with many server virtualization systems and very inexpensive compared to upgrading the drives in a server.

Remote desktop not accepting connections on terminal server - Citrix Xenapp Support

Sunday, September 4, 2011 by Greg Bock

A few weeks ago I could ran across a bizarre issue where I could not access a Citrix Presentation server using Microsoft Remote Desktop. The server was acting as if it was offline or RDP was disabled when you attempted to connect using the RDP client. I confirmed the server was online and responding to ping commands. I could even gain access to the server remotely through the ICA client. I checked the obvious things such as making sure RDP was enabled and any network firewall security settings were not blocking access on port 3389. Furthermore, I opened a command prompt on the server and executed a netstat -a command. I confirmed the RDP service was in fact listening on port 3389. I even rebooted the server but the problem remained.

This particular server was a Windows 2003 Server with Citrix Presentation 4.0 installed. It had been a couple years since virtualization of this server had taken place to a Vmware vpshere cluster and no major changes had been performed in recent time. The problem ended up being related to a setting in the Terminal Services Configuration. I opened the properties of the RDP-TCP connection and noticed it was not bound to any networking adapter, while the ICA-TCP connection was. I chose and applied "All network adapters configured with this protocol" which immediately resolved the issue. While I don't know how this setting was changed, I was happy it was an easy fix.

VMware MAC addresses changed after migration to vCenter server - Chicago Network Support

Tuesday, July 26, 2011 by Greg Bock

SkyByte Consulting recently migrated 17 VMware virtual machines spread out on 4 hosts into a vCenter server cluster. The VMware virtualization benefits produced from this migration provides redundancy and reliability in the event of a host or hardware failure. Virtual machines can be moved seamlessly between hosts without needing to shut down the guest OS. Several changes occured during this migration including a new range of MAC addresses provided for each guest OS's virtual network adapter. While we saw minimal side effects from this, a CAD licensing server required its old MAC address to function properly. Since the license file was bound to the old MAC address, forcing the MAC address back to it's old value was required.

Any guest migrated into vCenter's inventory will be assigned a new MAC address from the pre-determined range. There a few ways of changing the MAC address, one changing the actual MAC in each guest's .VMX file. The other and easier alternative is changing the MAC address in the guest OS itself. For a Windows OS, you can force the network adapter to use any MAC address. Following these directions found here to change the MAC address: http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1008473

Open the Device Manager. Click Start > Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Device Manager.
Expand Network Adapters. Right-click VMware Accelerated AMD PCNet Adapter or Intel Pro/1000MT. Click Properties.
Click the Advanced tab.
Click NetworkAddress for VMware Accelerated AMD PCNet Adapter or Locally Administered Address for Intel Pro/1000MT.
Select Value.
Enter the desired MAC address without the colons (:).
Restart the virtual machine to ensure that the change takes full effect over the network.

Once changed, reboot the guest OS and the new MAC address should be active!

VMM host in Needs Attention state after installation of KB978560

Sunday, July 24, 2011 by Mario McGuire

Just as a quick support tip - If your Hosts in SCVMM are all saying "Needs Attention" after applying the latest roll-up, you may need to update the agent on each management host.

To do this all you need to do is open up you SCVMM console and select Hosts on the left pane. Then right click on the server saying "Needs Attention" and click Update Agent. Type in your admin credentials and give it a minute to update. Then right click again on the server and tell it to refresh, it should now show up without anymore issues.

This is just another of the little nuisance's that admins have to worry about after applying patches to our servers.

This relates to Microsoft Hyper V Server 2008, System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2, and also Microsoft Server Virtualization.

Blackberry handhelds cannot playback .wav voicemail files - Blackberry Enterprise Server Support

Thursday, May 19, 2011 by Greg Bock

Recently SkyByte Consulting configured new Blackberry 9800 devices to a new Blackberry Enterprise Server Express installation. The BES install was included in the scope of a Vmware Vsphere Installation project for a small law firm. BES was installed on a Windows Server 2008 R2 64 bit virtualized VMware server running Blackberry Enterprise Server Express 5.0.2.29. A problem was soon discovered that .wav audio files could not be played back on any of the handheld devices. The .wav files were voicemails sent from their IP phone system as an email attachment. When playback was attempted, the device would say "Media is from an unsupported format".

The solution:

1. First you will need to install Windows Media Player on the host server for BES. For Server 2008, you need to install the "Desktop Experience" in server manager features to obtain WMP.
2. Once WMP is installed, test playback of a sample .wav file and ensure you do not need a special codec installed. If a codec is needed, you must install it to the server. For VMware or servers using virtualization without a sound card you will get an error saying something about no sound device installed - which is OK.
3. Next log into the Blackberry Administrator Service
4. Under Servers and components, expand BlackBerry Solution Topology, Expand BlackBerry Domain, expand Component view, expand Attachment, expand Server, click on the instance.
5. Scroll down to and click edit instance.
6. Find WAV attachment and you will see "0" as the attachment size. Change the value to "1024". Click save.
7. Click on restart instance or reboot the server.
8. Test playback on the phones. If playback still doesn't work, powercycle the device.

You should now be able to listen to your office voicemails on your Blackberry!

Blackberry 9800 device will not install drivers onto system - Chicago Network Support

Friday, April 22, 2011 by Greg Bock

Recently I had a user install a new Bluetooth device to his Windows Vista laptop which somehow corrupted the drivers for his Blackberry handheld. This user often uses his Blackberry as a modem when WiFi or other Internet connection is not available.  He uses the laptop and Blackberry's Bluetooth to establish the connection between devices. The problem was each time he would boot his laptop or connect the device with a USB cable, it would prompt for a driver installation. The driver installation would ultimately fail and the device manager would show two "Unknown Devices".

After many attempts of uninstalling the drivers, reinstalling Blackberry Desktop Manager, the AT&T connection manager, and directing the installer to the drivers in the Common Files directory, they simply would not install.  The solution was to manually choose the drivers by choosing from a list of device drivers on the computer.

Open Device Manager
Right click on the Unknown Devices and choose Update Driver Software
Choose "Browse My Computer for Driver Software"
Choose "Let me pick from a list of device drivers on my computer"
Select "Ports LPT & COM"'
Under manufacturer select "RIM Virtual Serial Ports"
Choose the only driver "RIM Virtual Serial Port v2"

Apply and it will successfully install.  Do the same for the other unknown device and the Blackberry should now work without any future prompts.

VMware guest randomly shuts down itself shortly after login - Chicago network support

Tuesday, March 29, 2011 by Greg Bock

After converting a user's physical Windows XP workstation to a VMware virtual machine, I ran into a problem where the guest would continuously shut down itself. The user received an upgraded computer with Windows 7, however a necessary application was not compatible in Windows 7. We decided to configure the user to remote desktop the VMware guest to access his application. SkyByte knows VMware virtualization benefits and one of those benefits is the ability to convert a physical machine into a virtual within minutes. Under normal circumstances, this process is virtually flawless.

Problem:

VMware guest OS reboots randomly 1-2 minutes after logging in. This did not occur in Safe Mode.

Cause:

The Uninterpretable Power Supply service was causing the server to immediately shut down. The OS likely could not determine the power source and would shut down the OS. The UPS service is disabled in Safe Mode, which is why it would not occur.

Solution:

Disabled the UPS service from starting.

This machine was on a UPS prior to the conversion to a VMware virtual server. The UPS service carried over to the VMware environment and just needed to be disabled.

VMware vSphere error mounting NetApp NFS volume: "error during configuration of the host. Cannot open volume"

Tuesday, March 29, 2011 by Darren Sieck

Recently SkyByte designed and built a new VMware vSphere Cluster centered around a NetApp FAS2040 SAN connected via NFS. We configured networking, volumes, NFS exports and export permissions on both controllers. We then began the task of mounting the NFS datastores on the VMware hosts. We were able to successfully mount all the volumes on controller 1 but when mounting them on controller 2, we would get the following error:

Problem: "error during configuration of the host. Cannot open volume" note: Once or twice we were able to get the VMware host to mount the NFS without the error, however it would report as 0KB in size instead of it's actual size, and the datastore was completely inaccessible.

After pouring through the network settings on all the VMware hosts and SAN settings, We figured we had a permission type error. On the NetAPP SAN we verified the VMware host IPs had read-write access to each NFS export. It took us several hours to figure out the problem. I hope this helps someone.

Solution: The problem was the Qtree security on Controller 2 was defaulted to NTFS. Navigate to Qtree's on the offending NetAPP controller and check that your Qtree security type is set to UNIX. After making the change to each Qtree we were able to successfully mount all NFS volumes on the vSphere cluster.

SkyByte is VMware professional partner. We are well versed in ESX & ESXi virtualization cluster installation, upgrades, and migrations. Call or email us for information on VMware Virtualization Benefits.

OWA failing after installation of rollup 2 for Exchange 2010 SP1 - Microsoft Exchange Upgrade

Thursday, March 17, 2011 by Mario McGuire

Updating Exchange Server can be a daunting task, but I have run into what seems to be a very common problem and would like to share my findings.

If your having problems with OWA after installing Microsoft Exchange Servers latest Update Rollup 2, I might have the answer for you.

Error -
Outlook Web App didn't initialize. If the problem continues, please contact your helpdesk.

Couldn't find a base theme (folder name=base).

Cause -
The update failed to update the OWA virtual directory or the command wasn't run as an admin in the Exchange Management Console.

Solution 1 -
1. Start an exchange powershell shell and run

2. execute this "C:Program FilesMicrosoftExchange ServerV14BinUpdateCas.ps1"

3. Open elevated command prompt and run "iisreset /noforce"

If this doesn't work try the next solution.

Solution 2 -
1. Goto Programs and Features and uninstall the Rollup 2

2. Start an Administrative Exchange Management Shell

3. Type the location of the update Roll Up 1 "Exchange2010-KB976573-x64-en.msp" or Roll Up 2 "Exchange2010-KB2425179-x64-en.msp" (I.E. c:usersuserdownloadsExchange2010-KB976573-x64-en.msp)

4. Close the Exchange Management Shell and finish the patch.

5. Open elevated command prompt and run "iisreset /noforce"

Note: If you do not run the Exchange Management Shell as an Administrative prompt, you will get an error regarding a failed install.

Hopefully this fixes any potential issues you may run into after these updates. Skybyte Consulting can assist you with all of your various Exchange 2003, 2007 and 2010 needs.

This post may also relate to Microsoft Server Virtualization with Exchange server and Microsoft Server Support.

Default Exchange 2010 OWA shows blank page - Microsoft Server Support

Thursday, March 17, 2011 by Mario McGuire

Installing Exchange 2010 SP1 can be a challenging task. Microsoft requires a metric ton of prerequisites prior to install. Recently after patching exchange 2010 with SP1, I found OWA was no longer working properly and displaying a blank page. I tired several steps to fix OWA including recreating the virtual directory per Microsoft's recommendations. Unfortunately Microsoft's white papers didn't give any hints to this problem before hand. Fortunately I found this solution:

Issue - After installing Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 SP1 out of the box successfully, owa no longer works and displays a blank page: https://xxx.yyy.local/owa/auth/logon…l/owa&reason=0

Solution 1 - Open Power shell (Run As Administrator) copy and paste the following commands to add the HTTP over RPC service.

1. Import-Module ServerManager

2. Add-WindowsFeature NET-Framework,RSAT-ADDS,Web-Server,Web-Basic-Auth,Web-Windows-Auth,Web-Metabase,Web-Net-Ext,Web-Lgcy-Mgmt-Console,WAS-Process-Model,RSAT-Web-Server,Web-ISAPI-Ext,Web-Digest-Auth,Web-Dyn-Compression,NET-HTTP-Activation,RPC-Over-HTTP-Proxy -Restart

Solution 2 - If you want to do this via GUI rather than via the PowerShell command, then navigate to Server Manager->Features->Add Feature, select to install the “RPC over HTTP Proxy” feature.

These will install the needed feature, and all dependent features, which will resolve the “blank OWA page” issue.

This post may also relate to Microsoft Exchange Upgrade and or Microsoft Server Virtualization with Exchange server.

VMware Virtual server shows 1 processor when 4 are configured - Microsoft Server Support

Tuesday, March 15, 2011 by Greg Bock

After converting a Microsoft Virtual server image to a VMware virtual server image using a third party tool, I discovered the number of processors in the VMware configuration were not reflected on the guest OS. The server was displaying one processor in the task manager, but showed four installed processors in the device manager. Furthermore, the HAL was configured as a "Advanced Configuration and Power Interface ACPI PC" when it should be a "ACPI Multiprocessor PC" under Computer in device manager.

The problem was the original configuration included one processor core in it's Microsoft Server virtualization environment. This carried over during the conversion process to the multiprocessor VMware Vsphere cluster. Since the server was running Server 2003, it is not easy to switch back and forth between uni and multi processor HALs without potential consequences. It seemed the only solutions were to run a repair install or rebuild the server. Since this virtual server contained a Citrix Xenapp installation, I did not want to risk a repair install or worse, a complete rebuild. I then found a script thanks to this website, which successfully converted the HAL to a multiprocessor PC. You will need the Microsoft command line utility devcon. Run the following commands:

Reboot the server and verify it displays "ACPI Multiprocessor PC" under Computer in device manager. You should see all configured processors in task manager as well. If the server does not boot, you may need to reconfigure the number of processors in VMware to one, reboot, reconfigure processors back again, followed by another reboot. I cannot stress enough the need to create a backup of the server before attempting this. This was a very risky procedure that could have easily corrupted the server to the point of no return. Thanks to the many VMware virtualization benefits, I created a snapshot of the server prior to running these commands, in case I needed something to fall back on.

Moving SCVMM database - Microsoft Server Virtualization

Thursday, March 10, 2011 by Mario McGuire

If you find yourself needing to move the SCVMM database from one server to another this will explain what you will need to do and potential pitfalls. For instance, this situation can occur when moving from local to remote SQL or from a stand-alone SQL server to a SQL cluster. The following instructions are provided as a guideline on how to accomplish this move from a SCVMM perspective.

Important! Before undertaking this process perform complete backup of the SCVMM database And save it to a secure location.

The two methods to accomplish the task of backing up and moving the SQL database are using SQL Server Management Studio or the built in scvmmrecover.exe tool built into SCVMM.

Technique #1 - Using SQL Server Management Studio

How to move SCVMM database to another server (local to remote SQL)

1. Backup the existing SCVMM DB

2. Uninstall SCVMM with the Retain Data option

3. On the remote SQL server, import SCVMM db

4. Install SCVMM pointing at the new SQL server and using the imported SCVMM db

5. If any managed host has the status of Access Denied, right click and select Re-associate

Technique #2 - Using the scvmmrecover.exe tool

The scvmmrecover.exe tool is discussed in great detail at the following TechNet article: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc956045.aspx

Microsoft Server Virtualization has become the backbone for many companies infrastructures. Utilities like SCVMM makes monitoring and deploying to your Virtualization infrastructure easier to manage.

OWA Options Button Broken - Microsoft Exchange Upgrade

Tuesday, February 15, 2011 by Mario McGuire

Are you users having problems with their options button in Outlook Web Access? I noticed that after performing a Microsoft Exchange Upgrade to 2010 SP1 RTM from 2007 R2, that when their users would hit the options button the page would simply just refresh. I dug around on the Internet and found the answer's. There are two possible fixes for this, and the second one worked for the problem I was having.

Mirror the ECP and OWA virtual sites, authentication settings in IIS.
Check the ECP Site and make sure its not redirecting to the OWA site.

Make sure that before you change either of these that you reference you networks security policy or talk with your security admin. SkyByte Consulting has been performing Exchange Server upgrades and migrations for over 12yrs. SkyByte can also Virtualize your Exchange server, or any other servers in your environment. If you have any questions please contact us at itsupport@skybyte.com