Change DAG Witness Server - Exchange 2010 Hosted

I recently had to change a DAG on Exchange 2010 Hosted. This only uses the Exchange Management Shell, and I couldn't find instructions specific to this, so I thought I'd share my experience.

Requirements

Witness Server has the following Requirements:

-          Can’t be part of the DAG

-          Same AD forest as DAG

-          Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2003 R2, or Windows Server 2003

-          Each DAG requires a different witness directory, but they can all be run on the same server

Permissions

Set permissions on target server –

Local Administrors group – add Exchange Trusted Subsystem

Reboot server to apply permissions

Commands

Go to Exchange Management Shell, and type in:

Get-DatabaseAvailabilityGroup | fl

There are two lines to pay attention to: WitnessServer and WitnessDirectory

To change the Witness server, type the following:

Get-DatabaseAvailabilityGroup | Set-DatabaseAvailabilityGroup –WitnessServer witness.serverdomain.local –WitnessDirectory C:\DAG1

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Dustin Shaw
VCP

V2V from Hyper-V to VMware ESXi

So you finally came to the realization that Microsoft Hyper-V really isn't as mature as you were lead to believe. Good! You can attend the Gullible Anonymous meetings later. First, let's get you over to something that can keep your servers up and running and performing like the $10k you spent on your hardware should provide you.

Assuming that you have a free server available, doing a V2V from Hyper-V to VMware ESXi is extremely easy. Just think of this as doing a P2V, and ignore the wasted resources in between...

Take one of your spare servers, and load up VMware ESXi on it (you can do 4.1 or 5, or whatever strikes your fancy). Get it all ready for the VM to run on it, and get it on the same network and gig switch as your Hyper-V box.

Login to the VM that you want to convert, and download and install VMware's Standalone Converter on it (current version is 5.0). Current supported platforms are:

Windows XP Professional (32-bit and 64-bit)

Windows Server 2003 SP2, R2 (32-bit and 64-bit)

Windows Vista (32-bit and 64-bit)

Windows Server 2008 (32-bit and 64-bit)

Windows Server 2008 R2 (64-bit)

Windows 7 (32-bit and 64-bit)

Next, you will want to run the Converter against the local machine, and convert it to ESXi server that you just created. There are several settings to change to verify that it's done properly:

• Prep your computer for a P2V by stopping ALL unneccessary services. You only need core services to make sure that it's successful.
• Select Powered-on machine; local machine

• Put in the IP/Hostname of your new ESXi server and root/password

• Give it a destination Virtual Machine name
• Select a Resource Pool (if used), datastore, and Virtual Machine hardware version (unless you have a driving reason, go with Version 7)
• Set your disk drives the way that you want them to be on the new environment - I prefer Thin on all my disks, but it's up to you and your application. To change this, Edit the "Data to copy," Advanced, and Destination Layout tab. Change the type to Thin

• Change the Disk controller to SCSI. To change this, Edit the "Devices" and go to the Other tab. I typically select SCSI LSI Logic SAS for newer OSes and SCSI LSI Logic for older OSes.

• Set all services that say Hyper-V to disabled. To do this, Edit the "Services" and go to the Destination services tab. The ones I came across on my most recent migration were (your mileage may vary based on the version/options you have):
• Hyper-V Heartbeat Service
• Hyper-V Data Exchange Service
• Hyper-V Guest Shutdown Service
• Hyper-V Time Synchronization Service
• Hyper-V Volume Shadow Copy Requestor
• Edit Advanced options and go to the Post-conversion tab and check "Install VMware Tools on the destination virtual machine"

Off it goes converting. Once it's done, power down your Hyper-V VM, power up the VMware VM, and wait for the VMware Tools to install. Once that's done, uninstall the VMware Converter, and your off and running.

Now you can wipe your Hyper-V server, load up ESXi on it, and build yourself a nice little redundant cluster.

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Dustin Shaw
VCP

vSphere 5 is now available!

According to Yellow Bricks, it is now available for download. I'll update with links as soon as I get to a computer, but here is Yellow Bricks post.

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Dustin Shaw
VCP

Exchange 2010 and IE9 Issues

Ran across a known issue with Exchange 2010 and IE9. How do I know it was a known issue? I happened to be on the phone with Microsoft Support at the time for another issue...

The error that this combination causes is that you cannot close the Exchange Management Console in Exchange 2010. When you try to close it you receive the error message "You must close all dialog boxes before you can close Exchange Management Console."

My friendly guy on the Microsoft call told me that there is currently no fix - they are expecting to have a patch out around Q4 2011. The current fix, according to him, was "Don't install it. And uninstall it if you have already." I almost forgot to mute the phone before I started laughing. Gotta love when Microsoft tells you to not keep your computer up to date because it will break it...

So I decided to do some research on my own and (easily) found an article here with the fix.

Basically what you need to do is disable the Internet Explorer Enhanced Security Configuration, then add https://localhost to the trusted sites in IE and your good to go.

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Dustin Shaw
VCP

vSphere 5

A number of vSphere 5 official announcements came out today. You can check them out on VMware's official site.


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Dustin Shaw
VCP

View Pool Issues

Had a client call me this morning with an issue with one of his VMware View 4.5 pool. He said that his users were having issues logging into their desktops. They could login, but it was taking a long time to login. When he went to double check the settings in the pool he found that his vCenter Settings tab was red and the error it stated:
Cannot find host or cluster for this pool.

Since I set it all up for him initally, he stopped there and thought he'd better differ to the expert. Oh, and yes it does say "Data-Denter" - he's dislexic (aren't we all?)

I dug in further and found the following other errors. When clicking on "Browse" to chose Host or cluster, I received this error:
Server Error
One of the required objects is not found in vCenter Server vcenter.

When I looked at the desktops, they all had the same error listed:
Status
Resource Cluster \'/Data-Center/host/Cluster/Resources\' not found for pool: Poolname

Since it was a Floating resource pool with no persistent desktops, I decided the quickest and easiest thing to do for him would be to just create a new pool based of the same image (I'm going to have to give him a refresher on Recomposing; it looks like he is still running off the image I helped him create over a year ago). I disabled his old pool and told him to delete it once he felt comfortable that everything was running good on the new one.

Afterwords, I decided to glance around for an answer, and found this VMware KB article:
Editing an existing pool in the VMware View web admin interface fails with the error: One of required objects is not found in the VirtualCenter server <IP address>

Nothing has changed on his environment. He only has the vSphere Essentials bundle (he has a small shop with only 2 hosts), so he doesn't have any actual Resource Clusters. This is my thought as to where the corruption came from, but I've got nothing to confirm my suspicions. If anyone has some thoughts on this, I'd love to hear them.


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Dustin Shaw
VCP

Purple Screen of Death - Dell issues

You may notice I don't post a lot of issues on here. That's because we frankly don't have a whole lot of issues. I personally attribute it to using Best Practices, and regular maintenance. That said, things will still get lost in the weeds occasionally.

We ran into the Purple Screen of Death on one of our ESX 4.1 boxes yesterday. It is a Dell R610, and apparently had a hardware hiccup, and kicked out errors stating:

		Tue Apr 19 21:09:15 2011		PCIE Fatal Err: Critical Event sensor, bus fatal error (Bus 1 Device 0 Function 1) was asserted		0xA10002FBF9AD4DB1000413186FAA0101h
		Tue Apr 19 21:09:15 2011		Err Reg Pointer: OEM sensor, OEM Diagnostic data event was asserted		0xA00002FBF9AD4DB10004C11A7E011610h
		Tue Apr 19 21:09:15 2011		PCIE Fatal Err: Critical Event sensor, bus fatal error (Bus 1 Device 0 Function 0) was asserted		0x9F0002FBF9AD4DB1000413186FAA0001h
		Tue Apr 19 21:09:15 2011		Err Reg Pointer: OEM sensor, OEM Diagnostic data event was asserted		0x9E0002FBF9AD4DB10004C11A7E011610h

We rebooted the box, and it came back online just fine, but we didn't feel comfortable with it, so we stuck it in maintenance mode and had someone contact Dell. Dell reports that we need to update the Bios on it:

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Yes, it appears your system is affected by some of the microcode updates released from Intel on the 5500 and 5600 series processors.  That is likely the cause of these PCI errors.  The course of action we need to take is:

·         Update the BIOS

·         Update the iDRAC

·         Clear out the old log entries

·         Monitor for re-occurance.
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So it's sitting in maintenance mode until someone has some time to love on it. The awesome thing is that we run N+1 (one more box than we need) so we have that luxury. I know plenty of people that refuse to listen to why you should go N+1 who would be scrambling to make a maintenance window to update it.

The downside to this whole fiasco was that when it hiccupped, it stayed online (as is the default with ESX), and held onto the Storage of it's VMs. Therefore, HA couldn't restart them on another box until someone manually SHUT OFF the pretty Purple-VM-Eater. As soon as they did that, all was well in the world and the phone stopped ringing.

Since I'm not fond on relying on manual intervention to make HA work, I found the command for auto-restart when a PSoD happens and applied to ALL our hosts:

esxcfg-advcfg -s X /Misc/BlueScreenTimeout

Were X = number of seconds before restart

I went with 30 seconds, that way I have the opportunity of seeing the screen if I so happen to be looking at it when it dies.

 
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Dustin Shaw
VCP