by Eric Siron
Like any creative work, a blog post is never really done; it’s just abandoned. Unlike many other mediums, blogs do allow us to easily refresh those older articles, but we so rarely ever do it. To close out this year, a few of us on the editorial team got together and selected a few highlights from the past year.
Our 14 selections from 2014 (in no particular order):
( http://www.altaro.com/hyper-v/hyper-v-portal-2014-year-review)
by Luke Orellana
The other day I ran into one of the most common issues IT pros have to face, file corruption. Out of the blue, one of our clients called in reporting issues printing from their Windows Server 2008 terminal server.
This was a VM, which was being hosted on a Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V Cluster. Users were not receiving their redirected printers at logon. It turned out multiple remote desktop services were repeatedly crashing. A read only Check Disk on the system volume reported evidence of corrupt system files. In order to repair the corrupt files, a Check Disk repair had to be run on the system volume which required the server to be offline. This process ended up taking over 6 hours to fully complete the repair resulting in unwanted downtime and lost productivity for the client.
by Eric Siron
In the introductory article of this series, we talked about objects in PowerShell and how the large and grandiose uses of PowerShell are difficult to explain. While reflecting on that article, I realized that out of all the programming languages that I know, PowerShell’s verb-noun convention is probably the best way there is. This article will revisit that subject along with an investigation of the Get-VM cmdlet. If you’ve already got a good understanding of PowerShell objects and just want to learn about Get-VM, skip to the second half.
Original post link: Hyper-V and PowerShell: A Deep Dive into Get-VM
Our monthly commentary and link round-up for November 2014.
If you read very much of what I write, you’ll know that I don’t put a lot of stock in fancy titles or credentials and I certainly pay little attention to self-anointed experts, regardless of how many popularity contests they’ve won. The only thing I pay attention to is what really, truly works, and it doesn’t matter at all to me who says it. This has been my only principle ever since the first time I was at the mercy of a support “technician” that had no idea what to do and whose only goal was to get me off the phone. Over the course of the past decade and a half, I’ve gotten fairly good at quickly determining who the fraud in the room is.
Read more: http://www.altaro.com/hyper-v/monthly-hyper-v-round-november-2014/
Newsletter December 2014
Contents include:
Microsoft licensing for virtual environments can be tricky and there are a lot of misconceptions out there on how to ensure you comply, but also special benefits some may be unaware of.
Are you looking to get to grips with Microsoft licensing for virtual environments?
We’ve got something special for you!
We asked our very own Hyper-V guru Eric Siron, and Hyper-V MVP Thomas Maurer to take you through the theory and a dozen or so example scenarios to help you gain a solid understanding of Microsoft licensing for virtual environments.
We’re offering you two formats:
What we’ll be covering:
Sign up for the webinar here
Download your copy of the eBook here
by Eric Siron
If you’ve had very much virtual machine churn in your environment, it’s almost inevitable that you’ve wound up with a few disconnected virtual machine files here and there. This free script will help you to locate orphaned Hyper-V VM files. For fellow infrastructure scripters, there is a special bonus script included as well.
The worst thing about my testing environment is that I often wind up with files that look legitimate, but are no longer part of any virtual machine. Even in live environments, some virtual machine moves and operations leave a trail of unwanted files. Errors and failures can produce more.
Original post link: Free Script: Find Orphaned Hyper-V VM Files
An international survey conducted among MailStore Server customers in the United States of America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland and further countries confirms the high level of satisfaction with the quality of our products and services. Over 480 companies responded to our appeal and rated MailStore Server in terms of documentation, support, product features from the administrator’s and user’s point of view, and the price/performance ratio.
The results show that MailStore Server meets the expectations of the companies surveyed. A total of 97.7 percent of those surveyed would recommend the email archiving solution to others.
96.1 percent of participants rated stability as ‘Very good’ or ‘Good,’ while 93.2 percent judged performance of the software solution as ‘Very good’ or ‘Good.’ The services provided by the technical support team were also examined. 92.8 percent of those who took part in the survey rated the quality of support as ‘Very good’ or ‘Good’ and 92.2 percent judged response times to be ‘Very good’ or ‘Good.’
We are delighted with this fantastic feedback and would like to thank all of those who took part in the survey. Your evaluations and suggestions motivate us to continue to do our best to ensure that our email archiving solutions and our services exceed your expectations in the future.
You can find more information about the results in our current press release and in our new white paper Customer Satisfaction Survey 2014
by Luke Orellana
As an IT Professional, you might find yourself blessed with the unfortunate scenario of working on a Hyper-V server that is not able to authenticate to the domain and the cached domain credentials are no longer working. In addition to this predicament, you learn that there is no documentation for the local administrator password. Either the client who you’re working for doesn’t know the local administrator password or the previous engineer who built the server is no longer working for your company and the standard passwords aren’t working.
A 3rd party password cracker application will allow you to reset the local administrator password. The drawback is you have to pay for it and in my experience they don’t always work.
Follow the steps below and use the Ease of Access Exploit to change the local administrator password.
Read the full blog post here.
MailStore Server 9 has an integrated task scheduler that greatly simplifies the creation and execution of archiving tasks. All tasks for archiving email servers were previously created in the Windows Task Scheduler of the system on which the client was running by the MailStore Client software. MailStore Server now controls these types of archiving tasks, completely independently and centrally. In addition, the administrator no longer needs to set execution intervals; MailStore Server automatically defines the optimal scheduling for all available tasks.
MailStore Web Access and the Outlook add-in now also offer an HTML preview and can display archived emails in a fashion similar to what you’re used to seeing in Microsoft Outlook. A whitelist-based HTML sanitizer, specifically developed for MailStore, provides the necessary security. Moreover, the display of recipients and file attachments has been significantly improved; this includes MailStore Client, too.
As of Version 9, the MailStore Client software no longer needs to be manually updated when you update the server (from Version 9.0 to 9.1). MailStore Client and the Outlook add-in are automatically updated using the auto update feature. A manual or group policy controlled update of the client components is only necessary again in certain situations when upgrading the main version (for example, from 9.x to 10).
MailStore Server 9 can write event types defined by the administrator not only in the Windows event log but also in the form of text files in a directory in the file system. MailStore Server 9 also has a special viewer with many sorting and filtering features, allowing the files to be easily accessed and quickly analyzed.
MailStore Server analyses every email that has been received during archiving and checks whether it has already been archived in order to prevent duplicates in the archive. The time required for this process varies and depends on the number of mailboxes to be archived, the volume of received email, and the size of the existing archive.
The diagram shows the measurement results when archiving 148 IMAP mailboxes with 25 simultaneous threads and a total of 902,716 emails to be checked. MailStore Server 8 required 25:39 minutes. MailStore Server 9 required 8:12 minutes.
The intelligent caching system and a new store hinting algorithm implemented in MailStore Server 9 allow mailboxes for Exchange EWS and IMAP to be archived at a much faster rate. At the same time, the new archiving methods allow the CPU resources of modern systems to be used more efficiently and significantly reduce network traffic and the workload of the email server.
The MailStore Client’s message list, which lists search results or displays the content of a folder in the archive, was completely revised. It can now effortlessly display hundreds of thousands of elements. The message lists of MailStore Web Access and the add-in for Outlook have also been optimized so that the results continue to load automatically when scrolling.
A newly developed lock manager in MailStore Server 9 ensures that the internal standby modes are reduced to a minimum. This allows a fluid interaction with the system, even in high load situations, and results in an improved user experience.
MailStore Server 9’s integrated backup feature now also writes a *.csv file in which the original storage location is retained. The backup can be restored to the productive environment with minimal effort via a batch file, which is also automatically generated. The MailStore Server service now also supports the commands ‘PAUSE’ and ‘CONTINUE’ to simplify the creation of snapshots as an alternative to using VSS snapshots.
The 30-day trial version of MailStore Server 9 can be installed in just a few minutes on any Windows PC (or virtual environment) and tested immediately. No changes will be made to your email server or emails at any time during archiving.
Are you already a customer with active update and support service? If so, MailStore Server 9 is ready for you to download now, free of charge. Please be sure to read the release notes.