Last weekend, we completed our third EBS production deployment as part of the EBS tap program, and I have to say, I was astounded, not only by the ease of install, but also by the speed!

This table shows how long it has taken us to complete the deployment of the 3 core EBS servers (not including the guided configuration).

Now all these installs have been into different environments, but the key point is how comprehensive and robust the EBS setup process is as we approach the release version. Not only is the setup itself very robust, but the preparation and planning tools allow you (actually, force you) to identify pre-existing issues with your environment and fix them before being able to install EBS.

I'd like to say a big thank you and congratulations to the EBS setup team, as this shows just how much effort has gone into this and what a great result you have achieved!

A number of times, I've gone to install SCE 2007, but been blocked by the pre-requisite requirements, primarily to do with IIS.

I've then gone and installed IIS and ASP.net, but it still blocks on asp.net v2 being required. Even after a restart this still blocks the install.

The solution is to register asp.net v2 with IIS, as it doesn't seem to have been registered correctly.

The solution is to use the following command:

%windir%\microsoft.net\framework\v2.0.50727\aspnet_regiis.exe -i

This will register asp.net v2 and allow SCE setup to progress.

I'm pleased to say that the covers have finally been taken off and the release date for EBS has been announced here at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in Houston, TX.

The big day will be November 12th!

By the time of launch, we will already have three live production deployments under our belt, including our own deployment which has been live since December 2007. We already have one customer deployed and running EBS, with another to follow soon.

As things ramp up towards the launch of EBS, look out for more articles and information on here as and when I'm allowed to post!

More info on the launch http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2008/jul08/07-07QAvanroekel.mspx

Microsoft finally announced earlier today that Hyper-V has released to manufacturing.

It's been imminent for a while, RC1 having been made publicly available a few weeks ago, and the release version is finally here.

It looks like it should be a pretty painless upgrade from RC1 - I've just upgraded our pseudo-production system (which I moved some VMs to today from VS2005) with no problems. Just make sure to shutdown any virtual machines and merge / remove any snapshots before attempting to upgrade.

Full details and links to the download available here:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/950050

Two things that seem to be incredibly hard to find on the microsoft web site are the livemeeting client and the outlook conferencing add-in, so here are the links to the latest versions:

Livemeeting Client: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/HA101733831033.aspx

Conferencing Add-in for Outlook: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/HA102368901033.aspx

The conferencing add-in now adds a nice "Meet Now" button - great for demo's instead of having to send a meeting request for now!

Over the course of the next couple of posts, I’m going to take a step by step look at protecting Essential Business Server with Microsoft Data Protction Manager 2007.

After LOB applications, and possibly file shares, the data held in the Exchange databases is probably the most important that your company holds, therefore I’m going to start by looking at protection of the Exchange storage groups. I’ll then go on to cover other aspects of protecting Exchange and then the other servers.

I’m not going to cover the base install of DPM, as it’s a pretty straightforward task. Note: DPM Must be installed on a separate server – NOT one of the EBS core servers! You could always use the 4th server in EBS premium.

In terms of hardware requirements, DPM likes lots of RAM – 4GB is ideal, although our production box only has 3. The other requirement is disk space – and lots of it! I see no reason why this couldn’t be cheap, high capacity SATA. Note, that DPM does NOT support USB hard disks – it will however support IDE, SATA, SCSI, SAS and eSATA. In our production system, we’re using internal SATA and external eSATA without any problems.

DPM is available in 32 bit and 64 bit versions, but for reasons that will become apparent, it’s much simpler to go down the 64 bit route when protecting EBS-  choosing 64 bit will make life much easier!

Step 1: Disable Circular Logging on EBS Messaging Server

Circular logging is turned on by default on EBS – this means that the exchange transaction logs are overwritten after a period of time. As we will be running an Exchange aware backup that truncates the logs after a successful backup, we don’’t want circular logging.

Open the Exchange Management console on the EBS messaging server and go to the properties of the storage group.

 

right click the Exchange storage group, click properties. Clear the checkmark on the Enable Circular Logging Box.

Step 2: Copy Required exchange files to DPM server

DPM uses eseutil from the Exchange binaries to perform consistency checking on the backed up data. To do this, it needs to have a local copy of eseutil.exe and ese.dll from the exchange server.

If you are running 64 bit DPM, simply copy the files from \\messaging\c$\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\bin to C:\program files\MicrosofDPM\ DPM\bin on the DPM server.

If however, you are running 32 bit DPM, then life is slightly more complicated, as you will need to find the 32 bit versions of these files. The easiest thing to do is download and install the Exchange Management tools on the DPM server. They can be obtained from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=6be38633-7248-4532-929b-76e9c677e802 Make sure that you download the version that matches your release of Exchange (for the current release of EBS, this is Exchange 2007 SP1).

Once installed, again, copy the files from C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\bin to C:\program files\MicrosofDPM\ DPM\bin

Once done, this will allow DPM to check the consistency of it’s exchange backups. Again, note that the version of the files on the DPM server needs to match the exchange server, and you may need to keep them updated in future (e.g. after the release and application of exchange 2007 sp2).

Step 3: Deploy the DPM agent to the Messaging Server

On the messaging server, connect to where you have the install files for DPM – in my case, I copied them to the DPM server. Run the agent installed (x64 version).

net use k: \\svrdpm\c$\DPM2007\agents

k:

dpmagentinstaller_amd64.exe

The agent will now be installed. Once complete a reboot will be required, but it is not initiated by the agent installer. Manually restart the server when appropriate.

Step 4: Attach the Client to the DPM Server

From the DPM server, we need to run a DPM powershell script to connect the agent to the DPM sever.

Open the DPM Management Shell and run Attach-ProtectedServer.ps1. Enter the name of the DPM server, the name of the server to attach, then your user credentials.

 

Step 5: Set the DPM Agent to connect to the server

The last step should have connected the agent to the server, but I haven’t had it work at this stage – the DPM console lists the server, but shows an error connecting to the protected server. We need to ensure that the agent is configured correctly and that the firewall on the protected server is allowing connections from the DPM server.

To do this, go to the protected server, open a command prompt and navigate to the DPM binaries folder (normally C:\program files\MicrosofDPM\ DPM\bin ) and run the following command:

SetDPMServer –dpmServerName DPMSERVER where DPMSERVER is the name of your DPM server. This will configure the DPM agent correctly and also configure the Windows Firewall as appropriate.

The DPM management console should now show that the server is able to communicate with the agent (on the management tab). In this screenshot, I’ve already protected MESSAGING, but MANAGEMENT just has the agent installed.

Step 6: Configure the protection group and add the exchange databases

I’ll continue with this in the next post.

I've been luck enough to get accepted onto the Live Mesh preview and have been exploring it for the last few days. It always looked like it would be useful, but now it has a real tangible use!

I've just obtained an Asus eeePC - the tiny little 7" solid state laptop that's been creating so much interest over the last few months. I wanted one primarily as an internet access device, but also for note taking and a quick simple tool for blogging.

Replacing the standard Linux image with Windows was pretty straightforward, but as much as I do like Vista, I think it would be a step too far for this machine, so I went with a clean install of XP SP3.

The eee PC is a bit of a departure from most current laptops, as it uses a small solid state disk (SSD) rather than a hard disk. This does limit it's disk space to 4GB, but it should be much faster than a hard disk and should have a positive effect on battery life and resilliency, as it has no moving parts.

Using nlite to remove non-essential parts of windows, I got my install down to under 1GB, leaving me over 2.5GB of space to install office, apps and data. I'll be interested to see just how long the solid state drive lasts - although these devices have a finite number of times each block can be written to, based on the online research I've done, this should not be a problem with a modern drive, and the device should have a long lifespan.

So, where you may be asking does Mesh come into this picture? Well, I already have mesh installed on my home PC and work laptop. By installing mesh on the eee pc, I can now sync automatically between the devices. Basically, I have 2 folders on my desktop - one for work, one for personal files. Simply saving or copying a file into one of these folders causes the file to be instantly replicated to all my devices! So, no more forgetting about files I've been working on on the home PC or vice versa!

More than that, I can also choose to share these folders with another person simply by emailing them an invite to the folder. On top of this, I can also access the files from any other device, if I have chosen to sync them onto my "live desktop", a virtual desktop hosted by Microsoft, that I guess is a kind of smarter version of skydrive.

Here is a picture of the mesh interface showing my devices:

I can access this web page from anywhere, and access files via the live desktop. If any of the connected devices are online, I can even remote desktop directly to them, although this is very slow - I assume because mesh is run from US datacentre's right now.

More on mesh to come...

Microsoft have just announced the pricing for Essential Business Server and Small Business Server, along with details on the public preview.

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/may08/05-13PublicPreviewPricingPR.mspx

Now that this information is in the public domain, I'm allowed to talk more about what we've been doing with EBS over the last month or so.

Look out for lots more posts in the coming days!

I'm sitting here at Newark airport waiting for a connection to Seattle. I'm on my way to Microsoft Redmond for some more in-depth training from the product team on Essential Business Server (more on that later).

I've got wireless Internet access, and have a remote desktop opened onto our production EBS beta 2 management server via the remote web workplace. From there I have a RDP session opened to another machine on our internal network. (can't run OA directly on management as scripting is disabled, not that it would be a great move from a security perspective anyway). From there I have then opened a web session to the onboard administrator on our HP c3000 blade system. From there, is yet another hop to the Integrated lights out management on the management server blade on the test system!

The fact that this work at all is quite incredible! In reality, it works better than I would have expected - contended wireless-> transatlantic link -> remote desktop -> remote desktop -> OA -> ILO.

Anyway, the upshot of all of this is that using the ILO and out of band management, I can finish configuring the firewall rules and VPN on my current EBS test system from half way round the world!

So, now that we are running EBS in production, what hardware are we using?

None of our existing servers were really up to the job, and we would require a clean install in any case, so new hardware was the only option. We decided on the very cost effective HP ProLiant DL385 - Dual processor capable AMD opteron boxes.

To keep costs under control, we have gone for fairly basic spec machines:

Management - Single Opteron, 2GB ECC RAM, 2 x 146GB SAS RAID1 - O/S, 3 x 72GB SAS RAID 5 Data

Security - Single Operton, 2GB ECC RAM, 2 x 146GB SAS RAID1 - O/S and data

Messaging - Single Opteron, 2GB ECC RAM, 2 x 146GB SAS RAID1 - O/S, 3 x 72GB SAS RAID 5 Data

Although the minimum requirements for EBS are stated as 2GB RAM on the messaging server, quite soon after install, we ran into some  performance issues. Upgrading to 4GB have cured these problems, and we have had a stable system since.

When we move to release candidate sometime later this year, we will migrate onto a new HP c3000 Blade System - more on this soon.

While the documentation for Essential Business Server covers the process for migrating public folders from and existing Exchange 2000 or 2003 server to EBS, it does not cover the steps required if migrating from Exchange 2007.

At present, this probably won't be too common a scenario, but it will happen. In our environment for example, we have been running Exchange 2007 more or less since it released so we could use it's Unified Messaging features.

It turns out that migration is a pretty straightforward process, although it's not particularly well documented - there's not a great deal out there on exchange 2007 public folders.

Create Database

The first step is to create a public folder database if one was not already created during EBS setup. To do this, open ESM on the EBS Messaging Server, go to server configuration -> Mailbox -> select the EBS server, then select a storage group (create a new storage group if required), then right click and select "New Public Folder Database".

Enter the location for the database and name it.

Replicate Folders

The next step is to replicate the folders across from the old server to the EBS Messaging server. There is an exchange powershell script that will do exactly this:

Open the exchange management shell on the EBS messaging server, then navigate to the c:\program files\microsoft\exchange server\scripts folder. Execute the script MoveAllReplicas.ps1:

.\MoveAllReplicas.ps1 -server OLDSERVER -newserver NEWSERVER

This will start the process of adding a replica to each public folder, replicating the data and removing the original server from the replica list. Depending on the amount of data, this could take hours or even days. You can monitor progress in the events logs, checking for exchange replication messages.

To confirm that the process is complete, use the Get-PublicFolderStatistics cmdlet and specify the server name:

Get-PublicFolderStatistics -server OLDSERVER

When replication is complete, there should be no output from this command. You can also check the statistics for the folders on the new server.

Update Default Public Folder Database

This is the step that I missed initially, and couldn't understand why my outlook clients were not accessing the folders on the EBS messaging server. Each mailbox database has an associated default public folder database associated, and directs outlook clients to this. From ESM open the properties of the mailbox database and go to the client settings tab and change the default database to your newly migrated public folder database.

Confirm All is Well

You can now dismount the database on the old server and ensure that clients can successfully access public folders. You can verify that the clients are no longer trying to connect to the old server by  CTRL-right clicking the outlook system tray icon and checking connection status:

Finally Remove Database

Now that all the replicas have been removed and we've checked everything is ok, we can now go ahead and remove the original public folder database. Note that exchange will prevent you from doing so if it still contains data.

Simply delete the database from ESM. Note that it must be mounted for exchange to verify it is safe to delete it and go ahead and delete.

On the weekend of the 8th of December, Digital IP became the first company outside of Redmond to go into production with the beta of Windows Essential Business Server.

We had a long weekend with the migration, but ultimately, we got there and our end users experienced no downtime or degradation of service.

The EBS team have done a great job with building the setup routines, and it was clear to see that significant progress had been made from the earlier betas we worked with back in August.

There are a number of key things to keep in mind when deploying EBS:

• Active Directory must be fully operational and error free - I'd recommend running DCDIAG before even thinking about deployment
• Make sure that replication is working successfully between all sites.
• DNS is also critical, as AD obviously relies on this. We ran into some issues with stale DNS records pointing to an old DC that had been removed from our network some time ago. This caused setup to take a lot longer than necessary.
• Ensure that you have connectivity to all DCs - we had connectivity issues with one of our remote DCs which affected the setup process
• Run the Exchange best practices analyzer as well to ensure the health of your exchange organisation.
• Make sure your environment is clean in terms of legacy servers being properly removed - e.g. a removed exchange 5.5 server still in your exchange org, group policy objects left from a previous SCE install

Overall, these items are just good housekeeping, and a well maintained network that has been thoroughly checked out should present few migration problems.

And it goes without saying - backup, backup, backup! Although the migration to EBS *should* be relatively pain free, and although it is updating both AD and your exchange organisation, even if something does go wrong it shouldn't impact your end users as no data is moved from your existing exchange server(s) and your existing DCs, DNS, DHCP can all be in place until you are happy EBS is working.

The area where you could run into user affecting issues could be with ISA - once you've started the cut-over process, you really need to get ISA up and running to enable Internet access and mail flow.

I've now had the official go ahead, so I can finally start talking about some of the things we've been working on over the last few months and what I really wanted to blog about!

In August last year, myself, one of our engineers and the IT manager from one of our customers paid a visit to Microsoft in Redmond.

As part of the technical adoption program for Centro - now officially named "Essential Business Server" Microsoft were running an airlift event. This is an in-depth technical workshop given directly by the product team to allow customers, partners and Microsoft staff to rapidly get up to speed with a new product. I was also fortunate enough to take part in the OCS airlift in January 07.

Not only that, but the EBS team were also offering a very limited number of partners and customers the chance to spend at week at the Enterprise Engineering Centre (www.microsoft.com/eec) testing a migration from their real world network to Centro.

We were fortunate to be the very first company to take part in the EEC engagement, and it happened to coincide with the Airlift, so we were able to attend both!

In preparation for our week at the EEC, we did a P2V conversion of our client's core servers - DCs, Exchange, File Servers etc. We were then able to take these captured images with us to the EEC and recreate the customer network in a virtual environment.

All in all, the week was a great success, we uncovered a number of bugs in EBS, and it really was quite an experience to find a bug and minutes later have members of the development team in the room poring over the logs!

During the course of the week we were able to overcome the issues, and we also uncovered some issues with the customer's environment. By the end of the week, we had successfully migrated a virtual replica of the client network to Centro.

Spending the week on Microsoft campus and working with the EBS team at the EEC was certainly an eye opener! I've previously worked on what I thought was a large campus (uk government with approx 7000 staff), but Microsoft Redmond is something else altogether! To put it in perspective, we were in building 25, and the building numbers go up to over 127 and they are still building!

I'd like to take this opportunity to thank all the staff in the EBS team and at the EEC for a very enjoyable and most of all productive experience!

Over the coming months, I will be charting our progress with EBS on our production network (Beta 2), including the initial install and day to day experience, then the migration to RC0 and finally to RTM. I'll also be looking at suitable hardware platforms including the new awesome HP c3000 BladeSystem and the integration of a complete Microsoft unified communications solution into the EBS environment.

When working with servers, particularly on test systems, it's very handy to be able to mount ISO images. e.g. a downloaded image from MSDN for building a lab environment.

The Virtual CD Control Panel, a free (unsupported) tool from Microsoft allows ISO images to be mounted as "Virtual CD Drives".

This works for 2000, XP and 2003, but unfortunately, not Vista.

http://download.microsoft.com/download/7/b/6/7b6abd84-7841-4978-96f5-bd58df02efa2/winxpvirtualcdcontrolpanel_21.exe

We use public folders for incoming helpdesk requests, and recently had a requirement to allow 2 new members of staff to reply to these emails with the address of the folder i.e. support@company.com. With exchange 2007 it was a little tricky to figure out how to do this!

After much searching, I located in a technet forum post the cmdlet :

Add-ADPermission "Support" -User "company.local\username" -Extendedrights "Send As" where Support is the name of the public folder.

You are wondering how this is possible? Well, it seems to be a little known fact that although ExMerge is no longer supported with and will not run on Exchange 2007, it can be run on another machine, against exchange 2007.

I've just managed to successfully run exmerge on an exchange 2003 box and export mailboxes from an exchange 2007 server.

Thanks to the guys at ExchangeInbox for this article which goes through the required steps http://www.exchangeinbox.com/articles/051/ex2k7exmerge.htm

Note - although this has worked for me it is probably not supported by Microsoft. Use at your own risk.

Today Microsoft announced the final name for the still in development product previously code-named "Centro" - Windows Essential Business Server.

As a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, Digital IP have been involved with "Centro" since early this year, but this is the first time we have been officially allowed to talk about it!

Windows Essential Business Server is a completely new product from Microsoft, bringing the benefits of Small Business Server and much, much more to medium sized business. WEBS (not sure if that will be the acronym, but I'm going to start using it!) is a suite comprising a number of Microsoft core infrastructure components, including Windows Server 2008, Exchange Server 2007 SP1, ISA Server 2008 and System Centre Essentials 2007. One of the most significant differences from SBS is that WEBS now supports up to 250 users (as opposed to 75 with SBS), and to do this, it is split across 3 servers (maybe 4 for the premium version which includes SQL 2008, although this hasn't been confirmed).

This allows us to address not only performance concerns (75 users on one box is a lot), redundancy concerns (an SBS server fails and potentially the organisation looses everything) but also security concerns - ISA is now a separate box, protecting the internal network from the Internet.

The major benefit of WEBS (apart from I imagine, attractive pricing) is in the area of management. Many medium sized companies (and resellers, consultants etc) struggle to support the complex networks that medium sized organisations have.

Limited IT resources, internally and externally have an awful lot to do to cost effectively support all the disparate components of a typical MM (Mid-Market) network, and time and budgets which should be focused on delivering business value are eaten up keeping things running.

WEBS, in large part through it's integrated management tools and System Centre Essentials goes a long way to addressing these issue, and will ultimately make networks easier for both ourselves as partners and the internal technical resource at our customer to manage.

I'll be posting much more on WEBS as and when I find the time, and am allowed to!

At Digital IP, we are part of the TAP for WEBS and will be working closely with the team in Redmond to deploy WEBS as our production  network solution, so we are sure to have an interesting few months coming up!

Today, I finally passed my CCNA, with a score of 961. I'm just glad to get it over and done with before the current CCNA exam retires and I need to buy a whole load of new study materials!

Now on to the CCNP and CCDA!

I've been having an issue with windows update on my vista business laptop for sometime now, and I decided to use some dead time here at Redmond to try and fix it.

After locating the WU log file at "%systemroot%\windowsupdate.log", I immediately noticed that the failure was due to windows update trying to contact a server called SVRFORE. This was the old WSUS server we had on our corporate network some time ago.

Obviously windows was looking to this server to try and update, and given that it's a) no longer on our network, and b) I'm thousands of miles from our network and don't happen to be VPN'd just now, it was never going to work!

I searched the registry for this server name, then after checking some documentation, and backing up the key, removed the entry from HKLM\software\policies\microsoft\windowsupdate\windows update, and lo and behold, WU works!

Hope this may be of some help to others with the same issue, although obviously if you are in a corporate scenario, check with your IT department - chances are your company policy does not allow you to start editing your registry!

Welcome to the first post on my blog!

I'm a technology professional working for a reseller and Microsoft partner based in Glasgow, Scotland.

We specialize in providing technology solutions of all sorts for small and medium sized business all over Scotland and the UK.

I'll be keeping a blog from now on of some of the more interesting things I get involved with, both IT and telecommunications technologies - especially with the lines between the two blurring all the time!

Why "Constantly Connected"? Well, the main theme of the blog will be communications technologies, such as Microsoft Office Communications Server and Exchange Server 2007. I'll also be talking about an exciting new Microsoft server suite for the mid market (when I'm allowed to!). This beta software and others are accessed via the Microsoft connect site, hence "Constantly Connected".

Robert