Glo Networks Technical Blog (Glo Blog)

We’ve recently started selling Microsoft Online Services. A great set of services that allows a business to offer email and file services without the need to worry about storing, backing up and maintanence. Yup that means no worrying out DR (Disaster Recovery) or servers in your building ! We particularly like the look of Business Productivity Online Standard Suite (BPOS). You can link it to your existing Active Directory using the Microsoft Online Services Directory Synchronization, great lets give it a go.

On setup I get a werid error ‘The Microsoft Online Services Directory Synchronization tool must be installed on a domain joined computer running Windows Server 2003 Serivce Pack 2 or greater.’. Hangon the server’s a Windows 2008 R2 Enterprise server and is a domain controler, so what’s the problem ? On digging around the MS site I find that it’s fine with Windows 2008 server but come accross this -

Installation on 64-bit environments not supported.

No way … surely not. Are we supposed to be using 64bit OSs now or not ? Exchange has been 64bit only for 2 versions or since early 2007 ! Even small hardware vendors are on the 64bit bandwagon.

Obviously now we know it’s not the end of the world but come on guys try to help us out just a little bit !

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Posted by Chris in Applications, Operating Systems, Servers | No Comments »

One of our customers recently wanted to upgrade their 6 terminal server which they have hosted in a data centre, they were 5 years old and it was starting to show, with 60+ users across the 6 servers the system was starting to get slow and the costs were high for the out of date hardware they were running on. The backup of the servers was not ideal, with each of the servers backing up to each other.

Project goals –

• Upgrade the servers to new hardware
• Save money
• Better way to backup
• Faster system

We purposed to the customer that we could make their current 6 physical server in to virtual servers and host them over two powerful physical servers on a much faster connection than they currently had, back all the servers up to separate location and save them money.

The customer accepted our proposal and we recently carried out the migration over a weekend, by Monday morning the servers were all up and running as virtual server on the two new servers. The new system will save them just more than £6000 a year.

Using disk2VHD (found here) we converted the physical servers, then transferred them to the new host and set them up on Hyper-V.

As well as having backup now done to a separate space away from the host servers it also adds an extra level of disaster recovery to their system. Should they have a hardware failure, being virtual servers we can have their system up and running very quickly (less than a day) on new hardware. All users had the exact same setup as before, the only difference they noticed was that their server was much quicker.

All of this also makes future migration, upgrades or add additional servers much easier thanks to virtual servers.

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Posted by Dave in General, Hardware, Operating Systems, Servers | No Comments »

Symantec have recently released Backup Exec 2010 with some nice new features, with more systems going virtual can save a lot of time with backups and restores of virtual hard drives -

• Support for Exchange 2010
• Support for Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7
• Enhanced support for Microsoft Hyper-v R2
• Continuous Data Protection for Exchange, File and SQL Servers

Hyper-V R2 support

Now from a single-pass backup, administrators will experience automated Log Truncation of a virtual machine applications. From that single backup, administrators can then easily recover either the virtual machine or granular application data such as Exchange mailboxes, messages, calendar items, and individual Active Directory user accounts or objects.

Continuous data protection for Exchange

Integrated Exchange 2010 support for the new Database Availability Group (DAG) in Exchange 2010 and enhanced granular recovery support provides fast recovery of individual email and mailboxes while eliminating the need to perform an additional mailbox-level backup.

Of course everything with Backup Exec is optional, you will need to buy the agent for each extra part you want to use.

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Posted by Dave in Operating Systems, Servers | No Comments »

Anyone that does work on networks will at least a little but understand subnets. In days gone by people would work out subnets on scientific calculators. Now there are a multitude of websites offering different ways to do it.

The website we use is subnet-calculator.com, not very pretty by does exactly what you want in a clear interface.

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Posted by Chris in Operating Systems, Operating Systems | No Comments »

Licensing is a pain in the bottom (edited by Chris). There are whole companies full of people who can tell you that you’re doing it wrong. Personally I cannot stand licensing, and the only thing that I find more annoying (in this field) than the proliferation of Open Source and Free Software licenses (and figuring out what I’m allowed and not allowed to do and what is an “arms length” exactly – but thats another rant for another time), is the software licensing by Microsoft and other vendors who shall remain nameless for this article.

To try and make things easier at work two and a half years ago I put together a very small document/cheatsheet describing the licensing terms for various Microsoft products and virtualisation. Yesterday Microsoft released an updated document for Windows Server 2008 R2, and interestingly not much has changed for Window Server, with the exception of a few new products. The table below should help out a bit if you’re confused It should be noted that I’ve only gone so far back as Windows Server 2003 for this table. I suspect that there are no particular dos or don’ts for anything older and you should probably just treat any virtualised instances as you would physical machines. If you know any different I’d love to hear it..

I decided to check the licensing for other products, just incase I’d missed any changes. It doesn’t look like it, so here the run down (as I understand it).

As a general rule, for anything per processor licensed, if you’re running it in a virtual environment it will simply count the number of virtual processors you assign it.

It gets a bit complicated with SQL 2005 and newer. To quote Microsoft:

When licensed per Server or CAL Workgroup and Standard editions allow you to run any number of instances of the server software in one physical or virtual operating system environment on the licensed server at a time. Previously, only the Enterprise edition of the Server license allowed multi-instancing. When licensed per Processor Workgroup, Web, and Standard editions for each server you have assigned the required number of per processor licenses, you may run, at any one time, any number of instances of the server software in physical and virtual operating system environments on the licensed server. However, the total number of physical and virtual processors used by those operating system environments cannot exceed the number of software licenses assigned to that server. For Enterprise if all physical processors in a machine have been licensed, then you may run unlimited instances of SQL server 2008 in one physical and an unlimited number of virtual operating environments on that same machine.

As far as I’m aware anything else licensed per server doesn’t currently have any special rules regarding virtualisation; so this includes Exchange, Sharepoint, and so on.

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Posted by Karl in Desktops and Laptops, Servers | No Comments »