Glo Networks Technical Blog (Glo Blog)

Exchange 2010 has been available for a while now, here at Glo Networks we’ve been using it since the beta testing stage and we’ve found many of the new features to be great, both for administrators and users.

Now SP1 for Exchange 2010 is released today, and not only does it include all the roll-up updates and bug fixes released so far but it also includes some handy new features. Several of the features are to make administrating the Exchange server more efficient (some new features in the Management GUI) but there are a few that users will enjoy.

One big benefit of the SP is it includes the ability for user to share their calendars, from OWA (which has been improved again and looks very nice!), via HTML or iCal. This means when someone asks you when you’re free for a meeting you could simply send them a link to your calendar for them to compare with theirs. Just imagine: no more ‘I can do Friday’ ‘Well I can’t make Friday but how about Monday..’ type conversations!

Tweet

Share

Save

Posted by James in Applications, Servers | No Comments »

Recently one of our customers has been playing with Hyper V, creating virtual machines for testing purposes. We have advised them in this and have guided them through using Hyper V, and it’s features and functions. One of the questions asked by the customer was about snapshots. ‘Why not use them for backups?’ they asked.

For anyone using Hyper V, Snapshots can be a very handy tool. Allowing the swift roll back of a VM to a previous state, they were intended to be used mainly for development and testing environments. They do have their uses for production environments too however, for example; if you wished to perform a potentially risky update on software installed on a virtual machine a quick snapshot before would allow you to do so safe in the knowledge you can revert to before the update simply by loading the snapshot.

One thing that snapshots should not be used for is a substitute for backups. Although they may on the surface seem ideal for this purpose there are a few reasons this is not recommended.

• They do not provide protection against problems that may occur on the host server (the one running Hyper-V), such as a hardware problems on the physical computer or a software-related issues in the operating system.
• Programs running in the virtual machine will not be aware of the snapshot and when rolling back they will not be able to adjust correctly. For example a Exchange server on a VM which has reverted to a snapshot would expect to have connections to the same clients as it did when the snapshot was created.
• The snapshot files (.avhd) will not work, or at least not you will easily be able to revert to them, once they have been moved from their original location. This means that copying them away from the host machine (as you may if you were planning to use them as a backup) will essentially make them useless.

Please note: Our method of backing up HyperV VM’s involves the use of volume shadow copy snapshots. These are not the same as HyperV snapshots! For more info please see the following:

Hyper-v Backups on the Glo Networks Technical Blog

Hyper-V Snapshots & VSS Snapshots: the differences on the Backup Assist Blog

Hyper V Snapshots FAQ on the Technet site

Tweet

Share

Save

Posted by James in Applications, Servers | 1 Comment »

A few weeks ago Dilip from VMUtil replied to one of our blog entries about backing up Hyper-V. He was saying that VHDCopy would speed things up and so we thought we’d give it a try.

We use the scripts in the blog post for all the Hyper-V data we manage. One customer has a fixed size disk of 272GB so we thought we’d give it a try. We changed one line in the backup script from

xcopy %srcb% %bkf% /Y

to

C:\Data\Scripts\VHDCopy.exe /fast %srcb% E:\DRIVE.vhd

and let it run as usual. It used to finish at around 4:09:01.47am every day but now it finishes at approximately 1:15:21.86am !

In the piped log file we found -
Avoided reading      150252 MB     146 GB
Also avoided writing 150252 MB     146 GB

Now that is handy ! The written file is still it’s full size and of course it still works perfectly.

Note that this software only helps FIXED SIZE VHDs. It will still copy dynamic sized VHDs but only makes a speed difference to FIXED SIZE ones. Also you can’t specifiy a directory to copy like you do in xcopy, here it has to be the full distinct name of the VHD in the destination and source.

So should we (where disk space is not an issue) convert all the VHDs to fixed size ? We didn’t use to because it was just soo slow to back them up … not an issue any more !

Tweet

Share

Save

Posted by Chris in Applications, Servers | No Comments »

In the next few months SP1 (Service Pack 1) will be released for Windows 2008 R2 and Windows 7. It will contain the usual plethora of hotfixes and some new functions. One of the great new functions that we’ve been waiting on for months is the Dynamic Memory availability in Hyper-V.

We’ve not got our hands on it for testing yet but from reading this TechNet Blog article it looks like it should do exactly what we want / need.

Tweet

Share

Save

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

There are many ways to receive email to your devices with POP3 being about the most basic one. It’s also one of the oldest internet protocols and is perfect for just getting emails off a server to your PC.

Its problems come from the fact that its about all you can do with it. So when you use your email client to receive you emails they pull them off the server onto your desktop or laptop. That’s then their only location, inside your chosen email client. So how many people bother to backup that local email store ? How many people know where it is ? How many people have even thought about that ? Even when you do think about backups and carry them out it’s a laborious task that gets more complex the more users you have.

Another thought is that all of POP3 is done in plain text. What that means is that if someone (say a college) wants to, they can load a simple network tool to gather information from the network. Not only will they see the content of your emails they’ll also see the username and password you use to connect to it ! (Yes there’s an SSL’ed version of POP3 but it’s very rarely used).

Now consider that you can now get fully hosted Exchange services from £3.36 per month per mailbox. So for your 5 user business you can get arguably the industry standard email platform with 25GB of hosted storage for only £201.60 per year ! That’s fully managed servers with no need to buy a server, no need to worry about backups, no need to think about DR (Disaster Recovery). And of course you get all the benefits of the an Exchange server like shared calenders, Outlook Web Access (Outlook Anywhere), Exchange Active Sync (for iPhone and mobile devices) and many more.

Or there’s the likes of a gmail service for your business. When we last put it in for a customer it was about £33 per user per year for the Google Apps Premier Edition. Of course there’s also the free gmail account that you could use !

Surely knowing all that you’d say that there’s no place in business for POP3. If you’re still using POP3 for your business emails we’ll happily help you change to something that’s more suited. Ask nicely we may even do it for free !

Tweet

Share

Save

Posted by Chris in Applications, Desktops and Laptops, Servers, Software | No Comments »