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 !

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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.

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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 !

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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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Or should I say new install? At the weekend we upgraded Glo Networks Exchange server from 2007 to 2010, it didnt go with out a hitch and thought we should blog about what we found.

One of the main problems is the upgrade path to 2010 is not an easy one, because there are so many changes do the way the database works, you cannot simply un-install Exchange 2007 (leaving the databases) then install exchange 2010 and mount them again.

Some of the problems we came across -

• No in-place upgrade option
• Public folders replica issue
• Users mailbox permissions when moving a mailbox
• Unable to uninstall due to public folders being left behind

We manged to fix all the problems that we found while doing the upgrade and now have a full functioning Exchange 2010 server.

If you would like more information about Exchange 2010 or about the problems we came across and how to fix them please contact us on +44 845 5210 140. The entire thing was done remotely on Hyper-V Virtual Servers, so we can help out pretty much anyone who may need it.

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Exchange 2010 has just been released. Well it’s on MSDN and the like right now.

As expected there are many benefits to Exchange 2010 over it’s predecessors. Of which the one we at Glo Networks will probably notice right away is the rich OWA (Outlook Web Access) experience out of IE ! There are of course many other benefits which we’ll post about when we are happy with their commercial usefulness.

We’ll be upgrading our Exchange 2007 production server over the coming weekend. It shouldn’t be to much trouble as we have been playing with the test versions.

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As a follow up to our previous post on Exchange 2010 Beta, if you’ve not been using Exchange 2007 (which many haven’t), you might be surprised to know that 2010 is 64 bit only.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and if you’re still using Exchange 2003 or earlier, were you really planning on using the same hardware? We hope not!

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So Diskeeper are still around and now launching a tool for Defraging Hyper-V machines (both guest and host).

I wonder how many people remember the days of defraging their Windows 9x boxes and watching the little bars move around, feeling great when everything looked tidy and then knowing the machine felt faster when using it ? So my next question is how many people still defrag and does it really make any serious difference ? The last few times I’ve tried it on various machines over the years I’ve noticed no visable difference at all. Just an hour or so wasted waiting for the machine to finish doing the defrag so I can get back to using it .

Of course the likes of diskeeper will through great stats at you about how much it makes things quicker. But in the real world does defraging have much of a place anymore ?

More importantly am I bothered enough or do I believe it may have a real difference enough to actualy bother installing it again and see if there’s a difference ….. ?

More info from Diskeeper themselves here.

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Microsoft have finally released SQL Server 2008 this week just in time becuase support for SQL 2000 has just expired.

SQL 2008 has a list of new features including -

• Enterprise Reporting Engine – Reports can easily be delivered throughout the organization, both internally and externally, with simplified deployment and configuration.
• Internet Report Deployment – Customers and suppliers can effortlessly be reached by deploying reports over the internet.
• Report Builder Enhancements – Easily build ad-hoc and author reports wih any structure through report designer.
• Microsoft Office Intergration – SQL 2008 provides new Word rendering that enables users to consume reports directly within Microsoft Office Word. In addition, the existing Excel renderer has been greatly enhanced to accommodate the support features, like nested data regions, sub reports, as well as merged cell imporvements.

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For many of our customers we redirect a user’s My Documents to a directory of the same name, on a Windows share. For example, the user ‘JMcMuffin’ may have their My Docs redirected to “\\FILESERVER\Home\JMcMuffin\My Documents”, which are stored in a local path of D:\Data\Users\JMcMuffin, on FILESERVER. Obviously you can switch \\FILESERVER\Home for a DFS share, etc.

In some instances you might have a significant number and for whatever reason the permissions may have been altered, and the Group Policy defaults don’t quite suit your requirements. Or maybe you’re transfering these files to a new server, in a different domain. I can’t image you want to do the whole thing by hand.

In days of old we’d sort this with a batch script and it would be ok, but might take a while to run. Powershell has changed things though. The script we’ve popped together (below) runs lightning quick in comparison, and we thought someone else might also find it useful.

Just save it in a ps1 file, and invoke it from powershell, providing your directory path that you want to “fix”.

To use our example from above, you’d call the script on FILESERVER, from powershell:

PS C:\Users\Karl> C:\path\to\scripts\fix-perms.ps1 “D:\Data\Users”

The script would then go over each directory and try and add that user to the ACL with Modify rights – i.e. the JcMcMuffin user to the D:\Data\Users\JMcMuffin directory.

In our scenario we required ourselves, another group, SYSTEM and each user to have access only – So we pushed the common permissions from the parent, and then ran the script to add the individual users.

# Fix-Perms
# Iterates over all child directories, and adds the user, with the same name as the directory, to the ACL with modify rights
# Usage:
# Fix-Perms “C:\Path\To\Directory”
# Or, for the current directory
# Fix-Perms “.”

# our parameters, throw a warning if we get none
param (
[string] $dirpath = $(throw “Please specify the full path to the directory!”)
)

# get list of all child directories, in the current directory
$directories = dir $dirpath | where {$_.PsIsContainer}

# iterate over the directories
foreach ($dir in $directories)
{
# echo out what the full directory is that we’re working on now
write-host Working on $dir.fullname using $dir.name

# setup the inheritance and propagation as we want it
$inheritance = [system.security.accesscontrol.InheritanceFlags]“ContainerInherit, ObjectInherit”
$propagation = [system.security.accesscontrol.PropagationFlags]“None”

# get the existing ACLs for the directory
$acl = get-acl $dir.fullname

# add our user (with the same name as the directory) to have modify perms
$aclrule = new-object System.Security.AccessControl.FileSystemAccessRule($dir.name, “Modify”, $inheritance, $propagation, “Allow”)

# check if given user is Valid, this will barf if not
$sid = $aclrule.IdentityReference.Translate([System.Security.Principal.securityidentifier])

# add the ACL to the ACL rules
$acl.AddAccessRule($aclrule)

# set the acls
set-acl -aclobject $acl -path $dir.fullname
}

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