Just run the following under a Powershell instance with the Exchange modules loaded (i.e. the Exchange Management Shell).

foreach ($u in $(Get-User)) { Write-Host "Clearing the msExchDelegateListLink for $($u.distinguishedname)"; $ad = [adsi]"LDAP://$($u.originatingserver)/$($u.distinguishedname)"; $ad.msExchDelegateListLink.Clear(); $ad.SetInfo(); }

Be aware that if you do this, all auto mappings for all users will get removed. This may not have the desired behaviour as some users may be relying on an automapped account. It should be feasible to alter this as required, as it’s pretty damn simple!

As with all things, do this at your own risk, we accept no liability, yadda yadda yadda.

If you’re curious (and lets face it, if you’re modifying the Active Directory en bulk, you should be!), basically what this does is loop over all users, and clear all values against their Active Directory account msExchDelegateListLink attribute. This attribute is where the automapping gets written to.

As an example imagine 2 users, Bob and Alice. Bob is an Exchange admin and at some point was granted full access (with permission, naturally) to diagnose a problem with Alice’s mailbox without having to disturb her too much directly. Bob will now be added to Alice’s msExchDelegateListLink attribute. It’s this entry that needs to be removed.

Apparently in SP2 there is the facility to disable automapping, at the time of adding the relevant permission; the shiny new “-AutoMapping” argument to Add-MailboxPermission. As with many things Exchange 2007 and newer, it’s just a facility available at the Powershell console, for now. And you know what? We’re ok with that.

And we can understand why. The basic gist of the change is a cap on the RAM you can apply to your virtual machines per license. Formally licenses were required on a per processor basis alone, now, if you reach the virtual RAM cap for the number of processor’s you have licensed, you will require extra licenses to cover any additional RAM. This increase caused the change to be dubbed the ‘Memory vTax’.

When VMWare first announced this pricing change the memory allowance per license were rather low, meaning (obviously depending on the configuration of the virtual machines) some VMWare customers were looking at their licensing costs being several times what the old pricing structure would have cost. Reacting to the complaints of their customers VMWare have now raised the cap, which should keep the license costs to a more reasonable level for most customers.

Here at GloNetworks we’ve always tended towards the Microsoft Virtualization software ‘Hyper-V’ over the VMWare options, and right now we’re more confident than ever in our choice. It could be argued that WMWares virtualisation software is more ‘feature-full’ however we feel that Hyper-V’s pricing has always been more appropriate for us and our customers’ requirements. And since Microsoft have appeared to confirm they have no plans to use a similar ‘Memory Tax’ in its next Hyper-V product (Windows Server ‘8’ Hyper-V) we’re sure this will continue to be the case.

I should warn you that this is a blog post aimed at technical people, who have some knowledge of Hyper-V clusters already, so if you’re looking at this from a “users” point of view you may get very lost, very fast. I’m not going to explain every little detail, because quite frankly we’d be here all day.

I feel I should start off by defining our “Private Cloud”. Cloud is term that thrown about a lot recently by marketing staff, and for that reason technical staff need to use it in front of boards and in front of the decision makers. To us techies it may be frustrating, however it’s the world we live in. If you’re uninitiated it’s a very broad term that covers:

• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) – Server and networking hardware, possibly server OS, such as Amazon’s AWS,
• Software as a Service (SaaS) – Software provided by a remote system, such as Google Apps (Mail, Docs, etc.), or Dropbox,
• Platform as a Service (PaaS) – Normally software infrastructure for developers to rapidly build software, such as force.com, Google’s AppEngine, or parts of Azure.

Whilst we also provide SaaS products, in this instance our small “Private Cloud” we see as an IaaS offering. It’s a small, 2 node, Hyper-V cluster that we use to run our own and customer’s systems.

As a rough outline our cluster consists of:

• 1x HP Procurve 2810-24G as our main switch,
• 1x Juniper SRX210 acts as our firewall and gateway device for some portions of our network,
• 1x IBM x3250 M3 acts as our physical Active Directory Domain Controller, and also hosts our Data Protection Manager (DPM) 2010 and System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) virtual machine under Hyper-V,
• 2x IBM x3550 M3 act as our Hyper-V nodes,
• 1x IBM DS3512 acts as our shared storage,
• 1x QNap TS-459U+ acts as our short term backup storage,
• Several USB hard drives for off-site backup that are routinely swapped.

We’re aware that there are some issues with this design; single switch, single firewall and only 2 Hyper-V nodes. However the importance here is why we chose some of these things and why we don’t care as much right now (this was a significant investment for our small company);

1. Granted all hardware does die. In the event that a switch does we can get one on-site reasonably quickly if we needed to, however we’re yet to have a HP Procurve die on us since we’ve started business,
2. Single firewall is something that we worry about, but we’ve chosen Juniper as they are easily clustered,
3. Provided that you don’t over subscrbe 2 Hyper-V Nodes should be sufficient, however additional nodes can be introduced to the cluster easily in the future.

So whilst we are aware of the problems, I believe that we’ve engineered the system in such a manner that we’re able to introduce new hardware easily, upgrade the existing hardware, and provide some additional redundancy, including multiple switches with multi-chassis LACP links.

We’ve not built this system to compete with Amazon’s amazing AWS, however we have built it with 3 goals in mind:

1. Extensibility,
2. To use as a small reference design,
3. To virtualise our own systems more redundantly. The fact we’re able to host customer’s systems as well is a nice perk.

I won’t take you through the process of setting up your Hyper-V cluster, but I will cover a few bits and bobs that we feel a techy should be aware of before walking into a project like this, but might forget when looking at the big picture.

Clustered Shared Volume, or CSV, is the magic that makes the shared storage work. It’s a clever file system that allows multiple nodes to share the same storage. We’re yet to deploy a CSV using FC so we’re unsure if this is true for FC as well, however in the instance of both DAS and iSCSI what happens is the following;

1. The master node takes control of the storage,
2. All other nodes are notified of this, and effectively redirect all storage requests for the shared storage to the master node, over the network.

It should be clear from this that your choice of network card and switch are very important.

CSVs are not supported by Microsoft for any other use other than Hyper-V clusters. So don’t go getting any ideas.

Jumbo frames on your networking gear is a must. Generally speaking a Jumbo Frame is any ethernet frame that exceeds 1500 bytes, however they’re commonly also used as a naming convention for frames of 9000-9600 bytes (+/- 14 bytes for the header, depending on your switch(es)/NIC configuration language). If you don’t remember how IP and ethernet interact I suggest you go and refresh your memory very quickly. You should recognise the importance of having Jumbo Frames enabled very quickly; it should provide higher performance in situations where large payloads are being transmitted frequently.

At present we’re using Microsoft’s DPM 2010 to backup. The major gotcha that we didn’t see was that DPM 2010 on a Domain Controller is basically a no-no:

For a DPM server that is installed on a domain controller, only protection of data sources local to the DPM server is supported. You cannot install agents on other computers to configure protection.

SCVMM (System Center Virtual Machine Manager) 2008 R2 needs some polish. We’ve had to dive into the database once already. Don’t be afraid of it.

Other than that the project went exceedlingly smoothly. There are a few features that I wish Hyper-V had, in comparison to VMWare and Xen. And I really do wish that there were more, cheaper, graphics cards out there for RemoteFX.

However, that’s just something to plan for as a future project.

Sadly this is not always the case. In the instance where you see duplicate virtual machines you have a bit of an issue on your hands as you can’t migrate that virtual machine to the Hyper-V cluster node that also has the “missing” version of itself.

If you delve deeper, and check the Failover Cluster Manager, you should see that there is only one copy. With that verified the answer is to break out the SQL to fix SCVMM.

1. Ideally you’ll want to stop the SCVMM service (VMMService)
2. Download and install SQL Studio Manager, or if you’re really hardcore use osql. If you’ve used the default database then you’ll want to connect to COMPUTERNAME\MICROSOFT$VMM$. Otherwise it’ll be where ever it was installed.
3. Now there are “2″ solutions we’ve found for this problem. As always backup your database first.
   • We found by digging into the database that the virtual machines instances are stored in tbl_WLC_VObject and have an ObjectState equal to 220. Deleting these very quickly removes the VM. However it does potentially leave other references behind.
   • The technet way, which we’d recommend, (see http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff641854.aspx), which looks at the same table, however also searches all other tables for references.
4. Restart the SCVMM service and you should be laughing all the way to the bank

Just incase Technet ever decides to go away, we’ve put the script from the page referenced above, below.

BEGIN TRANSACTION T1

DECLARE custom_cursor CURSOR FOR
SELECT ObjectId from
dbo.tbl_WLC_VObject WHERE [ObjectState] = 220
DECLARE @ObjectId uniqueidentifier
OPEN custom_cursor
FETCH NEXT FROM custom_cursor INTO @ObjectId
WHILE(@@fetch_status = 0)
BEGIN
DECLARE vdrive_cursor CURSOR FOR
SELECT VDriveId, VHDId, ISOId from
dbo.tbl_WLC_VDrive WHERE ParentId = @ObjectId
DECLARE @VDriveId uniqueidentifier
DECLARE @VHDId uniqueidentifier
DECLARE @ISOId uniqueidentifier

OPEN vdrive_cursor
FETCH NEXT FROM vdrive_cursor INTO @VDriveId, @VHDId, @ISOId
WHILE(@@fetch_status = 0)
BEGIN
DELETE FROM dbo.tbl_WLC_VDrive
WHERE VDriveId = @VDriveId
if(@VHDId is NOT NULL)
BEGIN

DELETE FROM dbo.tbl_WLC_VHD
WHERE VHDId = @VHDId
DELETE FROM dbo.tbl_WLC_PhysicalObject
WHERE PhysicalObjectId = @VHDId
END
if(@ISOId is NOT NULL)
BEGIN

DELETE FROM dbo.tbl_WLC_VCOMPort
WHERE HWProfileId = @ObjectId
DELETE FROM dbo.tbl_WLC_HWProfile
WHERE HWProfileId = @ObjectId
DELETE FROM dbo.tbl_WLC_VMInstance
WHERE VMInstanceId = @ObjectId
DELETE FROM dbo.tbl_WLC_VObject
WHERE ObjectId = @ObjectId
FETCH NEXT FROM custom_cursor INTO @ObjectId
END
CLOSE custom_cursor
DEALLOCATE custom_cursor
COMMIT TRANSACTION T1

Previously BPOS users who access their email via the free BlackBerry Internet Service were limited to wireless email access, pushed from the mobile operator. Other information, such as contacts and calendar data had to be updated through a wired connection.

Hosted Blackberry services allows wireless access to e-mail, calendar, tasks and contacts with global address list (GAL) integration, and device management such as device wipe and password reset.

By scrapping the current Hosted BlackBerry services pricing structure and moving towards a free service for BPOS subscribers, Microsoft will be hoping to see businesses that have come to like and possibly rely on their BlackBerry looking on the BPOS (and Office 365 in the future) offerings more favourably.

The pricing structure is a monthly subscription/rental, reflecting the online ‘cloud’ based nature of the Online Services applications. While we can see the benefit for those who are already using or planning to use Microsoft Online Services (essentially a free licence for Office Professional Plus per user whilst they are subscribed) at present we cannot see any major attraction for new customers.

Whilst we still have many unanswered questions about Office 365 (primarily regards deployment in terminal server environments) what’s evident is Microsoft are trying to entice more customers to embrace their Online Services ‘cloud’ based solutions.

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!

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

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 !

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.