Glo Networks Technical Blog (Glo Blog)

Microsoft have recently announced a new edition to their Office suites: Office 365. While there isn’t a great deal of information available it looks set to combine the elements of the Microsoft Online Services suite (Exchange Online,  Sharepoint Online and Lync Online) with the desktop Office suite (at least the Enterprise level product has the desktop suite, the Small Business only has the browser based Office Web Apps) .

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.

Posted by James in Applications, Servers, Small Business Software | 1 Comment »

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!

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

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 !

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.

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