avs099's questions

we have single Exchange 2010 server with single 28Gb mailbox database file. Lots of historical emails. I'm working on backup solution now (uploading to cloud nightly etc), and uploading this huge file is unreasonable. What I thought would be great, is to "split" this file into 2 (or more) - similar to VM snapshot thing - one huge, read-only file which I can backup once, and then growing read-write file with current activity. Is it possible to do in exchange? May be that would involve creating 2 databases? Is it possible to have "read-only" database? Any ideas are very welcomed.

PS I know I can get a specialized backup application which will deal with it - but we are a very small company, and getting it is a bit of overkill, and expensive. I'm trying to see what my out-of-the-box options are first.

I want to be able to read data from the Hyper-V VMs on the host. I understand I can go to DISM and attach VHD there - but it requires a VM to be offline - otherwise I get the following error:

Virtual Disk Manager

The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process.

Are there any ways to achieve this while keeping VM online? I want this primary for making backups easier.

I have 2 VMs in HyperV role:

first is RRAS - it has 2 interfaces (both manually configured, no DHCP):

• 192.168.1.110 - "external" one, connected to the router
• 192.168.10.2 - that's internal interface which other VMs will be using as well

also I added VPN connection to our main server - and it gets 192.168.2.136 IP address in 192.168.2.XXX network. And IP route is create on the server as well for this interface.

second VM is called KITCHENER. It only has 1 interface

• 192.168.10.99 / 255.255.255.0, with default gateway set to RRAS server - 192.168.10.2

QUESTION: how can I ping "main server" - 192.168.2.1 - from the KITCHENER server when RRAS server is connected to VPN? please see screenshots with ipconfig /all, route print and ping 192.168.2.1 commands. What needs to be done to get this working?

all servers are Windows 2008 R2 if that matters. All firewalls are turned off, no antivirus programs are installed - pretty much blank Win2008R2 installs.

this is RRAS server configuration:

tracert from RRAS server to MAIN server:

KITCHENER server configuration

basically we have 2 DC servers which used to have site-2-site VPN but it's not working anymore. So we started to get various errors, DNS stopped working, etc, etc. As a last resort attempt (before manually demoting one of the DCs), i want to "connect" them via public IP - so I can, at least, do a clean demote. But I can't figure out what I need to do for this. Both servers have 2 NICs, one with internal and one with external IP.

how should I point one DC to replicate with another one over public IP?

basically I want to see all my work emails in my google account. We used to have forwarding to google - but google started to reject our mail recently claiming it's spam. So i'm thinking about making gmail to download emails from Exchange via POP3 - but I don't want to enter my AD login/password there (call it paranoid :)). Is it possible to specify separate password for POP3 access in Exchange 2010?

I have Win2008 R2 HyperV host with one physical adapter running a bunch of VMs. I have a subnet of external IP addresses: x.x.x.208 / 255.255.255.240

I used to have the following setup:

host OS would have AD DC, HyperV, RRAS, DHCP & DNS roles. Physical adapter would have all available IP addresses assign to it explicitly:

x.x.x.210 / 255.255.255.240

...

x.x.x.221 / 255.255.255.240

HyperV network would have one External network created - but with "Allow management OS to share the adapter" option turned on - this way I could assign public IP to the host OS as well:

HyperV created another network adapter with I used for internal LAN (192.168.2.0 / 255). RRAS was set for NAT and LAN routing, and does NATting for guests as follows:

x.x.x.210 -> 192.168.2.10, Allow incoming sessions = YES

...

x.x.x.221 -> 192.168.2.21, Allow incoming sessions = YES

So basically all guest VMs did not have external IP address - but for them this did not matter - they still had access to internet, and were accessible from outside.

then we started to have issues with RRAS, VPN, etc, etc - so I did some reading and read that NAT schema is not good (could someone comment on this btw?) and I should virtualize physical adapter to give guest VMs access to external network directly. Alright, I did this.

Here is the current setup:

I removed "Allow management OS to share the adapter" from external adapter, and added second internal network to HyperV.

Then I had to add second network adapter to each guest VM - and then explicitly set public IP address for each one. That was done, and works fine. RRAS role was removed from the host.

questions:

1. Did I do the right thing? My inner feeling says yes - as here we have less "parts" (or at least looks like) but I just want to get some authoritative opinions.

2. Any issues I should be aware of with the current setup vs old one? Any best practices I should do after I set up the network as described above?

3. Probably, the most important question for me. In both scenarios, firewall is running on guest VM, and nothing has changed after the switch. And my understanding was that NAT does not do any filtering of traffic - everything goes directly to guest. HOWEVER right after the switch, I start getting the following errors in the log (on our exchange VM server):

Inbound authentication failed with error LogonDenied for Receive connector Default EXCHANGE. The authentication mechanism is Ntlm. The source IP address of the client who tried to authenticate to Microsoft Exchange is [200.195.42.7].

this kinda implies to me that in the new setup VM became "more" exposed to external threat - but I just don't understand why this was not the case for NATed scenario? I verified - there is NONE errors like that before the switch. Why am I getting such errors now? what has changed from the network point of view?

I have Windows 2008 R2 server with Hyper-V role enabled, and a number of Hyper-V VMs. Of of the VMs is CentOS SIP server. I want to block all incoming traffic from external IP address on certain ports - 80, 443, etc. Basically I want to be able to manage my SIP server through web interface only when I'm connected to VPN.

my setup is as follows:

Hyper-V host has 2 interfaces: 192.168.2.XXX (internal) and 8.8.8.YYY (external)

Hyper-V VM has ONLY internal IP address - 192.168.2.123, and I did set up NAT reservation for it in RRAS, mapping 192.168.2.123 to 8.8.8.123 and allowing incoming sessions.

everything works great, no issues. But is it possible for HyperV host to block certain traffic to the guest VM? I tried setting up Windows Firewall rule as follows:

block all incoming traffic to local IP address 192.168.2.123 or 8.8.8.123

but it does not work - I still could access web UI.

I have VHD file attached as a disk (Disk 2 on screenshot below). It has only 1 partition formatted in FAT32 (so Linux clients can write something there). It got full, so I want to extend it. I used Hyper-V tool to extend the size of the disk - but I can't "expand" exiting partition:

DISKPART> expand vdisk maximum=50000

DiskPart has encountered an error: The parameter is incorrect. See the System Event Log for more information.

and there is nothing in the Event Log (or may be I'm looking at a wrong place?..)

it's on Windows 2008 R2. Any idea how can I extend my disk from 30Gb to 50Gb?

Thank you.

I have Windows 2008 R2 SP1 with 4 identical SATA disks (Seagate Barracude 7200) in RAID 5 array. It has 4Gb of memory; all recent updates are installed. Problem: when I copy large file from one folder to another, I get about 10MB/s average speed. When I read this file from network share via 1Gbps connection - I get about 25-30 MB/s. Both numbers seems to be low for me - but specifically I'm very frustrated with low write speed.

there is no antivirus, no hyper-v, it's just a fileserver - i when i do my tests nobody else reads/write from it (we have only 4 people in a team, so I'm sure).

Not sure if that matters, but there is only 1 logic disk "C" with all available space (1400 GB).

I'm not an admin at all, so I have no idea where to look and what other information to provide. I did run performance monitor with "% idle time", "avg bytes read", "avg byte write" - here is the screenshot:

I'm not sure why there are such obvious spikes.

Any idea? Please let me know if you need me to provide more information - what counters should I check, etc. I'm very eager to get this solved.

Thank you.

UPDATE: we have another Windows 2008 R2 SP1 server with 2 RAID1 arrays - one is disk C (where windows is installed, another one is disk E). It is running Hyper-V and does not have antivirus. I noticed the following behavior when I copy large file (few GBs):

1. C -> C: about 50MB/sec
2. C -> E: about 55MB/sec
3. E -> E: 8MB/sec!!!
4. E -> C: 8MB/sec!!!

what could cause this?? E drive is RAID1 array from same Seagate Barracuda 1TB drives..

Right now I have daily (differential) and weekly (full) backups set on my SQL Server 2008 R2 as jobs for SQL Server Agent with email notifications if job fails. I do get emails like this:

JOB RUN: 'Daily backup.Diff backup' was run on 4/11/2012 at 3:00:00 AM

DURATION: 0 hours, 0 minutes, 28 seconds

STATUS: Failed

MESSAGES: The job failed. The Job was invoked by Schedule 9 (Daily backup.Diff backup). The last step to run was step 1 (Diff backup).

but often that happens because we delete/create new databases - and diff backup fails. And the only way for me to see the actual reason is to go to Log Viewer → Maintenance Plans logs.

Is it possible to include "Error Message" field from the logs into notification emails? And more generic - is it possible to change notification email templates somehow?