Brian Spolarich's questions

We're currently running Exchange 2003 SP2 in a Server 2003 Native Mode AD forest with a single domain and two sites. We want to get to Server 2008 R2 AD DCs and Exchange 2010 SP1.

We're also starting to leverage virtualization (VMWare ESX/ESXi 4.0/4.1) and a new SAN.

I'm wondering if I should focus on upgrading the domain controllers first, or exchange first and the DCs later. I won't be able to have all 2008 DCs until I add new hardware at my second site, so I'd have a mixed mode 2003/2008 domain for some time, and we will have one DC be a physical box versus relying entirely on virtual systems.

Are there any issues adding a 2008 DC to a 2003 native mode domain that would impact Exchange 2003 in some unexpected way?

Just looking for hidden gotchas, plus the best strategy in terms of what to tackle and in what order.

I saw a very useful "Rapid Transition Guide" for Exchange 2010 that I downloaded from a thread on Experts Exchange: http://www.experts-exchange.com/Software/Server_Software/Email_Servers/Exchange/Q_26626732.html

And I own a copy of the MS Exchange Server 2010 Inside and Out, which is helpful.

Client: Windows XP SP3 running under VMWare Fusion 2.0.1 with Bridged Networking under MacOS 10.5.8.

Server: Windows Server 2008 x64 SP1

I can ping the server, I can RDP to the server. I can't "net view" the server, or connect to shares on the server, and I get "The network name cannot be found." (Error 67).

I try to access the server via IP address with the same results.

"net view \servername" or "net view \address" returns "Windows cannot find the network path." (Error 51)

I'm only using DNS in my network, not WINS. Windows Firewall is off.

The server shows many shares in the Server Manager, and everything is accessible from other clients. I can access shares on the server logged on under my credentials from other hosts (i.e. my Citrix servers).

Basically I can't seem to do SMB sessions from one client to only this server.

From the server to this client, I can't access \clientname\c$ or \clientip\c$. If I use the client's name, I get Access Denied errors (logged on as Domain Admin on the server). If I use the IP address, I get "The network path was not found." (Error 53)

Every time the VM reconnects to the work LAN from sleep I get "duplicate name exists on the network" errors but its never been a problem. This reachability issue for this single host started yesterday.

Ideas? This is making me a little crazy. ;-)

I did a P2V conversion of a production server (W2K3R2 64-bit) a while back using the VMWare conversion tool. I then installed the free VMWare Server 2.0 product on a Windows server, and am able to boot and interact with the VM guest. My purpose for this project is to do testing of some patches to our ERP software.

Working with it a bit more, I'm seeing terrible disk I/O performance on the guest OS to the point of it being unusable. While the virtual disks are on a big fat 1TB SATA RAID1 mirror, I'm getting times of like two hours to copy 250MB files to the virtual disk while the same copy in the host OS environment only takes a minute or two. I don't expect blazing performance out of this test environment compared to the production system, so I'm okay with some degradation, but this is ridiculous.

I've tried the following:

1. Updated VMWare Server to 2.01.
2. Updated Virtual Hardware on VM to V7.
3. Updated LSI_SCSI driver to latest 64-bit version from LSI web site.
4. Reducing virtual CPUs to 1.

I still get this error when I Boot the VM:

Event Type: Warning
Event Source:   Lsi_scsi
Event Category: None
Event ID:   26
Date:       8/6/2009
Time:       11:01:46 AM
User:       N/A
Computer:   VULCAN-TEST
Description:
The driver has detected that device \Device\RaidPort0 has old or out-of-date firmware. Reduced performance may result.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.
Data:
0000: 0f 00 18 00 01 00 6a 00   ......j.
0008: 00 00 00 00 1a 00 04 80   .......
0010: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00   ........
0018: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00   ........
0020: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00   ........
0028: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00   ........
0030: 00 00 00 00 1a 00 04 80   .......
0038: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00   ........

My assumption is that the terrible I/O performance is related to this complaint from the LSI_SCSI driver.

The host system is running Windows Server 2008 x64 on an Intel E5405 quad-core dual-socket box with one CPU.

I see lots of discussion of I/O issues with VMWare and x64 Windows Server guests but I've tried everything I've seen suggested and so far no joy.

I keep a Ubuntu 7.04 VM running at Linode.com to host a few web sites, e-mail lists, etc. It was working flawlessly for a long time. I don't patch it or really pay attention to it.

Recently (past few months) and with increasing frequency, the box runs out of memory and I have to reboot it. Its configured with 350MB real memory, plus 64MB swap. It runs Apache, Mysql, Postfix, and mailman.

The out-of-memory symptoms are obvious and I see these in the kernel.log:

Jul 21 10:16:42 grendel kernel: Out of memory: kill process 30364 (apache2) score 11205 or a child
Jul 21 10:16:42 grendel kernel: Killed process 30364 (apache2)
Jul 21 10:16:42 grendel kernel: apache2 invoked oom-killer: gfp_mask=0xa01d2, order=0, oomkilladj=0

Is there a silver-bullet method to determine what's going on here? I'm watching 'top' and while I see the available real memory decline over time I don't see an obvious culprit.

I have a well-connected remote site that I'm delivering snapshots to twice-daily of certain tables. Snapshot replication is the only method that I can use based on the schema limitations of the underlying application.

The snapshot is published via UNC path and FTP, and is about 6MB so fairly small. I'm not 100% whether FTP or UNC is being used actually. It takes about 5mins from the time the snapshot is compressed into the snapshot.cab file to when the replication monitor shows me the first of the scripts being applied, so I assume that gap is transfer time. I'm thinking its UNC/SMB given that it takes a lot less time to copy that much data over our 3MB connection via FTP.

It takes about 25 more minutes to load the snapshot, which seems like a lot of time for a modest amount of data. Lots of rows (several tables have 100K rows), but the actual amount of data is pretty small.

The subscriber is running SQLExpress 2005 on a 2.8GHz ProLiant with 3GB RAM that's otherwise not busy. I haven't done extensive profiling yet to see if there's disk contention or what else might be going on.

I'm wondering what the likely rate-limiter is here and if there's a way to speed this up at all. 30mins seems like a long time to copy and load 6MB of compressed data.

0 vote down star

I have a database that I'm publishing to a remote site using Snapshot replication (only method that will work given the application and database schema). Because the replica database tables are unavailable while the database is refreshing, I am taking and delivering snapshots twice daily. For the target user population this is okay 99% of the time.

Occasionally they might want to manually kick off a snapshot so the replica will get updated. My question is how to I grant permission in MSSQL 2005 so the user can do this?

I've added my test account to the SQLAgentUser role in msdb and to the replmonitor role in the distribution database. This lets me run Replication Monitor and see the publication. When I try to run "Generate Snapshot" I get this error:

"The specified @job_name ('VULCAN-MfgSys803-Vantage8-ProdGLData-3') does not exist. (Microsoft SQL Server, Error 14262)"

I tried granting myself EXECUTE rights to xp_sqlagent_enum_job in master but that didn't help either.