PHLiGHT's questions

I understand that single instance VMs aren't eligible for an SLA in Azure. For the SMB customers who have important applications that weren't built well enough (Sage 50 in my case) to allow you to setup availability groups this poses a problem.

Does an application/hypervisor (on multiple availability sets) exist that sits between the Azure IaaS fabric and these single instance VMs that would in effect give them the SLA that the more advanced applications have?

Does Amazon EC2 offer something like this?

My current on-premises environment has this same problem but my hosts have been very reliable and don't have updates that require restarts done without my coordination.

I'm trying to send email to a domain that has two MX records. The higher priority record is IPv4 and the 2nd is IPv6.

Exchange gives me a delivery is delayed message in my inbox after I've tried to send the email.

A look at the connectivity logs shows

Established connection to XXXXX (the correct IPv4 IP)
Failed connection to XXXX (the correct IPv6 IP)
Retry

Despite establishing the connection to the IPv4 address it doesn't start the message delivery. If I send the email via telnet from the transport server to the IPv4 address it is successful.

With other domains it would just deliver the email over the IPv4 IP. I'm sending to many other domains with a similar MX configuration without a problem.

My firewall is an ASA and my public IPs are IPv4. The transport server is Win 2008 x64.

I have devices on the network that send out email alerts for misc things. The other night there was a condition that caused one of the devices to send a few thousand emails to a couple of internal users. Thankfully it didn't take anything down but you can see how it has the potential to. All the devices connect to a receive connector on one of the transport servers. The devices don't often have a built-in limiter so I figure the best place to manage this is on the Exchange side.

Actual Question

How can I set a limit/throttle on the number of emails that can go through the connector?

I picked up some bad habits from previous co-workers and I'm thinking I should change some of them. It was standard practice to just disable Windows firewall because it caused more problems than it solved in the past.

How can I slowly change this and is it worth the effort? I'd like to roll out a GPO that would allow traffic but log what apps are connecting to the internet. So I could then selectively start making exceptions to the GPO as needed.

Is this possible in XP (25% of PCs) and Windows 7 (75% of PCs) environment?

Thanks

New Outlook profiles won't connect to Exchange 2007 from Outlook 2007. Able to ping server by hostname and IP Able to access OWA All services are running on the standalone Exchange 2007 server Existing Outlook 2007 users/profiles are able to connect to the Exchange 2007 server without any problems. New Outlook profile settings are the same as the old profile settings.

I've recently p2v'd my Exchange server, created a new DC, upgraded DFL and FFL to 2008 r2, decommissioned 2 2003 DCs, added a 2008 r2 DC and set that server as the sole DC and DNS server. So there has been a few changes since I last tried to create an Outlook profile :/

I think in the past when I'd reboot the Exchange server one of the MS Exchange services (I can't recall which) wouldn't be started automatically and would exhibit similar symptoms. The unit is in production so I don't want to restart services without knowing the impact.

Any thoughts?

We have a Windows 2008 r2 file server that has a share that the users are mapped to that is full of PDFs. One department (A) has read/write access and most others (B) just have read access. If someone has one of the files open in either A or B department an A user isn't able to write to the file.

How can the end users determine who has the file open without me checking that out on the server?

Today this happened and the server showed that a user had about 15 PDFs open but he said he didn't and hadn't opened any of them recently and didn't have Acrobat open. I checked out his computer and saw that he had Windows 7 explorer file preview option enabled which showed a thumbnail of the files. It seems like this feature is prefetching the files to generate the thumbnails. It would seem like a nightmare for file access auditing that the user was opening up so many files.

Am I correct that explorer was prefetching them?

The OCD part of me wants to delete all of the groups that don't have any members. The part of me that doesn't want to break things says leave them alone. Right now I have all my real users in a specific OU.

I've left these accounts in the Users and the built-in groups so far - What would break if I delete the built-in groups?.

In case you hadn't heard there is a 6.1 bug that will be causing us headaches http://www.zdnet.com/ios-6-1-banned-from-corporate-servers-due-to-exchange-snafu-7000011064/

I have seen an article on how you can block exchange 2010+ from allowing syncing with 6.1 devices but it doesn't cover Exchange 2007 http://exchangeserverpro.com/block-ios-61-exchange-2010

What logs do I need to limit and how can I do it via the EMC?

Thanks!

I'm a Windows Admin so those that integrate with Windows will likely be most helpful. My main challenge at this point is just with file shares but as SharePoint use increases it will only make this harder.

I've got all my directories setup and many security groups that are setup with the policy of least access needed is allowed. My problem is tracking it all for HR and compliance reasons.

User A needs permission to resource 1. He needs to get approval from the manager of resource 1 and then the manager of the managers needs to approve this access as well. Once all of that is done I can make the change. At this point we're just tracking it on paper but it's such a burden and likely to fall out of compliance when user A is re-assigned and no longer should have access to resource 1 among other scenarios.

I know what I'm looking for should already exist but I haven't known where to look and I'm reaching out to the community.

EDIT:

Thanks for the responses. I think they touch on the technical side and hopefully my question isn't off-topic. I should have made myself clearer on my goal. What systems do you use to show an auditor that on X date user A had permission added/removed and it was approved by manager Y? I have a basic ticketing system in place currently but I don't see it delivering what I need in an easy to understand format.
In my mind I'm picturing something that would have a report on user A that would show all the changes that had been made to their permissions. Ideally something linking to Active Directory would be ideal but at this point I'm hoping to find something more basic. I'm hoping that there is an application specifically for this. I feel like this must be a requirement for larger enterprises and such software exists.

Thanks!

I have 3 Win 2003 domain controllers across 3 sites. When one of those domain controllers goes offline connectivity to Exchange is intermittent. When users open Outlook some of them will be able to connect and others won't (seemingly random). All of the domain controllers say that they are GCs which I believe is a FSMO that Exchange cares about. What else is special about this DC that is causing problems with Exchange? This DC is at a different site than Exchange and I would like to get rid of this dependancy so if the site is offline it won't effect the other sites Exchange connectivity.

This question is a bit different than the typical we are moving our server room to an off site location or we are moving the whole office to a new building.

Management wants to add some more office space and to do so they want to move the server room to another location. The server room has Verizon smart jacks, a few servers, PBX and all the office network drops go into this room. I'm going to go over there to scout out an alternate location for the equipment because that is still TBD. This sounds like quite a pain since the Verizon equipment for our MPLS will need to be moved (never done that) and the office jacks will need to be re-run.

How do you handle the jacks? I was thinking of keeping them in the same location and having new wall plates put in with half the ports going to the current location and the other half to the new location. Or do you think that 40 drops could just be done over the weekend so the old stuff would be ripped out and replaced with the new? Currently the wiring is a mess so this could be a blessing in the long run.

I created a couple of rooms in Exchange 2007 (http://www.msexchange.org/articles_tutorials/exchange-server-2007/management-administration/managing-resource-mailboxes-exchange-server-2007-part1.html)and I want to logon to OWA to manage resource settings but I can't logon to the mailboxes via OWA because of an invalid password error. I've reset it but still no luck. I've granted myself full permissions to the mailbox and try to access via my account but I just get a popup of my own account in the browser (ie9 and ie8).

What's going on here?

I'm not sure how many NICs I need to use to have vmotion support with my SAN. See the link for a picture, it's laughably crude. Sketch

Does Sharepoint 2010 address geo replication? My searches kept coming up with a third party solution but I'd rather stick to a built in option if it's available. I have multiple offices over 4.5 and 1.5 mbps WAN connections who access sharepoint and I want it to be LAN like speed with file locking.

I have an exchange 2007 mailbox server and two client access servers. There was an original exchange 2007 mailbox server/client access server that died and is still listed in the organization. As of late users are intermittently not able to connect with Outlook2003/2007. If they launch the program a couple of times they will be able to connect.

OWA is only accessed on one of the client access servers and it is giving users intermittent error

Exception Exception type: System.Web.HttpException Exception message: Request timed out.

Exchange 2003 is still installed on the original Exchange 2003 server which is a DC (I know).

I know that the old servers need to be properly decommissioned but I am curious why this has become an issue only recently. Do you think just doing the proper decommission will fix the problems or does seem like these need to be resolved before any proper troubleshooting can take place?

Thanks

I wanted to know how many people have gone the route of nearly or completing replacing your standard file server which we have all come to become so comfortable with by using Sharepoint. What kinda of limitations prevent you from fully replacing file servers?

I have file servers that I inherited with little documentation on the complex file permissions. People are using Sharepoint Server (moss 2007) for a little bit of work but its still not widely used yet. I was wondering if this would be a good time to upgrade to 2010 (not sure which version yet) in an attempt to largely reduce my usage of file servers. I feel like I could get away with Foundation but I'd need to make sure what features of MOSS are being used before determining if features would be missed.

I'm planning my first workstation replacement schedule to hopefully replace 80 or so computers out of the 125 office. I know the limitations of the 32 bit OS is 3.5 GB of RAM. I believe RAM is the only upgrade that you would do to an business computer. If you put 4GB in them all now does it make sense to go with a 64 bit OS? Do you think typical office computers need 4GB for now and the future, will more be needed? I like the ability to be able to add more RAM to extend the life.

Some users are already on 64 bit and this hasn't caused any issues with our programs that we use but further testing would probably be needed. I believe the only work that would be needed would be to upgrade our print servers to 64 bit drivers.

I feel like now is a tricky time for purchasing because of this question.

Thanks,

Warning: This is a very general question.

I've walked into an environment where everything is working for the most part but it is held together with scotch tape (don't want to offend the duct tape cult).

Key points

• Backups can't restore to different hardware
• SAN uses Microsoft iSCSI initiator
• Permissions are a non-documented nightmare
• Many single points of failure
• Servers are mostly 4-5+ years old Poor utilization
• 20 servers across 3 offices
• All windows servers

Should I virtualize first (already have a basic SAN) or address these issue prior to virtualizing? I think virtualizing will make fixing these issues much easier but I want to avoid garbage in garbage out. My biggest concern are the backups with Exchange and SQL servers (with middleware) not being able to restore to different hardware. I'm planning to go VMWare when the time comes.

Your thoughts.... Thanks,

I'm looking to deploy Symantec Backup Exec 2010 and I am trying to figure out how much storage my media server should have to allow for adequate growth and retention periods. 2010 offers block level de-duplication which changes the game dramatically. This seems like a stupid question but how do you calculate rate of changed data and then turn that information around to estimate backup storage needs.

Thanks

Hello we just upgraded from exchange 2003 to 2010. 2010 seems to be pushing people to stop using public folders. Public folders had the nice feature that you could see the contacts of the public folder in your address book. I haven't found a way to add shared contacts to the Outlook address book. How do you do it? If I am unable to find the solution I will likely have to go through the hassle of migrating the public folders over. I was having a problem with that so I went the route of shared contacts.