Review of Dell Equallogic SAN PS4000
At my organization, we have iSCSI and SAN devices from different vendors we have used throughout the years. The Dell Equallogic PS4000 iSCSI SAN is the latest brand we have bought on-site. It has 16 15K Hard drives, 15 drives that can be used + 1 hot spare. It also has 2 controllers with 2 1GB ports + 1 management ...
Creating a Gateway for Test VMware Network using Ubuntu 11.4
One of my side projects for the last 2 weeks has been the creation of my very own playground environment. I'm using VMware ESXi 4 with HP DL 370 G6 with 14 300GB SAS drives as a host. Getting the setup ready itself was not hard, but obtaining an internet connection was more of a challenge. The Problem Currently, we get an ...
Recently, I had a need to find a software to temporarily move over 2000 AD user accounts from many OUs to a single OU. I will explain in a later post why this was necessary. We currently use a software called AD Bulk Users via Doverstone to handle many of our bulk AD account creations, but moving AD accounts is not one of the options. My friend Prince found a free a great free tool from WiseSoft called Bulk AD Users (download here). Bulk AD Users has the ability to import a list of users via copy/paste, identify the accounts, and move the accounts to whatever OU you want. It’s a no-hassle system that does the job right.
Additionally, you can rollback the changes, so the AD accounts can be moved back to the original OU once I was finished with the modifications that I needed to perform as seen by the screenshot below. There are other great features of this software such as Bulk Modify, but for my current purposes, the bulk AD OU move sold me.
This device is pretty interesting, it will just use your existing Internet connection to devices to connect and enhance your signal strength. There is nothing to configure on the phone other then powering off and on the device to detect the Micro Cell for the first time. AT&T added into their boot up of the phone a Micro Cell look up command and if one is present it tries to connect and if it can it will display 3gMicro instead of AT&T next to the wireless signal meter. This makes deploying it in a corporate environment a breeze for end users, because the user doesn’t have to do anything.
Now for the device itself when you get the device you register it against your a phone number that is in your account. So for most people you will only have a hand-full of phones in your home that will need service and on your family talk plan. For a business the whole corporate account is open to adding in and this is where this device can take off and has limitations. This device can have up to 4 simultaneous calls at a time and up to 10 users approved for the device itself to use so as you can see expandability is capped and can start getting expensive if you want to start planning this as a deployment. Each device however does have its own unique channel so multiple cell’s wont conflict with each other. Other things you will need is 1.5 Mbps Internet connection and a location where it can receive a GPS signal. Configuring them is a breeze on AT&T’s site one you get one you log into your account and there is an option to add the device (e911 info, cell numbers, location) and that’s it.
more info can be found here at AT&T’s site
http://www.att.com/shop/wireless/devices/3gmicrocell.jsp?fbid=2-nlbWTX0d1
Our environment in my organization is currently operating on a triangle transitive trust among 3 forest. We are consolidating the file structure from 2 old forest to a newly created forest. One of the forest has DFSR setup with it’s own namespace (\\ForestOld1\files). We also setup a DFSR structure in our new forest (\\ForestNew\files).The DFSR setup uses Windows 2008 R2 servers running pre-windows 2008 DFSR mode. This is because there are still Windows 2003 R2 DFSR servers in our environment that we will need to remove. Our plan is to migrate the data from the DFSR systems in the old forest to the new forest.
New Organization
A new organization that we acquired required a new file server. Since the acquired organization doesn’t have an AD structure or file system, we had to setup new AD accounts and file server. The main requirement was that backups would be performed in our DataCenter in Chicago. I built 2 DFSR servers located in California. I was hoping to setup DFSR replication between the ForestNew servers in California and the ForestOld1 servers that exist in Chicago. The existing servers have file backups currently setup This setup though is not supported by Microsoft and you receive an error when you attempt to setup a cross-forest replication setup as shown below.
Our solution was to setup another file server in Chicago. We would need to setup a DFSR server in the new forest anyway but since we are using BackupExec 12d to backup the file system in the old forest (Main file server is Windows 2008 server) we will have to address the backup issue. This of course is for another post.
Group Policy Preferences in Windows 2008 and 2008 R2 has been one of the greatest free add-on features Microsoft has added to the Windows systems. Group Policy Preferences allow administrators to utilize more powerful tools for controlling setup of printing, drive mapping, shortcut, and local group policy management. Windows OSes such as Vista, 7, and 2008, and 2008R2 support Group Policy Preferences. Windows XP, 2003, 2003R2 and below do not.
This is an issue when I am trying to deploy a drive mapping using Group Policy Presences. The windows 7 clients received the icon but the XP and 2003 clients did not receive the mapping. Fortunately, Microsoft provides an patch update for these Oses. You can use the links below to download the patches.
The migration of student Exchange mailboxes to Google Apps for Education was broken into 2 phases: Active students vs Alumni. Additionally, the process was broken into 3 technical sections: migration of Exchange mail to Google Apps, removal of Exchange Mailboxes, and addition of mail-enabled attributes.
Initial Plan
The 1st part of the 3 technical sections was to migrate the Exchange mail to Google Apps. I created 4 temporary Windows 2008 servers with the Google Apps Migration for Microsoft Exchange software installed. The software was flexible enough to accommodate some important requirements:
- Migrate mail based on date stamp
- Control number of concurrent accounts being migrated
- Be simple enough to use
The Google Apps for Microsoft Exchange App
With the Google Apps Migration software, we could pre-stage the migration of the 274 accounts up to a certain date and complete the final migration by transferring only the email on the day of the migration. This was important because the Exchange 2003 server is in a building that has only a 10mbit internet pipe. We wanted to route all traffic out of a 100mbit internet feed located in another building via the 100mbit microwave radios that connected the buildings. We found out that the Google Apps server could send data to the 100mbit internet feed if it was located in 2nd building.
Servers
The servers were 4 VM Windows 2008 32bit machines with dual-core processors and 4GB of RAM. The servers were set to transfer 25 users concurrent users. Each server would handle 68-69 total users in total. Network and Server monitoring showed that we could ramp up to 100 concurrent transfers (25 per server) without too much impact on the production environment.
Next Steps
In Part 3, I’ll explain section 2 and 3 of the student migration-the removal of the Exchange mailboxes and addition of the mail-enabled attributes. I’ll also review the AD tools used including a free tool that we found 2 days prior to the migration..
I have been on and off configuring an Exchange 2007 CCR environment in my sandbox environment. My setup is 2 CAS/HT servers, and Edge server, and 2 Mailbox servers. For some reason, I setup the 2 mailbox servers using Windows 2008 clustering per the following links
- http://www.msexchange.org/articles_tutorials/exchange-server-2007/high-availability-recovery/deploying-exchange-2007-sp1-ccr-cluster-windows-server-2008-failover-cluster-part2.html
- http://www.msexchange.org/tutorials/Installing-Configuring-Testing-Exchange-2007-Cluster-Continuous-Replication-Based-Mailbox-Server-Part2.html
During the setup, I ran into issues with the setup of the passive node. It was bad enough that I just went ahead and built a 3rd server and made it a secondary node. The setup went well, and the Failover was functioning properly…until, I tested the clustering. The databases on the active and passive nodes were replicating and talking to each other. Unfortunately, when I tested the Exchange CCR clustering, via a transfer of the roles in the Failover Cluster, my test Outlook client would not connect to the new active server. I shutdown MB01 to see if a shutdown of the former active server would help, but it didn’t.
After reviewing the event logs, I could tell that the passive node’s database would not mount. I checked online but Google didn’t really help. To make sure the databases were indeed consistent on the passive node MB03, I used the Update Storage Group wizard from the passive node. During my readings, I found that Microsoft recommends with SP1 and on to use the Manage Clustered Mailbox Server wizard, not the Failover Cluster to manage Exchange 2007 cluster actions. When I performed a cluster move to the passive node, I received the error below.
Turns out that I had used the SP1 version of the Exchange 2007 setup on MB03 without upgrading the Exchange version to SP2. All the other servers including the Clustered Mailbox server were running at SP2. As a result, the cluster could not move the MBX cluster to the MB03 nodey. Since all the other Exchange 2007 servers are at SP2, I ran the SP2 upgrade on MB03. Now the cluster is talking to each other without issues.
Note: a good site that explains the CCR roles really well is “http://www.msexchange.org/articles_tutorials/exchange-server-2007/high-availability-recovery/exchange-2007-service-pack1-managing-ccr-cluster-using-exchange-management-console.html“.