Microsoft

If you’ve got a some hardware lying around for your lab, Windows Server 2012 may be a great solution for a home storage device. You can now do both block (iSCSI) and NAS (NFS) on the same server, as well as having an OS to install some management apps on it. In my lab, I use this management server to run Veeam for my backups, PRTG network monitor for bandwidth tracking, as well as using this server for both iSCSI targets and NFS mounts. ...

One of the new features in the latest version of Windows Server is the ability to create server groups. When you open the server manager you’ll see some server group options on the dashboard. You can add other servers to manage, or create a new group. Also, pay attention to the “Roles and Server Groups” section at the bottom of the screen which shows some of the server groups that were already set up. ...

 Microsoft has made the Exchange 2013 transition from Exchange 2010 a bit easier than it was in the past. This article should help to explain the process. Prerequisites Before you begin with this endeavor: Make sure that your Exchange 2010 infrastructure has been patched to Exchange Service Pack 3, this includes Edge transport servers, Client Access Servers, Hub Transport Servers and Mailbox Servers. This service pack is required for the coexistence period with Exchange 2013 as noted in the Exchange Team’s Blog. Say goodbye to Exchange 2003. You can not have Exchange 2003 in your organization any longer. Check your DNS Server and Event logs for errors. It’s unlikely that you had DNS errors before an upgrade that you didn’t already know about but it’s certainly worth taking a look just to check. A few minutes of discovery is well worth not having hours of troubleshooting afterwards. Plan your Exchange 2013 infrastructure. This article only explains the transition steps, but you should research and understand what your infrastructure should look like before you start a migration. Do you have multiple sites that need High Availability? Do you need multiple Exchange servers in a Database Availability Group? Do you need to separate your Client Access Server from your Mailbox Server for performance or management reasons, or can you put them on the same box? How many different Mailbox databases should you have? These are important design considerations. Licensing There are two flavors of Exchange 2013. Standard allows for up to five mailbox databases, and Enterprise allows for up to 50. ...

Microsoft Exchange 2010 to Exchange 2013 Transition part 1 Microsoft Exchange 2010 to Exchange 2013 Transition part 3 Microsoft Exchange 2010 to Exchange 2013 Transition part 4 I assume you’ve reached this page because you finished ready part 1 and are now ready to dive into your newly installed Exchange 2013 server. ...

Microsoft Exchange 2010 to Exchange 2013 Transition part 1 Microsoft Exchange 2010 to Exchange 2013 Transition part 2 Microsoft Exchange 2010 to Exchange 2013 Transition part 4 Migrate Mailboxes You’re ready to migrate your mailboxes! Go to the Recipient link, mailbox category and choose the mailbox(es) you want to migrate. I’ll be migrating [email protected] to the new servers. Click “To another database” action on the lower right hand side of the menu. ...

Microsoft Exchange 2010 to Exchange 2013 Transition Part 1 Microsoft Exchange 2010 to Exchange 2013 Transition Part 2 Microsoft Exchange 2010 to Exchange 2013 Transition Part 3 I want to take a second to explain that this series of posts on how to migrate to Exchange 2013 didn’t come without it’s share of difficulties. ...

When I was a Systems Administrator, one of the things we wanted to know was if there were issues with our Active Directory environment. Things like directory health, stale computers, and if someone had modified the domain admins group were at the top of that list. The scripts below were built in an attempt to give a quick overview of the Active Directory. These plugins were built on top of Alan Renouf’s vCheck ( @alanrenouf) which provides a great framework for the building of your own scripts. Check out his site if you haven’t already! ...

One of the new features I really wanted to check out in Server 2012 was the ability to setup a highly available DHCP server. Prior to Windows 2012 if you wanted to setup a highly available DHCP solution, you only had a couple of options. 1. You could setup up a split scope, which required you to setup identical DHCP scopes on two servers, and then adding exclusion ranges on each of them so they didn’t both hand out the same IP Addresses. Usually this was done in an 80/20 fashion. ...

It’s a pretty common best practice to not install the Infrastructure Master (FSMO) Role on a Global Catalog Server. This post should help to explain why that is, and the circumstances where you can get away with it. Global Catalog Review A Global Catalog contains a full set of attributes for the domain that it’s a member of and a subset of information for all domains in its forest. So basically, what this means is that all of the little attributes that are stored on objects in Active Directory, in the GC’s domain, will be housed on Global Catalog servers. The global Catalog will also have a replica of the objects from other domains in the forest, but only a smaller set of their attributes. ...

Suppose you have multiple virtual machines that you would like to distribute load across that are housed inside of your virtual environment. How do we go about setting up Network Load Balancing so that it will still work with things like DRS and VMotion? Switch Refresher In most networks we have switches that listen for MAC addresses and store them in their MAC Address Table for future use. If a switch receives a request and it knows which port the destination MAC address is associated with, it will forward that request out the single port. If a switch doesn’t know which port a MAC Address is associated with, it will basically send that frame out all of it’s ports (known as flooding) so that the destination can hopefully still receive it. This is why we’ve moved away from hubs and moved towards switches. Hubs will flood everything because they don’t keep track of the MAC Addresses. You can see how this extra traffic on the network is unwanted. ...