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 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. ...

VMware Resource Pools are not something that should be thrown into every vSphere implementation! I considered not writing this post, because of all of the blogs I’ve seen that have written about this already. If you don’t believe me, check out a few of these: http://www.ntpro.nl/blog/archives/1512-dont-add-resource-pools-for-fun,-theyre-dangerous.html http://wahlnetwork.com/2012/02/01/understanding-resource-pools-in-vmware-vsphere/ http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2009/11/13/resource-pools-and-shares/ http://frankdenneman.nl/2010/05/18/resource-pools-memory-reservations/ Unfortunately, I continue to hear resource pools being misunderstood. Don’t get me wrong, these are great tools and have a place in your arsenal, but they are used for a very specific reason. ...

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! ...

QLogic has introduced a new product that combines their already reliable Fibre Channel host bus adapters with solid state storage in order to do caching. Think Fusion-IO cards with a Fibre Channel HBA as well. (Yes I know that’s an over simplification) The new QLogic cards come in 2 flavors. A 200GB SSD option and a 400GB SSD option, both of which are 8Gb Fibre Channel. I’ve been told that 8Gb was used to get started with this concept because it was already proven and solid, where as the 16Gb Fibre is much newer. I’m sure these cards will be a hit and 16Gb Fibre cards are in the works with even larger capacities. ...

My configuration is listed below if anyone is interested in the details. Similar designs have been done before by both Chris Wahl @Chriswahl and prior to that by Phillip Jaenke @RootWyrm who called them " Baby Dragons". I used their base config and made a few tweaks of my own based on pricing, part availability etc. Part List ESXi Servers - Quantity 2 Case: Lian Li PC-V351B MicroATX PSU: SeaSonic Platinum SS-400FL2 Fanless 400W RAM: Kingston 16GB (4 X 8GB) 240-Pinn DDR3 Unbufferred ECC Motherboard: Supermicro MBD-X9SCM-F-O CPU: Intel Xeon E3-1230 V2 Ivy Bridge 3.3GHz NICs: Intel EXPI9301CTBLK 1000Mbps PCI-Express, SuperMicro Dual Port Gigabit Card Boot: Kingston DataTraveler 101 G2 8GB USB 2.0 Local SSD: 64 GB Intel SSD Flex Server - Quantity 1 (Used for a Hyper-V server, VSA or 3rd ESXi Host) Case: HP Gen8 Microserver Storage: 4 480GB SSD’s from OCZ Storage Array Synology Array: 1- Synology DS1513+ Hard Drives: 5 1 TB Wester Digital Blue 7200 3.5 inch hard drives Networking Equipment Layer 3 Switch: Cisco WS03750G-24T Switch Firewall: Cisco ASA Wireless Router: Dlink Wireless N+ Router ESXi Server Notes: I’m not going to lie, when I saw these cases on Chris Wahl’s lab and had to have them. They look crazy sharp and I love the pull out Motherboard mounting option. There are other components in common but I have a feeling these were copied because of a similar taste for components and budget rather than lust! :) ...

Today HP announced their new initiative called Project Moonshot. This initiative takes converged infrastructure and puts it on steroids. Hewlett Packard identified that the amount of compute, power and cooling that is necessary to continue providing resources for Big Data, and mobile platforms is unsustainable at the current rate. It just isn’t feasible with the current technology to continue to throw the same servers into data centers without optimizing. ...

I see a good number of IT shops with my job and in most cases the largest priority is system uptime. I might be there to install, troubleshoot, etc. but in the front off my mind is the idea that everything must stay up and running. IT departments are adding redundant WAN connections, server clusters, fault tolerance, failover devices, disaster recovery sites and redundancies at every level. But in some cases these departments are forgetting a pretty integral part of continuous uptime. ...