Blog (at) mreza.info

Edge Planning Tool for Office Communications Server 2007

sasoe — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 14:57:17 GMT

Another great tool from OCS team!

The Edge Planning Tool for Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 provides settings for configuring your perimeter network based on information that you provide to the tool.

The Edge Planning Tool asks questions about your proposed or current edge server deployment. The tool uses your answers and Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 best practices to generate the following reports:

Settings that you can use to configure your certificates, DNS services, and firewalls.
Custom documentation for configuring your edge servers, reverse proxy, and next hop server.
A comparison of your answers to Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 best practices.

Source: Edge Planning Tool for Office Communications Server 2007

VMware Workstation faster than Hyper-V?

sasoe — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 14:57:27 GMT

Well... not exactly.

I came across a blog post on The Hypervisor which compares VMware Workstation and Microsoft Hyper-V.

The interesting part about benchmarks is that they are based only in difference between installation times which is complete nonsense. Hyper-V in known to be "slow" during installation (it's also slower than Virtual PC). Hyper-V shows real speed when Integrated Components are loaded.

It would be interesting to see a real (and with real I mean applications stress tests,... and not installation times) between Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware ESX. I can tell you from my test labs that VMware Workstation/Server is slow compared to Hyper-V. Anyone noticed Windows Server 2008 struggling on VMware ESX 3.5 and flying on Hyper-V? Must be something with Experimental support for Windows Server 2008 on ESX 3.5...

Source: Hyper-V benchmark surprise

4th Birthday

sasoe — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 10:54:00 GMT

Blog (at) Mreza.Info is 4 years old today. In the near future blog will be migrated to Exchange.SI domain and will also include some great online tools for every UC Administrator.

;-)

Cipher Suite Update for Windows Server 2003

sasoe — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 13:06:36 GMT

This update adds support for the following Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) cipher suites in the Schannel.dll module for Windows Server 2003:

TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA AES128-SHA
TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA AES256-SHA

Note: These cipher suites are based on the RC4 algorithm.

Source:

KB948963 - An update is available to adds support for the TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA AES128-SHA and the TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA AES256-SHA AES cipher suites in Windows Server 2003

Performance Tuning Guidelines for Windows Server 2008

sasoe — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 10:09:27 GMT

This guide describes important tuning parameters and settings that can result in improved performance for the Windows Server 2008 operating system. Each setting and its potential effect are described to help you make an informed judgment about its relevance to your system, workload, and performance goals.

This information applies for the Windows Server 2008 operating system.

What's New:

Added "Power Guidelines" under Server Hardware section and added "Performance Tuning for Virtualization Servers" section.

Included in this paper:

Performance Tuning for Server Hardware
Performance Tuning for Networking Subsystem
Performance Tuning for Storage Subsystem
Performance Tuning for Web Servers
Performance Tuning for File Servers
Performance Tuning for Active Directory Servers
Performance Tuning for Terminal Server
Performance Tuning for Terminal Server Gateway
Performance Tuning for Virtualization Servers
Performance Tuning for File Server Workload (NetBench)
Performance Tuning for Network Workload (NTttcp)
Performance Tuning for Terminal Server Knowledge Worker Workload
Performance Tuning for SAP Sales and Distribution Two-Tier Workload

Download: Performance Tuning Guidelines for Windows Server 2008 White Paper

Bash vs. Windows PowerShell

sasoe — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 08:57:45 GMT

Is Bash better than Windows PowerShell? Is Windows PowerShell better than Bash? Well... It depends on your needs and system you are administering. I just found first good comparison of both products.

Marcus Nasarek wrote great comparison article of Bash vs. Windows Powershell for Linux Magazine!

Hyper-V Maximum Supported Configurations

sasoe — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 08:34:03 GMT

Nick MacKechnie posted a great post about Hyper-V maximum supported configurations.

Topics:

Operating System Requirements
Hardware Requirements
Virtual Machine Architecture Support
Memory
Processors
Networking
Physical Storage
Virtual Hard Disks
Virtual Storage Controllers
Virtual Storage
Virtual CD/DVD
Virtual Serial (COM) Ports
Virtual Floppy Drive
Number of Virtual Machines

Links of the Week #1

sasoe — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 10:34:37 GMT

Let's try this...

Microsoft Exchange Server ActiveSync Web Administration Tool (for Exchange 2003/2007) - The Exchange Server ActiveSync Web Administration tool is designed for administrators who want to manage the process of remotely erasing lost, stolen, or otherwise compromised mobile devices.
Microsoft Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool - This Solution Accelerator provides automated tools and guidance that IT professionals can use to update offline virtual machines efficiently and without exposing them to security risks.
Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and BitLocker Drive Encryption - Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and BitLocker Drive Encryption provide consolidated workloads a platform for secure data and systems. This paper describes detail steps for setting up this platform for deployment of virtual machines.
Microsoft Office Visio 2007 Professional Add-In for Rack Server Virtualization (Virtual Rack) - Rack Server Virtualization Add-in provides the capability to pull the rack-server data either from an Excel spread sheet or from the user and render the Visio diagram.
Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server 2006 Service Pack 1 - The new features focus on configuration change management and enhanced troubleshooting designed to help you identify and resolve ISA Server configuration issues within the ISA Server Management console.

Migrating Vista/Server 2008 VMs from Virtual PC, Server or VMware to Hyper-V?

sasoe — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 15:13:54 GMT

There is one little trick you need to remember if you are migrating VHDs with Vista/Server 2008 that was previously created on Virtual PC or Virtual Server 2005.

Enable Detect HAL!

How to Enable Detect HAL?

Start the virtual machine and Run Msconfig.exe.
In the System Configuration dialog box, click the Boot tab, and then click Advanced Options.
In the BOOT Advanced Options dialog box, click to select the Detect HAL check box, and then click OK.
Click Yes to restart the virtual machine.
Clear the Detect HAL check box after reboot (it takes longer to boot).

Source: KB 954282 - The VMBus device does not load on a virtual machine that is running on a Windows Server 2008-based computer that has Hyper-V installed

Designing you DMZ network for OCS 2007

sasoe — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 14:43:32 GMT

What is the right/recommended design of our DMZ (perimeter) network for OCS 2007 Edge implementation? This is usually quite common question whenever I have conversation with someone that is in the phase of designing/implementing their OCS 2007 infrastructure.

Microsoft just released new whitepaper. Happy reading! ;-)

Designing Your Perimeter Network for Office Communications Server 2007 White Paper

Brief Description
This paper answers questions about Microsoft® Office Communications Server 2007 with specific regard to its integration into the perimeter network (also known as DMZ, demilitarized zone, or screened subnet).

Overview
The first section, “Commonly Asked Questions,” answers key design questions from customers about the initial stages of product deployment.

The second section, “Architecture and Networking Best Practices,” explores ways to prepare for the edge servers in the perimeter network, taking into consideration issues of physical deployment, ways to ensure a publicly routable IP address, firewall configuration, and load-balancing concerns.

Hyper-V is final!

sasoe — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 18:26:07 GMT

Hyper-V RTM version is available for download. It came a little bit ahead of original (180 days) schedule.

Microsoft Office Communicator Mobile 2007 - Connection error

sasoe — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 22:04:20 GMT

Microsoft Office Communicator Mobile 2007 is released for some time now. You can download it from here.

After CoMo installation on your mobile device you will probably receive connection error (Cannot sign in. Check you connection settings in the Server options, or contact your system administrator.) because your ClientFilter is not updated. To resolve this issue go trough following steps.

On Standard/Enterprise Pool

Go to your Standard or Enterprise Pool
Open Client Version Filter option in your pool configuration

Edit CPE value to: 2.0.387.* >= Allow

Stop and Start all started services

On Access Edge Server(s)

Run ClientVersionFilterConfig.exe (C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007)
Edit CPE value to: 2.0.387.* >= Allow
Stop and Start all started services on Access Edge Server

Step-by-Step Guide for Testing Hyper-V and Failover Clustering

sasoe — Mon, 26 May 2008 13:10:37 GMT

Shows you how to make a virtual machine highly available. You will do this by creating a simple two-node cluster and a virtual machine, and then failing over the virtual machine from one node to the other.

Source: Step-by-Step Guide for Testing Hyper-V and Failover Clustering

MSDN and TechNet Powered by Hyper-V

sasoe — Mon, 26 May 2008 13:03:25 GMT

Interesting post about Hyper-V and virtualizing MSDN and TechNet web sites at Microsoft.

Hi—I am Rob Emanuel from the Microsoft.com Operations team. For those of you who may not know what we do, our group designs, deploys, manages and sustains highly available, highly scalable Web and SQL systems for Microsoft for some of the largest corporate web sites in the world (www.microsoft.com, Microsoft Update, Download Center, MSDN and TechNet). Along with our team’s TechCenter, we maintain a blog on how we adopt our own products and share some of our real world experiences.

For the last several months we have had the opportunity to focus on virtualizing both the MSDN and TechNet websites with Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V as a start to our overall virtualization adoption strategy. This was a group effort across our entire Operations Team including individuals from the Technical Architecture group I am part of, the System Engineers who run the sites, the data center hosting team which handles our infrastructure changes and the very supportive product group which is responsible for MSDN and TechNet. Today we are very pleased to be able to share how Hyper-V was deployed for those two sites and our lessons learned through that process. We have written an article on the TechCenter which goes through how we approached virtualizing MSDN and TechNet and hopefully conveys how successful we found Hyper-V to be as a web platform.

The article covers the reasons and characteristics which made MSDN the first site we looked to move onto Hyper-V. It provides an overview of how both Hyper-V Beta and Hyper-V RC0 were deployed as well as the general architecture used for the deployment. Possibly the most surprising finding was that Hyper-V was far more stable than we had expected for a beta version deployment. There was in fact no difference we found in stability or availability between Hyper-V and a physical deployment! We were also not able to identify any bugs for the Hyper-V team during our deployment under either full production load or even stress load.

...

Source: MSDN and TechNet Powered by Hyper-V

Hyper-V RC1 Released

sasoe — Mon, 26 May 2008 12:58:03 GMT

Microsoft released RC1 version of Hyper-V.