Blumetech's Tech Blog

Microsoft Hosted Exchange Outage

When the system works, it is great and well worth the cost of the service.

Today's outage is frustrating for both users as well as the IT professionals trying to support the service.

We have several accounts using the service each with a different experience today.

The outage left one client's email completely shut down for a few hours - the Office 365 health status did reflect that Exchange was down.

Another client experienced no disruption and yet another had intermittent issues but the Microsoft console showed all services to be healthy.

You can check the Office 365 service health status here:

http://status.office365.com/ or log into the admin management console.

http://www.crn.com/news/cloud/300073234/microsoft-suffers-another-cloud-outage-as-exchange-online-users-left-in-the-lurch.htm

We still like the service and hope this outage doesn't become a pattern.

 

Related articles

 

Microsoft's Office 365 outages pile up: Growing pains or uptime issues?

Posted with Blogsy

Windows 2012 Features SlideShow

Network World has published a slide show on the major highlights of Windows 2012. Unfortunately there isn't much in the release that makes the upgrade pressing.

Some key features for SMB:

1. Resilient File System (ReFS) -- Win2012 will have a new file system beyond just NTFS. The new file system supports more storage and the stability requirements needed when you go beyond 256TB. This feature really only applies to those SMBs with multi-TB volumes.
2. Data Deduplication -- This is a common feature on many storage arrays, but many SMBs have simple DAS without this advanced feature. For a basic file server, dedup can reduce space by up to 40%. Dedup volumes can also be used as backup targets for additional savings

There are some other features that I would define as specialty cases that don't apply to all SMBs. For example there were improvements related to Hyper-V. (I don't know anyone running Hyper-V. ESX, RedHat, and Xen only) Also some improvements on IIS for heavy loads. (I don't know anyone running IIS under heavy loads. (Apache and Nginx for heavy loaded web servers.

Link to Slide Show

Expanding the C: Drive on Windows VMs

One tasks that frequently comes up in IT is adding more disk space to a server. In a Windows VM environment, for the most part, this is very easy. If your disks are Basic as opposed to Dynamic, simply add more space to the VMDK file via VMware and then use diskpart to extend the partition. If your disks are dynamic, create a new virtual disk in VMware and in Windows span onto this new disk.

Unfortunately, neither of these two scenarios work if you are trying to add space to the C: drive. Diskpart will not extend a partition that contains the boot volume, a.k.a. C:. If your C: drive is dynaimic, you cannot span the C: drive with multiple disks.

One solution assuming you are using Basic disks is to

1. Shutdown your VM
2. Remove the virtual disk from the VM configuration. (DON’T DELETE IT)
3. Add this virtual disk to another VM
4. Increase the virtual disk size using VMware
5. Use diskpart in the VM to extend the partition
6. Remove the virtual disk from the temporary VM
7. Add the VM back to the original VM and boot

There are a couple of problems with this method

1. It assumes you have a spare VM to work with
2. It assumes that you don’t mind making changes to the temporary VM even if the changes are minor

There is a better way to do the C: drive expansion that is a bit faster and sidesteps the problems listed above. Parted Magic is the secret sauce. Pmagic is an opensource, Linux distribution that includes many easy to use disk based utilities including gparted, a disk partition utility.

Requirements:

1. Basic Disks. (It may work with Dynamic. I have never tried)
2. A Backup of your data specifically the vmdk file you are modifying. I highly recommend using FastSCP from Veeam. This is a free tool that is easy to use and can make fast backups of VMDK files
3. Parted Magic Live CD

Steps:

1. Shutdown your VM
2. Backup your VMDK file. Do not rely on just a snapshot. Since we are making major changes to the partition table of the vmdk file a full backup is recommended. A snapshot will probably work but not recommended.
3. In VMware Infrastructure Client, increase the size of the virtual disk
4. Mount the Pated Magic Live CD in your VM
5. Boot the VM into the Pmagic OS
6. Start the Gparted Application. There should be an icon on the desktop. In the screenshot you can see the C: drive with the additional 40GB of unallocated space. The drive designation is in Linux parlance, i.e. it is now /dev/sda1 and not C:
7. 
8. Click Resize/Move
9. Simply drag the green box representing the first partition so that it fills the entire drive
10. 
     
    
11. Exit gparted and apply your changes. After churning for a few moments you should see a success screen
12. 
     
    
13. Shutdown the VM. The equivalent Windows “Start Button” is in the lower left hand corner
14. Unmount the Pmagic CD
15. Boot the VM. Windows will immediately complain that changes have been made to the system that require chkdsk to run. Let chkdsk run. The machine may reboot after this is complete.
16. Login and check that Windows sees the larger C: drive.

NAS Analysis – Windows 2008 vs Openfiler vs Nexenta vs Red Hat vs Windows with OpenText – Part 1

NFS based storage is gaining a strong following in VMware environments. NFS has a lot of big pluses for storage of VMDKs especially in environments that lack the money or expertise for a full fiber channel SAN but still want to leverage some great ESX features like vMotion and High Availability.

In the NAS arena, there are two broad categories of vendors

1.       The Giants – This is EMC, NetApp, and IBM. Prices are high but level of features, functionality, availability and support are also great.

2.       Everyone Else – These could be your traditional servers running an operating system that you probably already know, e.g. Windows or Linux. Price is fairly low and feature set is pretty broad. Or these could be dedicated NAS boxes. Very cheap with questionable performance. Drobo and Overland are good examples.

Many SMBs simply can’t afford the complexity and cost that are associated with “The Giants”

One fairly cheap and easy to understand NAS solution for SMBs is to simply buy a standard server, e.g. Dell, HP, Super Micro, install your OS of choice, and then finally export your NFS mount points.

Analyzing the features of the different OS 's is fairly straightforward and can be done simply by reviewing the online documentation and datasheets.

I wanted to understand if any of the operating systems performed better with NFS workloads. As a side note I was also curious if Windows 2008 would outperform a typical Linux distribution.

I've been spending my spare time over the last few days setting up the lab for testing. I've run into my first roadblock which was actually suprising. The first interation of my NAS server is Windows 2008 R2 running on a HP ML570 G4. I've exported an NFS mount and created a datastore on my ESX host. From there I could easily create VMDKs for my VMs on the NFS Storage. Here is a good article on setting up a Windows 2008 server for NFS and ESX http://ross-family.org/blog/2009/07/08/how-to-use-windows-2008-to-host-storage-for-esx/

What surprised me was how well Windows 2008 performed in the first round of tests. By doing simple file copies in and out of the VMDK I was able to saturate the GigE link on the NAS box. See screenshot below. Given the number of people online complaining about slow NFS performance in Windows, I was happily surprised by the results. I think if given the choice most SMBs would choose Windows over Linux for their server OS simple because it's an OS most SMBs are familar with. Let's see if future tests confirm these initial good performance numbers.

I am going to upgrade the link to 10Gig-E. Bonding the two NICs together into a single channel would not improve performance. Traffic is being generated for my test from a single ESX Host and hence all that traffic would go over a single 1Gig-E link. I could setup another ESX Host and test both simultaneously, but going to 10Gig-E, since it is available to me, is much easier.

Microsoft Has Record Patch Tuesday

Yesterday marked a dubious record for Microsoft...49 security holes patched in a single month. There's no need to list all the fixes here. Some helpful links with background on the worse vulnerabilities and additional links to the source information at the Microsoft site...

http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/67336?hpg1=bn

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/101210-record-patch-tuesday-hits-older.html?source=nww_rss

Have no doubt that these vulnerabilities are very serious and effect even the latest and greatest software, e.g. Windows 7, Windows 2008, and IE v8. In the worse vulnerabilities, simply browsing a web page with malformed content is all that is required to allow full remote access to the machine. Expect widespread use of these vulnerabilities to spread viruses and malware.

I recommend applying the updates as soon as possible.