Ten Reasons You Should Already Be Using Virtualization For Your Server Environment

According to Intel:

Virtualization technology is possibly the single most important issue in IT and has started a top to bottom overhaul of the computing industry

Virtualization is a relatively new technology, but it is not as new as one might think.  VMware, one of the pioneers of virtualization, has been creating and selling virtualization software for over 10 years now.  All 100 of the Fortune 100 companies are currently using virtualization, specifically VMware’s offerings.  Once the only player, VMware now has serious competition from Microsoft, Citrix, Oracle (who recently acquired Sun Microsystems), RedHat, and Novell.

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The problem is that Windows Updates will not run properly (giving you various errors) and when Roles or Features are selected un the Server Manager you get the following error:

Error: Cannot display data until your computer is restarted.

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Exchange Outlook Web Access is a wonderful feature, but directing users to access it on their own can be a patience testing proposal if you’re not using URL redirection.

For example: you’ve installed Exchange 2010, configured all the appropriate roles, including the CAS (Client Access Server; responsible for OWA), and deserve a hero’s welcome, or at least a pat on the back. You then send an email to staff telling them that they can access webmail from the following public URL – https://webmail.domain.com/owa; easy enough right? Wrong! A few days later, calls come streaming in with users attempting to access OWA using incorrect URL’s: http instead of https, forgetting to append /owa to the URL, etc.

Well you can clear all of this up and make it transparent to the user, and they’ll never know you did it; it will just work.

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Several of our customers recently purchased HP DL180 G6 servers.  They are perfect (and economical) servers for iSCSI storage as they support up to 14 drives in a 2u form factor.  We however ran into a logistical problem in the purchase as the servers ordered were a HP Smart Buy, meaning that it’s a preconfigured server for a bit of a discount. 

This particular Smart Buy came with a PCI cage in the rear of the server for 2 PCI-E slots and a slimline DVD drive.  Well it being a storage server we had no need for the DVD drive and really wanted additional expansion slots.  The standard PCI cage will allow for 3 PCI-E slots or 4 with an optional riser card.  So I called HP and they directed me to a part number and so I ordered it.  When it arrived I could tell by the box that it was too small and sure enough it was just a PCI-e riser card, not the cage.  So I called them back and explained the situation and after I talked to 3 different departments I was still not convinced that the part they were telling me to order next was the right one.  Being in a crunch I ordered all rear PCI-e accessories.  When they arrived I opened box after box and they were all wrong! 

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A customer was complaining that their “sysvol” share on their Windows Server 2003 R2 domain controllers was not replicating content (updated group policies, login scripts, etc.). Upon initial examination, I ran across this error in the event logs:

Event Type: Error
Event Source: NtFrs
Event Category: None
Event ID: 13559
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OK, so you just got your shiny new Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007 (R1 or R2) implementation up and running, and whoa!, you start receiving complaints that users are unable to initiate multiparty instant messaging (IM) sessions, or multi-party conferences.

The setup:

OCS 2007 R1 and R2 (Standard)

Cisco Unified Presence Server v7.0.2

Cisco Call Manager v7.0.1.11000-2

In OCS 2007, the error reads as:

“Your attempt to start a conference was unsuccessful. If you need further assistance, contact your system administrator.”

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It never hurts to have a quick reference for Linux administration commands, so I wanted to put out some helpful items for user, file, directory, and group management.

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As Windows Server 2008 takes it’s place in more data centers, serving as a domain controller, design changes are starting to impact end users.

One of these notable changes effects a workflow most users have picked up: browsing the network to find file servers and shares.

We have seen more and more customers call in with an error similar to below (wording may differ from client to client):

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To Distro or not to distro…

Our customer needed distribution groups from their various SharePoint sites for creating alerts on shared lists and libraries.  Until now, the site administrator was constantly having to add and manage these alerts all on an individual basis, and since each project the customer works with calls for a new SharePoint site, changes were plentiful.

Initially, when trying to create a group, specifically, mail enable a group from within SharePoint, the admin was receiving an error stating: “The group operation succeeded, but the distribution group could not be updated because of the following error: The Directory Management Service reported the following error: Access denied.”

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After installing WSS3 SP2 on a clean install of Server 2008 x86 SP2 STD, and using SQL 2008 SP1 as the backend, I could not get any search results.  The setup is about as simple of a farm installation you can get, it is for a small number of users, and demonstration purposes, so everything is installed on a single machine virtualized on an HP server running VMware ESXi 3.5.  There are two site collections using different application pools, one enabled for anonymous access, and the other not.

The search service is common to both, but the crawl account (data access) is unique.

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