Over the summer we moved mail to Exchange 2010 sp1 and being a school we also have new members of staff joining.
The result is that a few people are having trouble finding certain people in their outlook address book when they get back after their summer break.
I’ve done a quick powershell script to remove the offline address book files remotely. Make sure the user has closed outlook*, fire up Powershell ISE as administrator and then run this:

$comp = read-host “Computer Name”

$user = read-host “Login Name”

cd \\$comp\c$\Users\$user\AppData

dir -Recurse -Filter *.oab | remove-item

It will prompt for a computer name and a login name of the user you want to remove the files for. Obviously you will need appropriate network permissions.
When the reopen outlook they will have no problems finding all the new staff members they need to send to!

*If you want to go power(shell) crazy you could script the closing of the outlook process.

Back in April Microsoft put on their free tech day’s events in London, and today I spotted a tweet by Markjo saying the next tech days will be in London from 5^th October at ICC Canary Wharf now I missed the last event due to work commitments but I will definitely attempt to get to the event in October. More details will be released this week or next and as soon as they go public I will update this post but I have included 2 videos from a previous techdays event. So I hope to see you there.

One of the features in Windows 7 is the ability to mount a VHD file as a drive, this could be very useful in this world of HyperV because this allows you to extract a file directly from the VHD file on a desktop machine very useful if you have a VHD backup of your server and just require a few files. 

The first step is to open disk management, once open right click on Disk Management and choose “attach VHD”.

Once attached you will see a new drive in my computer, you can then copy files from and too the mounted VHD file.

To dismount the VHD from disk manager just right click on the disk and from the sub context menu choose “Detach VHD”

You can as well mount the VHD from the command prompt or via PowerShell first from the CLI load diskpart

Next use the command select vdisk file=”C:\vhd\test.vhd”

To attach the VHD use the command attach vdisk

To unmount the VHD use detach vdisk

UPDATE

Deano left a great comment on the post:which i thought i would share -

“This is a really handy feature of Windows 7 that I have used a lot of times. One thing to point out is that this feature is only available in Windows 7 Enterprise and Windows 7 Ultimate”

Dave

 One of the changes in Exchange 2010 with service pack 1 is that themes are back for end users and admins, this feature was in the beta of Exchange but was removed in the RTM version. For the end user they can choose their theme from the options button as illustrated below.

The amount of themes has grown considerably from the original 4 in Exchange 2007 to 27 available in Exchange 2010

To change the default theme for all users you need to use PowerShell but the good news is it is one single line, set-owavirtualdirectory “owa (default web site)” –defaultTheme blue-b

One gotcha I have discovered is that if a user has already applied a theme, the theme applied by the admin globally will not alter their choice. Although this can be combated by denying users changing themes using exchange policies.

Dave

 Today I started the job of installing service pack 1 for Exchange 2010 which can be downloaded from here.

  The first thing I must say is just how unhelpful the installer is, if you compare this with the SharePoint 2010 installer it is an absolute nightmare, as you can see from the screenshot below after running the prerequisite test it found I needed hotfixes before I could continue,

The big problem is this only presents you with a ‘Click here for help’ link that when clicked tells you the page cannot be found also the link to download the hotfix cannot be clicked or copied, so you then have the laborious task of manually typing into the browser the address which may not seem like a big deal but when you are dealing with long and complex URL’s it takes a lot of time and is prone to human error. So after going through this pain I thought I would share the error messages and links which you can click on.

Hub Transport Role Prerequisites Errors

 This was the first problem area and we have the exchange Backup Exec remote agent installed this service I had to stop running I also changed the start-up type to manual as this install requires a lot of restarts the next download required was the Microsoft Office 2010 Filter Packs which can be downloaded from   

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=5cd4dcd7-d3e6-4970-875e-aba93459fbee&displaylang=en

 Client Access Role Prerequisites

 The client access role required the most updates starting with KB982867 – WCF: Enable WebHeader settings on the RST/SCT but requires a restart download from http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/KB982867

The next update was the .NET Framework 2.0-based Multi-AppDomain application stops responding when you run the application downloadable from http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=979744 but again requires a Restart after install

 Next is KB983440 Win 7 rollup package downloadable from http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/KB983440

Again requires a restart after install

The final update for the client access role is FIX: An application that is based on the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Service Pack 2 and that invokes a Web service call asynchronously throws an exception on a computer that is running Windows 7 downloadable from http://support.microsoft.com/kb/977020

And it will not come as any surprise to know that a restart is required after installation.

Unified Messaging Role Prerequisites

 The last area was Unified messaging role this only required 2 updates and no restarts the first update was Unified Communications Managed API 2.0, Core Runtime (64-bit) downloadable from

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=e5e7aa8d-e110-4736-81ae-2ef81338b46b&displaylang=en

 The final update was Speech Platform Runtime downloadable from

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=180958

 The way I handled the service pack install was download all the updates and then start ploughing through the updates/restarts, but I did manage success with the install of service pack 1 but I will never understand why these hotfixes and patches where not rolled up in the service pack itself. I hope this post helps with your SP1 install experience.

Dave

It’s hard to explain what I mean in words so here is a picture:

See how the icons do not sit right next to the title of the item and you are left with masses of white space. This bug only seams to appear in IE8 and in firefox it works just fine. The picture below shows the same thing in Firefox:

This looks much better. I did a bit of digging around using the IE developer tools (just press F12) and tracked down what was causing the error. It’s the CSS width attribute which is set to 0.01% in the coreV4.css My colleague Rob Brown @littlemenace1 (who for a 17 year old knows far too much about far too many things!) assures me that only integers are supported here, so 0.01 is meaningless. IE8 must just get confused and ignore the width attribute all-together whereas Firefox just gets on with things and assumes it’s 1 or 0 but then expands the width to fit the icon and any padding.

Here is the offending CSS:

As we already have a custom masterpage and CSS applied, all I had to do was add

.ms-vb-icon {
    width: 1% !important;
}

into our CSS and all was fine.
If you don’t have a custom CSS and don’t want to make one then I think you could probably get away with doing what I always say you shouldn’t and edit the core CSS. Just watch out for it being overwritten during updates.

While I was at it I also updated the DOCICON.XML and associated images to make the folder icon and a few others more up-to-date. Results below!

Hopefully the CSS will be fixed in an update or service pack in the future.

  This post is a follow on to my Free HyperV Monitoring Tool post where I showed you a free but limited HyperV tool for monitoring your HyperV environment, in this post I will look at Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager and show some of the benefits for managing your HyperV install with this management tool.

 At Twynham we now have 2 HyperV farms one on our domain and another is for a SharePoint deployment we are hosting for the Dorset Local authority (but more about that later) for our domain SCVMM has many benefits one of the biggest being the ability to create P2V (Physical to Virtual) snapshots of our production servers SCVMM has proved an invaluable tool that we have used a great deal to help on the road to a virtualized environment.

The illustration above gives you an administration view of your HyperV deployment this report gives you a pie chart view of your hosts, Virtual Machines, Recent Jobs and library resources

I think the biggest win with SCVMM is the ability to control all of your HyperV servers from one interface for example we have been working on a customer’s site this week and they have 5 sites one with a 4 server failover cluster and 2 other sites with single HyperV servers running a number of virtual servers. Through SCVMM this brings the management of all these virtual servers into one interface simple to use interface for more details check out the SCVMM website.

Dave

Guest Post By Darren White

  Today myself and Dave where working on a customer site when the question of HyperV statistics came up, it would be good to be able to see what free memory was available on the host machine and also what memory was being used by the guest OS’s, now as has been pointed out in previous posts Dave is no expert with PowerShell but very much a newbie, whereas I am a past master (I do my best). So after searching codeplex I found the PowerShell Management Library for Hyper-V.

  After downloading and extracting please remember to unblock the zip file as illustrated below or you may encounter errors when trying to install and run the commands.

Once installed the obvious first step was to see the output of the commands, this proved to be very extensive and perfect for the job. The command we were most interested in was Get-VMSummary as illustrated below.  

As you can see the output is in list format for each item and this makes it hard to get an overview of data so the next step was to pipe it into Format-Table; Get-VMSummary | Format-Table. As illustrated below the formatted table makes it easier to read.

As you can see there is a lot of information presented that we do not need, so by using the format-table command we can specify the columns we wish to output to the screen. The main information we needed was:-

Hostname (Host), Virtual Machine Name (VMElementName), Installed Operating System (GuestOS), Number of Allocated CPU’s (CPUCount), Allocated Memory (MemoryUsage), Current State i.e. Running/Stopped (EnabledState)

Get-VMSummary | Format-Table Host, VMElementName, GuestOS, CPUCount, MemoryUsage, EnabledState

The next step was to output the information to a CSV file; this was achieved by replacing Format-Table with Select-Object and then piping this into the Export-Csv command. We also used the Sort-Object command to order the output by virtual machine name.

Get-VMSummary | Sort-Object VMElementName | Select-Object Host, VMElementName, GuestOS, CPUCount, MemoryUsage, EnabledState | Export-Csv VMInfo.csv -NoTypeInformation

The next step was to get the information from all the HyperV servers in the current domain this was achieved by using the Get-VMHost command as can be seen in the illustration below.

To continue writing our PowerShell script we included the parameter –server for the Get-VMSummary command. We passed this parameter from the Get-VMHost inside a foreach loop.

Get-VMHost | Sort-Object | foreach {
Get-VMSummary -server $_ | Sort-Object Name | Select-Object Host, VMElementName, GuestOS, CPUCount, MemoryUsage, EnabledState | Export-Csv “$_ VMInfo.csv” –NoTypeInformation
}

This will create a new CSV file for each hyperV server with the virtual machine information we have asked for.

The next step we needed to achieve was to merge the individual CSV files into one master CSV file containing the desired information on all the virtual machines in your domain. To do this we need to store to output in an array for each HyperV server instead of outputting to the CSV file. Once the array is populated we output this to the master CSV file.

$content = @();
Get-VMHost | Sort-Object | foreach {
$content += Get-VMSummary -server $_ | Sort-Object Name | Select-Object Host, VMElementName, GuestOS, CPUCount, MemoryUsage, EnabledState
}
$content | Export-Csv VMInfo.csv –NoTypeInformation

This script we saved as a PS1 file and then ran from within PowerShell, the CSV output you can see below.

This gives a great overview of all the virtual machines you have running on your HyperV server and will be a great aid when it comes to balancing the load across your HyperV servers.

A trick we used to balance the server load was, once we opened our CSV file in Excel you can use the function sumif to create the following formula, =SUMIF($A:$A,H1,$E:$E).

In our CSV column A we have the HyperV Hostname and Column E is the Virtual Machine Memory allocation. Cell H1 is next to the formula containing a HyperV hostname. We then copied this formula to the cells below for each HyperV (i.e. H2 will contain the hostname for the second HyperV and so on)

This will show the amount of Ram used on each HyperV server by the virtual machines and we hope it helps with balancing your HyperV implementation. As you can see from the illustration above our HyperV server will need balancing but that is the point of the post so we can now live migrate our virtual Servers and rerun the script until we are happy with the spread on across all of our HyperV host servers.

I hope you enjoyed this post and any questions please submit via comments on the blog or by going to http://twitter.com/whitefern and asking me there.

Darren

You may be aware of a constant debate that goes on between myself, Dave and a few others in education about running virtual environments and whether they should/could be 100% virtual of if you would need some physical domain controllers put into the mix. If you’re not familiar with the debate have a quick read of this http://sharepointineducation.com/?p=2056

So as you see, I’ve always maintained that you can have a completely virtual environment and in theory it’s all fine.

Well theory came crashing into reality this week. There was a planned power outage at school; the only flaw in the plan was that no one told us. We made it to the server room just in time to watch the UPS run out and experience the eeary sensation of a silent server room. One of the things to die was a fully virtual environment we have been playing with. The two node hyper v cluster is part of the same domain as the virtual machines that run on them. They both go off because of power and you have no domain. The theory being that you can just log in locally and start the DC, then boot 2^nd node then reboot node 1. What I hadn’t taken into account was that the cluster would not load and the DC was not available to boot from the cluster manager.

Lessons were learnt. Here they are.

If running a fully virtual environment the failover cluster and associated cluster shared volume will not start as there is no domain – this is a problem.

We fixed it by removing the cluster volume and just assigning it a drive letter on node 1 of the hyper cluster, the VHD for the domain controller could then be copied onto the local C: of node 1 and fired up via hyper-v manager. The 2^nd node could then be fired up and now having a domain to join was fine and the cluster volume was all good. The 2^nd DC was then moved to the C: of node 2. Node 1 could then be restarted and all was good from then on.

So if you go fully virtual don’t put all your domain controllers in the cluster, keep them local, one on each node as they can be started independently of shared storage or cluster.

Although I still wouldn’t be brave stupid enough to do this in production

Yesterday we were meeting a customer when the question of the difference in SharePoint 2010 versions came up well we answered the questions but I did not have a definitive answer or a document or URL that I could refer people too. So today after a bit of searching I managed to find on the Microsoft site a list of differences in each version but I could not find it in a PDF or Word format so the only thing to do is the hard miles of writing my own table. I will also make this available for download in PDF format at http://www.scribd.com/doc/35796153/SharePoint-2010-Version-Comparison , and if you would like it in word format just drop me an email and I will send you a copy dave@sharepointedutech.com