Since a few months now we see a shift and a decreasing adoption of Apache servers and Microsoft IIS gaining market share. Does this mean people are moving from Linux boxes to Windows Servers with ISS? Or do we just have more websites running on our install base? I'm wondering how much of the IIS Servers are running on top of Windows Server 2008. Anyway the microsoft.com site are hosted on an IIS 7 platform and it run's great. I advise you to take a look at our new IIS Web platform.
Apache loses 2.8% share this month, partly through the strong growth at the major blogging systems, and partly due to 2.5 million domains on Apache expiring at trouble-free.net. Apache has around a 10% market share advantage over IIS now, which is the smallest gap between the two since IIS was launched in 1996.
The DPM website has been updated (www.microsoft.com/DPM) - with new information on the upcoming release of DPM 2007, pricing/licensing details, and best of all - new downloads.
We have a release candidate for DPM 2007 - and now everyone can start to evaluate it.
This evaluation downloadable is the complete feature set for the upcoming release, so check out:
And new since Beta 2 for this evaluation and the upcoming RTM:
Source: Jason Buffington
This weekend I had to reinstall a Windows XP machine for my daughter, she got her first PC :). So she couldn't wait and it had to be installed right away. So I had to put in a new disk because the old one crashed and died. Installed Windows XP SP2 (Dutch Version) onto the box. And guess what everything was fine beside one device which Windows XP did not recognize. How do you solve this? Through the blogpost (in Dutch) of one of my colleagues Tony Krijnen I found the procedure again to find out which device it is.
Let me explain to you how I found the driver for this unknown audio device. First open the device manager (I suppose you know how to do that) and double click onto the unknown device. A new window will open and here you have to select the details tab and choose Hardware-Id's (see screenshot).
Here you see the Hardware ID for the unknown device it's defined as follows
BUS \ VEN_[xxxx] Dev_[yyyy]
So BUS means on which kind of hardware bus it is connected to,this can be PCI, USB, IDE, etc ....The VEN means the vendor this piece of hardware and the DEV can be the device type of the vendor.
How can you look this up? Easy there is a website devoted to that and its called http://www.pcidatabase.com. I looked for the vendor 1106 which is VIA Technologies and within the vendor page I looked for the Device ID 3059 which returned "AC97 Enhanced Audio Controller".
The next step is straight forward I just looked up the driver for the "AC97 Enhanced Audio Controller" device and installed it.
No need to comment :)
Last week we had our first Funcast and I must admit the session didn't went like we planned it. We had major sound issues, Our apologies for that. I recorded this session again for you.
You can view the recording from here
Our next funcast will be held on Nov 22th and we will show you how to create a blog- and wiki site with Sharepoint 2007. I will post more info about this funcast later on and hopefully we will not have sound issues anymore.
Like I mentioned in a previous post I would be playing around with Server Core and Virtual Server 2005 just to see how it works. So what I have done is I installed a new Windows Server 2008 Server Core onto my physical box. The installation is straight forward, just make sure you select Server Core, and after a reboot you have your machine. I also discovered that with the June CTP you need to change the admin password after the reboot. Now that we have a server core running we need to perform a few additional steps.
set objVs = wscript.CreateObject("VirtualServer.Application")Set objSecurity = WScript.CreateObject("VirtualServer.VMSecurity")
set objSecurity = ObjVs.Security
Set ace = objSecurity.AddEntry("wds\Domain admins",vmAccessRights_Allowed) ace.WriteAccess = True ace.ReadAccess = True ace.ExecuteAccess = True ace.DeleteAccess = True ace.ReadPermissions = True ace.ChangePermissions = True
ObjVs.Security = objSecuritySource: virtual_pc_guy
Now you have prepared you VS environment and you can start manage it from another domain joined machine with the VMRCplus tool.
Note: I want to inform you again that this is not supported by Microsoft and I only tested because of personal interest and to see how easy or difficult it was to configure and manage a server core environment. If you want to have Virtualization onto Windows Server Core you will have to wait until we release Windows Server Virtualization.
I have multiple live ID's one I use for personal matters and another one for work. Up till now it was always painful to switch between the ID's. This is not true anymore :). I linked my two live ID's together and I can now switch from one account to the other without the hassle of signing out and in again.
I'd love to see that kind of integration in more of our sites for example the TechNet site.
How does it work? Jeff Steinbok who is a member of the Spaces development team explains it on his blog.
Basically you have to go to https://account.live.com and sign in with your account.
Linked Windows Live IDs. There's a link there to manage your linked IDs and if you click that, you'll get a screen where you can add IDs.
Once you have this done, Sign Out, and then Sign In Again.
You can now easily switch between the two accounts by clicking onto the arrow sign next to your name.
In the two previous parts of this topic we created the Server Core Machines, connected them to the storage and added the Failover Clustering Feature. In this last part we are going to configure the Windows Failover Clustering feature and form a 2 Node cluster. For doing this you have two options one is using the cluster.exe command line tool and do everything from the command line or by using the RSAT tools and remotely create the cluster. I've chosen for the second and easiest option.
Step 1: Open Failover Cluster Management Console and Validate the configuration
In my case I will open up the mmc from my Domain Controller but with the RSAT tools you can now also remotely manage failover clusters from an Windows Vista SP1 box.
The first action that needs to be performed prior building the cluster is running the validation tool. This is not needed for a test environment but if you want to get support from Microsoft you need to run this and keep the report, you also need to run the validation tool each time you make changes to the cluster infrastructure, changes like adding an HBA requires a new validation report. The Validation tool will run tests to determine whether your system, storage, and network configuration is suitable for a cluster. These tests include specific simulations of cluster actions, and fall into the following categories: System Configuration tests, Network tests and Storage tests.
Click on "Validate a Configuration" in the action pane.
Add both nodes to be validated.
Run the tests needed for support and to know if the cluster config is correct.
After all tests have completed you will be able to review the report by clicking onto the report button or if you want to open it afterwards we store all reports in the following directory: "c:\windows\cluster\reports"
If the validation tool completes successfully then you can go on with the creation of the cluster. Let's assume everything is fine and perform the actual cluster creation wizard.
Fill in all nodes that will be part of this cluster, this is a huge difference comparing to Windows Server 2003 clustering because now the setup wizard is going to configure all nodes at once.
Give your cluster a name and IP Address in my case I only selected the 192.168.0.0/24 network because that's my public LAN and the second network is only used for heartbeat configuration.
After this step the setup tool is going to create the cluster and making configuration changes on both server core nodes to form a cluster.
The cluster is now ready.
The next step you need to perform is that the correct Witness disk has been used in my configuration it was not the case and I had to change Witness disk config.
You can do that as follows:
In the action pane click on more action and then select the "Configure Cluster Quorum Settings" as can be seen in the picture below.
In the following Wizard you are able to change the Quorum configuration model or change the details of the current Quorum.
In my case I just clicked on next and in the screen that follows you will be able to change the disk configuration of the Witness disk.
That is what I've done and now my cluster is up and running and I can start clustering Services or Applications
I hope that these three blogposts will help you to create a Windows Failover Cluster on a Server Core.
This weekend I read on Damien Caro how you can save every command that has been executed on an Exchange 2007 environment.
Because Exchange 2007 is completely based on Powershell, which means that every change made through the Exchange Management Console or through the management shell can be logged.
Damien explains which keys you have to change in order to log the commands:
For the Exchange snap-in we will have to set the following regsitry key:
Powershell command:
set-itemproperty HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\PowerShell\1\PowerShellSnapIns\Microsoft.Exchange.Management.Msh.Admin -Name LogpipelineExecutionDetails -value 1
Registry Key:
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\PowerShell\1\PowerShellSnapIns\Microsoft.Exchange.Management.Msh.Admin LogpipelineExecutionDetails 1
From now on all commands executed by the Exchange management console will be stored into the event viewer of the server which could be monitored by Operations Manager (MOM)
Technorati Tags: Powershell, Exchange 2007
In my previous blogpost I talked about which 10 reasons I would blog. Now the first one is Server Management Improvements.
To start I wanted to point out that we've simplified the Server Installation procedure. My Longhorn server will be a Virtual one running on my freshly installed Virtual PC 2007. Let's take a look at the installation procedure:
After booting my virtual machine with a Longhorn ISO file the installation procedure started.
Basically you have to select which language you want the Longhorn server, the Time and Currency and the keyboard language.
In the two following screens you hit the "Install Now" button and fill in the product key. You don't even have to fill in the product key this can be added after the installation procedure. So far nothing really new or special but the Next step is where we get to choose which version of Longhorn we want to install. You have the choice between a normal or a server core installation.
I have chosen to install the Standard Edition, however in a future blogpost where I will talk about server core I will need to select Server Core. It's a choice you have to make because it's either a Full version or a Server Core version no up- or downgrade possible. I'll explain the server core in the near future.
The last step is to select or create the partition where you want to install the server onto and start the actual installation. 25 Minutes later the server rebooted and I can start configuring the server.
By default the Administrator account has been created and the account has no password. Just hit ctrl+alt+del and hit enter to login and do the initial configuration of the server. You see the installation procedure has been simplified we don't need to watch the setup screen and wait until the installation procedure ask us to configure the keyboard, etc, etc.
Now it's when the new part of Longhorn server simplified setup/server management comes into action. The first time you login onto your server box you will receive this "Initial Configuration Tasks" window. Remember when you needed to configure a Windows 2003 server which different tasks and each on different locations and/or management tools you had to use. Now with Longhorn server this will be history.
The "Initial Configuration Tasks" window has three different sections:
Provide Computer information: here you will define the admin account, change the time zone (if necessary), configure your network settings and change the name (or add to a domain) of the server. Update this Server: here you can configure how the Windows Update and our Feedback systems will work. You can also manually check if there are any updates and install them. Customize this Server: Here is the very new part of Longhorn server because by default nothing is installed and with Longhorn server you will be able to install different server roles like: Active Directory Domain Services, Terminal Server, File Server, DNS, DHPC and many more server roles. Furthermore you can add different features to the server like the .Net 3.0 framework, Network Load Balancing, Windows Server Backup, etc, etc. To finalize the configuration you can enable the Remote Desktop and configure the integrated Firewall.
With this tool I am able to configure my server for the role you need. You can choose to have a single role onto a server box, however adding multiple roles onto one box is also possible and more likely for the most environments. There is a obvious difference between server roles and features. A server role describes the function of the server, the features don't describe to server role but serves as auxiliary or supporting functions.
Now I have chosen not to select any server role and/or additional feature. I just changed the IP Address, Server name and enabled the Automatic updates. I did this solely for this blogpost as I will explain how the server manager will help you manage your environment from one central console per server. This is not an Enterprise management tool but is aimed to manage single servers.
After rebooting the server the Server Manager console opens and if I had installed any server roles they would appear onto the management console.
The server manager gives you an overview of the running system, it includes computer-, security information and also shows us which roles and features are installed. It's also the central location to manage each of those roles because this MMC based console makes also usage of the Software Definition Model and knows every dependency of each role we can now monitor each role within this console.
The many wizards built into Server Manager streamline the task of deploying servers in your enterprise by cutting the time it takes to install, configure, or remove roles, role services, and features. Multiple roles can be installed in a single session by using the Add Roles Wizard.
Most importantly, Windows Longhorn Server performs dependency checks as you progress through the Server Manager wizards, ensuring that all the roles and role services needed by the role you selected are installed, and that none are removed that might still be required by remaining roles or role services.
This tool can also be used to install or remove the different features needed for any particular server.
Last but not least within this tool we gather all different management snap-ins of the server roles installed on the server and also some other snap-ins like diagnostics and configuration.
In this example you can see that I installed the "Terminal Services" role by using the wizard and because of the monitoring possibilities the server manager shows us that there is a possible issue with that role. If I click on "Terminal Services" the role information page opens and shows me the information like events, system and service info.
Here we can clearly see that the "Terminal Services Licensing" service is not running but should be running. From here I can also start the service.
Notice that Longhorn Server will add the management snap-ins for each of the installed roles, as we have only Terminal Services the server manager screenshot above shows only the Terminal Services role management snap-in.
In summary we have simplified the installation and initial configuration process to give you an Out of the Box Experience. With the Server Manager we give the Administrators a new single server tool to manage the entire server.
In the next blogpost I will talk briefly about Windows PowerShell.
With Vista we introduced computer performance rating and I just found out which laptop I want. My US colleague Keith Combs has the fastest laptop (Lenovo ThinkPad T60p) according to the tool I saw.
Keith explains in his blogposts how the performance rating is working in current builds.
I wish I had this laptop, this is my best machine:
Who has a better rating on his laptop then 4.1????? Let me know arlindoa@Microsoft.com
“Windows 7 : Tips & Tricks” and as the name suggests its a compilation of one of the finest Tips n Tricks about Windows 7. You can use them to enrich the Windows 7 Desktop experience of yours. It contains more than 50 Tips and tricks and an added bonus section for Windows 7 Applications.
Source:http://windowsvj.com/wpblog/2009/12/windowsvj-xclusive-release-windows-7-tips-tricks-ebook/
Download:Windows 7 - Tips& Tricks PDF
I noticed that some of the gadgets in build 5536 have been changed or added.
Let me know if you have any cool and useful gadgets.
Today with a Windows Server 2003 domain you can only define one password and account lockout policies. We heard the feedback of many customers that we needed to change that because now it was one of the reasons to create another domain in your forest. When I was a consultant I always advised my customers to keep their AD infrstructure simple, avoid creating domains if it's not needed. When Windows Server 2008 will be released you will be able to have more control onto the password and account lockout policies. From then on you will be able to define different policies for different users. Note that this policy will not apply to Organization Unit's (OU) but only to User accounts en global security groups.
What have changed?
To be able to store those passwords we will introduce two new object classes in Active Directory:
The password settings container will store the Password Settings Objects (PSO) for the domain. The PSO has different attributes for the password and account lockout settings like max password age, password must meet complexity requirements, account lockout duration, etc.
What are the Requirements?
The Domain functional level must be Windows Server 2008.Only members of the Domain Admin group can set the policies, however you could use delegation to allow other users to define the policies.There are 9 attributes in the PSO that are needed and they all must have a value.
RSOP?
Users can now have multiple PSO linked to his account; this can be done directly or through Group Membership. Take into consideration that multiple password policies cannot be merged. Which PSO will be applied? All PSO have an attribute that is called msDS-PasswordSettingsPrecedence, the lower the value the higher the rank.
Users with a user defined Password Policy will always have the highest rank. In case that there is no user defined PSO than the different Global Security groups with a PSO will be compared and the one with the lowest precedence number will be applied. If there is no PSO applied through users and group then the Default Domain Policy is applied.
As you can see these new policy changes are a step forward but you will also have to be careful when applying those policies. My recommendation here is to limit the number of password policies you have in one domain and at least document them with the reasons why you created those policies, because I can assure you that within a few weeks, months after the implementation you will forget.
Yesterday my colleague Katrien De Graeve learnt me something in PowerPoint. After years of creating slide decks I finally get the ultimate tip that will and could have saved me tons of time. Thanks Katrien for sharing this.
What is this? Well how many times have you created an additional slide because of animations… let me show you a screenshot and you will understand what I mean.
How the hell can you change the text in one of the textboxes. One workaround could be create a new slide for each textbox you want to show. Or like me put all textboxes aside and when it’s final put them on top of each other, not the best way to do this. I tend to agree, but until yesterday and after that I created the slide as seen above (which took me 1 hour) Katrien gave me ultimate solution.
Use the “Selection and Visibility” feature
With this feature you work in lets say layers, you can hide objects (see above) and adapt them as needed, don’t forget to unhide everything before you want to present.
Where can you find this option? In the Ribbon go to “Select” and click on “Selection Pane”
The selection pane will become visible and you will be able to hide any textbox in the slide.
This tip will save me and hopefully you many hours of work in PowerPoint.
Microsoft welcomes you to learn more about how Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) can help you manage a modernized desktop. It is our pleasure to invite you to a workshop on December 2, 2011 that will go over the powerful new enhancements to MDOP 2011. During the sessions desktop experts will provide practical experiences that can be used right away.
WHEN: TIME: WHERE:
December 2 2011 13:00 - 18:30 Business Faculty Brussels
AGENDA
•
13:00 - 13:30 Welcome & Registration
13:30 - 14:45 Microsoft BitLocker Administration and Monitoring (MBAM)
14:45 - 15:45 Deployment and Recovery Toolkit (DaRT)
15:45 - 16:15 Coffee Break
16:15 - 17:30 Advanced Group Policy Management (AGPM)
17:30 - 18:30 Networking and Drink
SPEAKERS
In depth information and demonstration on the following three MDOP technologies that can help you and your organization immediately:
Microsoft BitLocker Administration and Monitoring (MBAM) Streamlines management and extends BitLocker value • Simplify provisioning and deployment • Improve compliance and reporting • Reduce support costs
Advanced Group Policy Management (AGPM) Enhancing group policy through change management • Enables Group Policy change management • Provides granular administrative control • Reduces risk of widespread failure
Deployment and Recovery Toolkit (DaRT) Powerful tools to accelerate desktop repair on site and remotely • Support for additional deployment methods • Software based remoting functionality • Restrict user access to tools while making them available to IT
According to a 2011 report by IDC1, the impact of MDOP on reducing the cost per PC is significant:
69%
Downtime
64%
Helpdesk costs
29%
PC Management costs
13%
PC Deployment costs
Since 2007, MDOP has been helping organizations around the world to streamline administration of Windows clients. We hope you can join this session and learn how this 5th generation of MDOP technologies takes client administration to new heights.
During the Dutch Launch event I presented about Windows Failover clustering and I also prepared some demo's. I build a failover cluster on top of a Server Core. In Part 1 I will briefly explain the sysprep process because I had to rebuild all my VM with the RTM version of Windows Server 2008. So first I wanted to create a new set of base vhd's which I will use to install all my VM's from, this makes the install process much faster. I started with the installation of a Windows Server 2008 EE to create my first base vhd. After the installation I added a few tools, changed some registry keys to make sure some of the tools are running when logging into the box.
Now with Windows Server 2008 the Sysprep tool is included within the System32 directory. To sysprep you're machine you need to run the sysprep tool and select the following options:
After the sysprep process is done the VM will shutdown automatically. Now keep this VHD as a base for all your new Virtual Machines.
In my case I needed to start with the installation of a DC and I've used the VHD Base, this is what you will see when you boot a sysprepped vhd file:
Select the correct regional settings.
Fill in the product key.
Fill in the server name and click start to configure the server, after a while you will need to change the password of the local Administrator account.
The server is now ready to be configured, in my case I will configure the networking and add the Active Directory Domain Services role and finalize with a dcpromo.
The next step in this little project is to install two Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Editions - Server Core. I also created a base vhd for this and used them to create SCCLU01 and SCLU02.
Once the base OS is installed I've configured the server as described in one of my previous posts , in Part 2 I will explain how to configure the iSCSI shared storage and assign it to a server core. In part 2 I will install the cluster and configure a high available file sharing infrastructure
Note: This is one way how to create your base VHD's another option is to use those base VHD files and create differencing disks pointing to the base vhd for each additional VM you need in your environment.
Did you ever hit the sent button too early? I do it from time to time and when it happens it's always oh sh*t it was not supposed to be sent to this person, forgot to put someone in cc or I needed to add the attachment, etc ... . Now I was playing around with some outlook rules and why not apply it onto the Outbox. So what I mean is to apply the rule to an outgoing mail instead of the mostly used inbox rules. By default, I now defer my outgoing mails with 5 min's which gives me the time to change the mail, add recipients or add the attachment that was needed. What I did is I created the following Rule in Outlook:
Apply the rule to all mails that you wish to send.
Defer the mail with a number of minutes, in my case I selected 5 min's.
And I don't want to apply this rule when I mark the mail as important. You could also apply another rules for those type of mails but I didn't want to create to much rules neither.
The first few hours I used this rule I didn't always realize that the 5 min were counting down before the mail left my outlook and I thought that my mailbox was full again (it happens) and therefore could not be sent out.
Once you are used to it you will see that it's very handy to have this. Note that this obviously a Client Only rule which means that it can only run when your Outlook is running.
"Microsoft Office 365 for IT Professionals" is specially tailored for technologists looking for real-world proof of how cloud-based Office 365 enables organizations to solve more problems from more places. Microsoft Office 365 brings together cloud versions of our most trusted email, communication and collaboration software – Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and Lync Online – with the Office Professional Plus desktop suite.
The HD-quality video recordings of the entire course on TechNet Edge: “Microsoft Office 365 for IT Professionals” Jump Start
If you’re interested in one specific topic, we’ve included links to each module as well. • Office 365 Jump Start (01): Microsoft Office 365 Overview for IT Pros • Office 365 Jump Start (02): Deploying Clients for Office 365 • Office 365 Jump Start (03): Microsoft Office 365 Administration & Automation Using Windows PowerShell™ • Office 365 Jump Start (04): Microsoft Office 365 Identity and Access Solutions • Office 365 Jump Start (05): Microsoft Office 365 Directory Synchronization • Office 365 Jump Start (06): Exchange Online Overview for IT Pros • Office 365 Jump Start (07): Microsoft Exchange Online Administration • Office 365 Jump Start (08): Microsoft Staged Exchange Online Migration • Office 365 Jump Start (09): Hybrid Options with Exchange Server & Exchange Online • Office 365 Jump Start (10): Exchange Online Archiving & Compliance • Office 365 Jump Start (11): Lync Online Overview & Configuration for IT Pros • Office 365 Jump Start (12): SharePoint Online Overview • Office 365 Jump Start (13): SharePoint Online Administration • Office 365 Jump Start (14): SharePoint Online Extensibility & Customization • Office 365 Jump Start (15): Office 365 Deployment Overview • Link to course materials on Born to Learn
Source: http://borntolearn.mslearn.net/btl/b/weblog/default.aspx
If you like Monad like I do then I have some resources for you. Check out Thomas Lee's blog, he likes Monad and Vista and links also to valuable resources like the video of Monad that we posted on IT's showtime guess who is doing the Video.
IT's Showtime is really a great place to find information about our technology. You can find the best of Tech-Ed, Vista and WinHec sessions. Go ahead and start learning our technology. I'll do.
Another hgreat place to find information about Monad is Jeffrey snover his blog.
I am currently reading chapters of a book on Powershell that has not yet been released. I'll blog about that later on. First I have to prepare myself for a talk about System Center Products like Data Protection Manager and "Service Desk" .
Somewhere in october I will do a Funcast (screencast, webcast, what's in the name) about Powershell for Exchange 2007. Maybe I should invite Thomas Lee for a session about Powershell during our Dev & IT Pro days. What do you think? Should I?
November 9th will be the day that we will have the biggest event in Belgium. During that full day we will share lot's of information about Office, Vista and Exchange. There will be 16 breakout sessions of 30 min's.
I am responsible for 3 sessions about Vista & Office Deployment, Vista Management and Vista security. During these sessions we will show you why Vista is the best operating system we ever released. But we will not only talk about Vista we will show you what are the new communication, security, features in Exchange and many more. Just check out the website to find the agenda of this important day.So I am (almost) ready for a new day and you?
And as a finishing touch we will have a keynote with Bill Gates.
Curious about the event, want to subscribe ? http://www.readyforanewday.be
Let’s continue with powershell and the next thing I showed was how to create and test a script. The script we wanted to create was a move mailbox script. Not just a move mailbox but one where we searched for the top 3 biggest mailboxes.
First let me explain a little bit the mailboxstatistics command and how we can get the top 3 mailboxes in size.
get-mailboxstatisctics
This command returns the mailboxes with some statistical information like the number of items, last logon time. See the screenshot for more info
Now that we have the mailbox stats we want to sort them.
get-mailboxstatisctics | sort totalitemcount –desc
(get-mailboxstatisctics | sort totalitemcount –desc)[0..2]
This command returns the same results as the previous command but sorts it based on the number of items in the mailboxes.
Same result but shows only the top 3 (from 0..2) mailboxes
You know now how to get stats, sort them and filter the top 3 out of it lets continue with the script we created.
The technetdemo.msh script:
param($server=$(read-host "Target Server"))
new-storagegroup DemoTechnet -server $server | out-null
new-mailboxdatabase MBX01 -storage DemoTechnet | mount-database
Write-host "Database Created"
$mbxset=(get-mailboxstatistics -server smbex01 | sort itemcount -desc)[0..2] | foreach {get-mailbox $_.LegacyDN}
$mbxset | move-mailbox -targetdatabase MBX01 -whatif
Let me explain some of the new commands we used in this script.
The param command is used to pass parameters to the scripts, in this case we are asking for the target server.
The out-null command is obvious, do not write output.
The Write-host command will write the message to the host. This can be useful to have some information about the status of your script.
The “$mbxset=” command is to create a variable with in this example the get-mailboxstatistics command, this means that the mbxset will contain the legacydn name of the top 3 mailboxes.
We can now use the variable and pipe it to a move-mailbox command to move those mailboxes.
I recommend to use the what-if or –validate command to see what the result of the move mailbox will be.
You can now just run the script in the shell by referring to the file.
The biggest advantage of Powershell scripting is that you can test each line of your script before actually hitting the complete script. In VBscripting you had to run the complete script and wait and see or use a debugger to debug each line.
The last part of the Powershell scripting is reporting. I explained that there some command to do diagnostics and some commands to do reporting.
For the diagnostics part there are commands like :
Test-mapiconnectivity
Test-Servicehealth
This command will test the mapi connectivity for all mailboxes.
This command will look at the different server roles and return the services that are running and which one are not.
See screenshot.
For reporting there are commands like export-csv which lets you export the information to a csv file there are also some scripts that we have created like out-html and out-chart which outputs information to a html file or to a chart. (See screenshots for an example)
The following example will get the mailbox stats, sort them by itemcount and output certain information to a html file:
Get-mailboxstatistics | sort totalitemcount –desc | select mailboxdisplayname, totalitemcount, totalitemsize | out-html | out-file c:\powershell\mailboxstats.html
The last example will do the same but output into a chart instead of html.
Get-mailboxstatistics | sort totalitemcount –desc | out-chart mailboxdisplayname, totalitemcount –outfile report1
So far for the Powershell scripting.
The next item on this post was some Q & A we got after the session:
Q: Can you schedule a Powershell script like the charting script?
Answer: Yes you can here is an example
msh.exe -mshconsole 'c:\program files\microsoft\exchange server\bin\exshell.mcf1' -command 'get-mailboxstatistics -server server1 | d:\scripts\out-chart Identity ItemCount -filename d:\charts\chart.jpg'
Q: Will there still be a standard and Enterprise edition of Exchange?
Answer: We did not disclosed any licensing on Exchange 2007 yet.
Q: Will there only be support of 64 bit?
Answer: There will only be 64bit support, no support for Itanium only x64 based systems.
Q: Unified Messaging Video?
Answer: I told you I would look after the UM video and unfortunately there is not yet a public version of the video available however here is a link to another video which is a cool demo on the LCR and CCR technology. http://msexchangeteam.com/videos/9/drandha/entry427787.aspx
If you have other questions please mail (Arlindo.alves@microsoft.com) me and I will try to answer them.
You can now download the presentation : http://www.microsoft.com/belux/technet/nl/events/presentations.mspx
Tags: Powershell, Monad, Exchange 2007
Just read on the bink.nu about some NetCmdlets which delivers great network tools for us IT Pro's.
The current package contains the following Cmdlets:
You can find out more about NetCmdlets here.
These are awesome tools.
Source: Powershell NetCmdlets Beta 2 is now Available
It has been announced yesterday the team had their Windows Home Server RTM signoff and the software is on it's way to the OEM Partners. It's a great piece of software I had the opportunity to play around with it and I will even further use at home.
Too bad we won't have a Dutch version any soon. I don't mind the English language but I know a lot of possible Home Server users would like to have their native language.
Check out the announcement on the Windows Home Server team blog, where you will find out which OEM partners signed in and where to find add-on's, etc...
Last Saturday I presented at an event in Croatia called KulenDayz (aka Cool’n’days). Kind of funny to present at a Sausage (salami) event. Sausage? Yes Kulen means sausage and actually it’s a local spicy sausage, tastes nice.
This event is organized by the community for the community. So my journey towards Croatia started with a short flight to Zagreb where I spent a few hours into the Microsoft office. Then we had to travel for almost 4 hours towards the event location in Beli Manastir.
I really enjoyed to be there I must say that the community did a tremendous job organizing this event. The location is perfect, I have a very nice hotel room with my personal steam bath :).
There are several MVP from the region that came to the event to talk to other members of the community and to my surprise I was not the only Belgian guy in the room, one of our own MVP’s Marc Gregoire also traveled to Croatia to join the event.
I had quite some attendees at my Hyper-V session and I told them at the end of my session that I would be around during the day and if they had any questions around Hyper-V they just could grab me and buy me a beer. I had to drink many beers :)
I hope they will invite me back next year.