Since I have this lovely Lenovo W530 laptop with a couple of disks and 32GB of RAM, it is great to run VMs on! As you can imagine, I have multiple different Exchange labs to reflect all the different versions and builds that are in use. Generally I have been able to import all of my older VMs into Hyper-V on Windows 8 and 2012 with no issues. But as you probably have guessed by now, if I had not ran into something this blog post would not be needed………
Update 22-10-2013: If trying to import a Windows Server 2008 R2 VM into Windows Server 2012 R2 or Windows 8.1 please also see this post.
Update 10-1-2014: Updated error message is present in Windows 8.1. Please see this post.
<Courtesy link to Oasis>
The machine we will look at is an Exchange ActiveSync emulator running Windows Mobile 6.5, but that’s not too relevant. I copied the files over to the C:\VMs folder, and then went to import the VM using the wizard:
We can see the files have been copied over:
Now lets import the bad boy into Hyper-V:
As the Eurovision judges from Belarus say, “nil point”
In the Microsoft-Windows-Hyper-V-VMMS/Admin event log we can see that an error was logged.
The error is stating that Hyper-V is a smidge unhappy with the configuration it is trying to import.
Hmmm. That’s a trifle annoying, isn’t it? So let’s go get this fixed!
Taking a look at the directory structure, we see the following:
Looks like we have all the files, no? There are VHD, export and some config type files.
Cracking open the World’s #1 troubleshooting tool, Process Monitor from Sysinternals, let’s trace to see what is going on at the file system level. Maybe there is a deny NTFS permission ??
When firing up Process Monitor, it will capture a lot of data by default. A lot. So much so that we will need to tweak the capture filter to make it easier to parse the results. When Process monitor is opened up, either click the magnifying glass icon or press Ctrl + E to stop the capture. The magnifying glass icon will then have a red cross to indicate it is not capturing.
Then we can click onto the filter icon or press Ctrl + L to specify our custom filter.
In this case we know that the VM files are located in “C:\VMs\EAS VM” so let’s filter on that:
Click Include then add to include the path filter, then click OK. You will see a new row with a green icon at the top of the filter view (not shown above). Now that our filter has been saved let’s clear the screen with Ctrl + X.
We will then click the magnifying glass to start the capture, and then re-do the VM import that originally failed. When the import fails, stop the capture with Ctrl + E.
As you can see, there are no access denied messages. You can search for that easily in larger captures with Ctrl + F and searching.
What is interesting is that Hyper-V is looking at the .exp file and then moving on to the .xml file. Hmm, wasn’t that one of the neat new features? In Windows 2012 Hyper-V -- we do not have to specifically export a VM before it can be imported. So why are both files here? Since I know that this VM was originally exported from a Windows 2008 R2 Hyper-V machine the .exp file is what is expected.
So lets backup and then remove the .xml file from the directory, and then re-do the import. Note I said backup and not nuke, just in case!! What happens now?
With the .xml file removed the import wizard is able to parse the VM and moves on to the next screen:
A couple more clicks to finish the wizard and then success! The VM was successfully imported! In the Process Monitor capture the .exp is processed and no errors are reported.
After removing the spurious .xml file I was able to import the VM. Note that there are other causes for the same error being raised. The exact fix will depend on the version of Hyper-V.
As mentioned above each new release of Hyper-V has added new capabilities, and if we focus on just the VM import/export aspect:
Windows 2008 R2 Hyper-V added additional features when importing and exporting VMs, namely:
Windows 2012 Hyper-V removed the dependency on the .exp file. In Windows 2008 and 2008 R2, a VM must have been exported before it could be imported. This is a great feature for admins, and the following was a common scenario. Why do we want this you ask?
Say that your lab Windows 2008 R2 Hyper-V host lost the RAID1 OS array, and you were left with only the RAID 5 array containing the VMs. Because the VMs were not manually exported before the OS mirror failed, you could not just import them. Backups of the VMs would be great, but not all lab VMs are backed up for example. Sure you could create new VMs and attach the existing .vhd files to the new configurations but that means re-doing the IP addresses and depending on the OS having to clear out the old IP and NIC configuration. How many times have I had to use KB 241257 with the command devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1 to purge stale NICs from a VM.
In Windows 2012 Hyper-V the VMs can be imported as-is – how neat is that?
One more thing to add on the Sysinternals topic. You can go to live.sysinternals.com and directly download the tools that you want. This is very handy if you know exactly what you want.
Cheers,
Rhoderick
The Exchange Team released the first Update Rollup for Exchange 2010 SP3. Exchange 2010 SP3 RU1 is available for download from the download centre as update 2803727.
This is build 14.03.0146.000 of Exchange 2010. Article 2803727 has the full details for this release.
Probably the two biggest changes that we have been waiting on are:
2814847 Rapid growth in transaction logs, CPU use, and memory consumption in Exchange Server 2010 when a user syncs a mailbox by using an iOS 6.1 or 6.1.1-based device
2822208 Unable to soft delete some messages after installing Exchange 2010 SP2 RU6 or SP3
You can find a previous blog about the soft delete issue here.
In addition to this, there is a fix for the move mailbox issue in Exchange 2010 SP2 RU3+
“Post-move cleanup failed. The operation will try again in 30 seconds”
2763065 Move request log is logged when you move a mailbox in an Exchange Server 2010 SP2 environment
Exchange 2010 DAG AllowCrossSiteRPCClientAccess Reverts to False is resolved in SP3 RU1.
2561346 Mailbox storage limit error when a delegate uses the manager's mailbox to send an email message in an Exchange Server 2010 environment
2729954 Can't send voice message to a selected non-primary email address in an Exchange Server 2010 environment
2750846 Information Store service crashes when you mount public folder databases on an Exchange Server 2010 server
2751628 Event ID 9682 does not record the folder name when you delete a public folder in an Exchange Server 2010 environment
2756460 You cannot open a mailbox that is located in a different site by using Outlook Anywhere in an Exchange Server 2010 environment
2777742 Address Book service crashes on an Exchange Server 2010 Client Access server when a server has been running for 25 days or more
2781488 RPC_S_SERVER_UNAVAILABLE (0x6BA) error code when you use a MAPI or CDO-based application in an Exchange Server 2010 environment
2782683 Email message that a user sends by using the "Send As" or "Send On Behalf" permission is saved only in the Sent Items folder of the sender in an Exchange Server 2010 environment
2784210 Ethical wall does not function as expected when the ReportToOriginatorEnabled property is disabled in an Exchange Server 2003 and Exchange Server 2010 coexistence environment
2793348 Read receipt is sent unexpectedly when you view an email message by using Outlook Web App
2796490 Microsoft Exchange Information Store service crashes on an Exchange Server 2010 Mailbox server
2802569 Mailbox synchronization fails on an Exchange ActiveSync device in an Exchange Server 2010 environment
2806602 EdgeTransport.exe process crashes on an Exchange Server 2010 Hub Transport server
2814723 Server loses network connectivity and UDP ports are used up on an Exchange Server 2010 server
2816934 Error code 0X800CCC13 when an additional POP3 or IMAP account is used to send an email message and Outlook online mode is used to connect to an Exchange Server 2010 environment
2817140 Exchange Replication service crashes intermittently in an Exchange Server 2010 environment
2817852 Cyrillic characters are displayed as question marks in the "To" field of message items in the Sent Items folder in an Exchange 2010 environment
2818456 Attachments are missing from an embedded message in an Exchange Server 2010 SP2 environment
2826066 VSAPI-based antivirus software causes delayed response in an Exchange Server 2010 environment
2827037 Copy of an item is created in the Version subfolder in an Exchange Server 2010 environment
2833888 No items are displayed in Outlook after you install Exchange Server 2010 SP3 or Update Rollup 6 for Exchange Server 2010 SP2
2840099 ArgumentOutOfRangeException exception when an EWS application creates a new MIME email in an Exchange Server 2010 environment
This may, or may not be an issue depending on the language used for your Windows Server 2012 installation.
You cannot install or uninstall Update Rollup 1 for Exchange Server 2010 SP3 on a computer that is running the double-byte character set (DBCS) version of Windows Server 2012 if the language preference for non-Unicode programs is set to the default language. To work around this issue, you must first change this setting. To do this, follow these steps:
After you successfully install or uninstall Update Rollup 1, revert this language setting, as appropriate.
The Exchange Team are aware of this and will look to correct this in a future update.
Now, before we rush off to download and install this there are a couple of items to mention!
Update 28-7-2013: This issue is now resolved in Exchange 2010 SP3 RU1. See end for details.
When browsing a customer’s Disaster Recovery document I noticed that the Exchange admins had added a step at the end of the document when recovering the DAG back to the primary datacentre. This was to enable AllowCrossSiteRPCClientAccess in the DAG. This was curious as it had already been enabled when the DAG was first created. This environment has Exchange 2010 SP2 RU3 and higher installed so AllowCrossSiteRPCClientAccess is a supported capability.
The admins were running:
Set-DatabaseAvailabilityGroup –Identity DAG -AllowCrossSiteRPCClientAccess:$True
This was being done as they had noticed in testing (full marks for testing !!) that the AllowCrossSiteRPCClientAccess setting was being changed from $True to $False. To ensure that the DAG was configured as per the design they were running the Set-DAG command to again reset the value for AllowCrossSiteRPCClientAccess.
This was a concern as we assumed that the setting should not be getting changed.
Sometimes we want to use Set-DatabaseAvailabilityGroup with no additional parameters to:
What happens if Set-DatabaseAvailabilityGroup is run to change another aspect of the DAG – would the AllowCrossSiteRPCClientAccess be changed in that scenario? Let’s see…..
So Robin, here we are in an Exchange 2010 SP3 lab. We have a simple 3 node DAG, called “DAG-01”. All Exchange servers have the same build running on Windows 2008 R2 SP1 Enterprise Edition.
This is the DAG we shall look at:
Initially DAG-01 does not have AllowCrossSiteRPCClientAccess set to $True
Then we set the AllowCrossSiteRPCClientAccess value to $True, and then verify
So far so good! But let’s now run the following command and see what happens to the AllowCrossSiteRPCClientAccess value:
Set-DatabaseAvailabilityGroup –Identity DAG-01
You can see that as a result of running the Set-DatabaseAvailabilityGroup cmdlet the value for AllowCrossSiteRPCClientAccess has changed from $True to $False.
The same behaviour was also noted when running other parameters in Set-DatabaseAvailabilityGroup and again without specifying the AllowCrossSiteRPCClientAccess parameter.
The behaviour that we saw was the AllowCrossSiteRPCClientAccess was reverting back to it’s default value ($False) unless it was explicitly specified in the command.
If you have set AllowCrossSiteRPCClientAccess to $True for a DAG in your environment, please ensure that when running Set-DatabaseAvailabilityGroup cmdlet you specify the AllowCrossSiteRPCClientAccess. You can also run Get-DatabaseAvailabilityGroup to validate the configuration on a scheduled basis.
BONUS TIP: Some of the Exchange cmdlets do not retrieve all of their data by default as they are costly operations. To instruct the cmdlet to retrieve this additional data add the –Status parameter. Set-DatabaseAvailabilityGroup is a good example of this! Try it and see the difference when piping to Format-List.
Update 28-7-2013
This issue is resolved in Exchange 2010 SP3 RU1. To illustrate, the example below shows a DAG with AllowCrossSiteRPCClientAccess set to $True. When Set-DAG this then run, note that the $True does not revert to $False.
Have you read a blog or web site that asked you to run the Set-DAG command? Were you told by someone to run the Get-DAG command? You then went to your lab Exchange server to test and validate the command only to find that it does not work. At this point it’s a case of: Dude, where’s my command! **
The Exchange Management Shell will look like the below:
The reason is as mentioned in the red output text, the command is not recognised. It’s simply just not there…
This is because Set-DatabaseAvailabilityGroup is a little wordy to type, and is often abbreviated to Set-DAG. The same is true for the other DAG commands as well. I’ll put them into a table so that search engines will pick them up and people can easily find them. And for the record, I’m pretty guilty of shortening them which is why I started to write this in the first place……
** – Ashton Kutcher films never really became more cerebral, did they?
Update: Management Pack was updated on 12th July 2013
Update: Management Pack was updated on 28th October 2014 to version 15.0.652.19
The Exchange 2013 System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) Management Pack has been released to the download centre.
This Management Pack is designed to work with the new features in Exchange 2013, namely Managed Availability. It is supported on SCOM 2012 RTM or later, and on SCOM 2007 R2. More on these big changes later on in this post!
The Management Pack (MP) is build 15.00.0620.018 can be obtained here. Before installing the MP, please be sure to review all of the documentation and prerequisites. A great starting place is the MP Guide.
One of great benefits of running Office 365 is that the Exchange product group can share solutions to scenarios that they see in the service which will benefit on premise installations. The Exchange Server 2013 Management Pack works with the Managed Availability feature in Exchange 2013. The alerts within the System Centre Operations Manager (SCOM) portal indicate unhealthy states as reported by the Managed Availability components in Exchange 2013.
The following are some of the new features in the Exchange 2013 Management Pack:
What does that really mean? Well you will see a radically simpler, smaller and leaner management pack! Why is this?
Exchange 2013 with Managed Availability is now able to monitor itself and determine if it is healthy or not. Who better to gauge the condition of Exchange than Exchange itself! Another benefit is that this can be controlled by Exchange itself in two distinct ways:
Both of these mechanisms will allow for a greater degree of flexibility and agility when monitoring Exchange 2013. Additionally you may have seen previous issues around the Exchange 2010 Management Pack when it was updated for Exchange 2010 SP2 and then re-released.
One other change that will bake people’s noodles is that changes to monitoring thresholds are to be done in Exchange directly and not in SCOM. Again this is because Exchange is monitoring itself, and SCOM is responsible for the escalations that are produced by Managed Availability.
The Exchange Server 2013 Management Pack relies on the Managed Availability feature in Microsoft Exchange Server 2013. In Managed Availability, each component in Exchange Server 2013 monitors itself using probes, monitors, and responders. Any component that implements Managed Availability is referred to as a health set. For example the OWA Health Set has documented troubleshooting steps.
This includes getting details about the server and Health Set in question
Get-ServerHealth <server name> | ?{$_.HealthSetName -eq "<health set name>"} Get-ServerHealth Exch-1.Tailspintoys.com | ?{$_.HealthSetName -eq "OWA"}
Get-ServerHealth <server name> | ?{$_.HealthSetName -eq "<health set name>"}
Get-ServerHealth Exch-1.Tailspintoys.com | ?{$_.HealthSetName -eq "OWA"}
Check to see that none of the Alert Values are displayed as unhealthy. If one is shown in an unhealthy state, then rerun the associated monitoring probe:
Invoke-MonitoringProbe <health set name>\<probe name> -Server <server name> | Format-List
All of the Exchange 2013 Management Pack Troubleshooters are documented here.
We already covered that Exchange is now responsible for monitoring itself and SCOM will do the escalation portion of the alerting system. In addition there are a couple of other changes that are worth highlighting:
Exchange Team blog
SCOM Team blog
Lessons from the Datacenter: Managed Availability
Cheers,,
When the office updates were released last patch Tuesday, there were a couple of issues of mine that were resolved. Great, I thought, let’s download and install them! After checking that my installed build of Outlook etc. was older than the released updates I downloaded the updates from the Microsoft Download Centre and then went to install them only for it to barf:
After muttering briefly, I realised that I was not actually using a traditional .msi install of Office 2013. I’m actually using a Click-To-Run installation on the MSIT Windows 8 image. DOH!
But, wait. Wasn’t my office build out of date? Part of the advantage of Click-To-Run is that it will automatically update. Why was this not happening? One quick Bing search later I noted that in the article Microsoft Office 2013 Click-to-Run virtualization there were steps to retry the Office update :
Update 8-4-2013
After updating to Office 2013 SP1, the interface appears different. Note that there is not a button to check for updates
As soon as the updates were re-enabled – boom! They started to download!
The updates then installed in the background as I continued to use the applications, and only when all the updates had been installed was I prompted to restart them.
Note that a restart of the OS was not needed here, just the applications had to be restarted. Again another neat feature of the Click-To-Run package!
Those of you familiar with App-V will be thinking this is kind of familiar, and it is . Click-to-Run is based on App-V, which itself came from the Soft Grid acquisition).
Click-To-Run was launched with Office 2010, and with more and more people moving to Office 365 it is destined to become even more popular!
One thing that you may experience when running Click-to-Run is that some of the traditional troubleshooting tools that expect Outlook to be installed as a .msi will have issues. Mr MAPI (AKA Stephen Griffin) mentions a workaround on his blog for MFCMAPI to get it to work with Click-to-Run Outlook.