[Today’s post comes to us courtesy of Damian Leibaschoff from Commercial Technical Support ]

As you might already know, the Migration Preparation Tool (Source Tool) was updated when SBS 2008 with Service Pack 2 was released. If your SBS 2008 media includes service pack 2, make sure you are using the correct version of the tool that is provided in the SBS 2008 DVD 1 (<More info>).

This new tool now has the ability to check for health issues that could cause a migration failure, in order to get the rules, you need to select “Download and Install Updates” when prompted (<More info>).

Once updated, the Migration Preparation Tool (Source Tool) will check for a number of conditions, one being the source server in Journal Wrap.

In order to determine if your source server is in Journal Wrap, the tool will scan your File Replication Service event log looking for Event Id 13568.

Unfortunately, even after you correct the situation, the tool will continue to report the server being in journal wrap as the event is still present in the log.

To confirm that you have corrected the Journal Wrap situation, you should not see Event ID 13568 after restarting the File Replication Service, which is marked by the Event ID 13501. Keep in mind that it might take a few minutes for the error to show up. The event you truly want to see after the server start event is Event Id 13516, that basically announces that the server has shared its SYSVOL folders and is acting as a domain controller.

Once you have confirmed that your Journal Wrap situation has been resolved, and only if that is the case, you will need to export and delete the File Replication Service event log before the migration tool will allow you to proceed. If your server is still in Journal Wrap and you proceed with these steps, your migration will most likely fail.

To clean your event log follow these steps:

1. Open Event Viewer
2. Select File Replication Service
3. Right Click on top of File Replication Service and select Clear All Events
4. Select Yes to save the log when prompted, name the output file and save it.
5. Once the log has been cleared, you can select the option to “Scan Again” in the Migration Preparation Tool.

This is a known issue and new detection logic is being worked into a future update.

When we first started designing Windows SBS 2011 Essentials (formally SBS Code Name “Aurora”), one of our initial focuses was to provide effortless support for multiple internal and external hard drives. Drive Extender provided the ability to take the small hard drives many small businesses may have acquired, and pool them together in a simple volume. During our current testing period for our SBS products, we have received feedback from partners and customers about how they use storage today and how they plan to use it moving forward. Today large hard drives of over 1TB are reasonably priced, and freely available. We are also seeing further expansion of hard drive sizes at a fast rate, where 2Tb drives and more are becoming easy accessible to small businesses.

When weighing up the future direction of storage in the SMB segment, data access support and application compatibility, the team felt the Drive Extender technology was not meeting our customer needs. Customers also told us that they wanted easier access to data stored on Drive Extender drives so they are able to view these files outside of Drive Extender. Therefore, moving forward we have decided to remove the Drive Extender technology from Windows Small Business Server 2011 Essentials, Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials and Windows Home Server Code Name “Vail” all of which are currently in beta.

While this removes the integrated ability for storage pooling of multiple hard drives and automated data duplication, we are continuing to work closely with our OEM partners to implement storage management and protection using industry standard RAID solutions. This will provide customers greater choice as well as a seamless experience that will meet their storage needs. Customers will also have access to the in-built storage solutions Windows Server 2008 R2 provides for data protection, including software RAID support. We are also still delivering core features such as automated Server and PC backup, easy sharing of folders and files, Remote Web Access and simplified management without any expected changes.

As SBS 2011 Essentials also shares the Drive Extender feature with both Windows Home Server Code Name “Vail” and Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials, we are working with OEM partners to also provide similar data protection solutions for all members of this product family. Target product availability is still H1 2011, and we expect to deliver a new beta without drive extender for both Small Business Server 2011 Essentials and Windows Home Server Code Name “Vail” early in the New Year.

[Today’s post comes to us courtesy of Michael Leworthy from Windows Server Marketing]

Building on the Windows Small Business Server 2011 announcements and adding to that exciting momentum - today on the Storage Server blog, Microsoft announced a new edition targeted at small business, Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials. Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials is part of the Windows Storage Server family of network attached storage appliances. It shares common features and usability with both Windows Home Server code name “Vail” and Windows Small Business Server 2011 Essentials and is optimized for:

• Server and PC backup, including file, folder and image based restore
• Centralized storage for file data and easier sharing
• Console driven administration for easier management
• Access to your data from virtually anywhere through Remote Web Access
• Network health monitoring for both Windows and Mac PC’s
• Active Directory Domain join

With support for up to 25 users, Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials is an appliance form-factor with preconfigured hardware and software - vastly simplifying the deployment and management tasks normally associated with a new file server or additional servers for storage. Plus, Active Directory join capability enables Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials to easily integrate into existing infrastructure and networks.

Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials Administration Console

Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials Domain Join Wizard

Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials User Administration

Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials is targeted at very small businesses such as home offices which are looking for an affordable entry server without line of business support. Further to this, it can also be used as an additional storage server for organizations with existing servers. We likewise anticipate Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials to be a viable solution to assist many current SBS 2008 and new SBS 2011 Standard customers with automated PC backup and further storage options. Upon release it will be available through many OEM vendors who will offer multiple form factors, and is expected in H1 2011.

To learn more about Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials, visit the Official Storage Server Blog.

Thanks
Michael Leworthy
Senior Product Manager
Windows Server Marketing
Follow me on Twitter for more SBS news at @miclew_sbs

[Today’s post comes to us courtesy of Damian Leibaschoff from Commercial Technical Support ]

The symptoms for this case were that after a few seconds of launching the Add User Wizard, the wizard would crash, without any user input.

When we face a user mode crash like this we usually try to get our hands on the dump that is generated so we can review what triggered the crash. Depending on the crash, the associated wizard log might also contain valuable information (this was not the case here). Furthermore, we might also rely on tools such as Sysinternal’s Process Monitor.

For this case we launched the application within our Windows Debugger to see what was taking place, here is a summary of what we found and how we found it:

1. Launched Windbg (elevated rights)
2. Verified that the public symbols were configured properly.
3. Selected File, Open Executable, and picked C:\Program Files\Windows Small Business Server\Bin\adduser.exe
4. Once it loaded, proceeded to let the program run while connected to the debugger by issuing the GO ‘g’ command.
   
   
5. The Debugger will break on the second chance exception, on this case a CLR exception, pointing us to an issue while running .Net Framework code.
   
   
6. At this point, we need to load the proper extensions to handle .Net Framework debugging so we can take a peek into what is going on. You do that by loading the SOS extension:
   .loadby sos mscorwks
   
   To view the exception, you can now use:
   !printexception or !pe
   
   The output for this (key lines highlighted):
   0:006> .loadby sos mscorwks
   0:006> !pe
   Exception object: 00000000027f30a0
   Exception type: System.ArgumentException
   Message: An entry with the same key already exists.
   InnerException: <none>
   StackTrace (generated):
       SP IP Function
       000000001B2AEF80
   000007FEF69C4BD3System_ni!System.ThrowHelper.ThrowArgumentException(System.ExceptionResource)+0x2ad1d3
       000000001B2AEFC0 000007FEF62AC16DSystem_ni!System.Collections.Generic.SortedList`2[[System.Int32, mscorlib],[System.__Canon, mscorlib]].Add(Int32, System.__Canon)+0x5d
       000000001B2AF030 000007FF001AF6EF
   AdminCommon!Microsoft.WindowsServerSolutions.Admin.Common.Utils.GetPrimarySmtpWorker(System.Object)+0x89f
       000000001B2AF130 000007FEF6DC175C
   mscorlib_ni!System.Threading.ExecutionContext.Run(System.Threading.ExecutionContext, System.Threading.ContextCallback, System.Object)+0x9c
       000000001B2AF180 000007FEF6E36112
   mscorlib_ni!System.Threading._ThreadPoolWaitCallback.PerformWaitCallbackInternal(System.Threading._ThreadPoolWaitCallback)+0x62
   000000001B2AF1D0 000007FEF6E35F50
   mscorlib_ni!System.Threading._ThreadPoolWaitCallback.PerformWaitCallback(System.Object)+0x50
   
   StackTraceString: <none>
   HResult: 80070057
   
7. We can easily tell by looking at the exception that we are getting a duplicate entry in a list of what should be unique items. By looking at the CLR call stack that led to the exception we can also see our code trying to find the Primary SMTP address from Exchange. From this, we rapidly found the lines of code that we were using when we hit the exception, confirmed what they were doing and quickly found the cause of the problem. Before we go into the details of what was wrong, let’s continue this scenario as if we did not have access to the source code, how would we have found what was wrong going the long way.
   
   When we look at a working Add User Wizard, we can see where we are using the SMTP address in plain sight:
   
   
   
   Once we see that, it is just a matter of understanding how Exchange 2007 manages SMTP addresses to find the place where the problem lies, in our case, the E-mail Address Policies <More information> . On normal Exchange server in SBS, they would look like this:
   
   
   
   Yet on the system where we had the crash, they looked like this:
   
   
   
   You can also get the output from Exchange Management Shell
   [PS] C:\>Get-EmailAddressPolicy
   
   Name                                                Priority                  RecipientFilter
   ----                                                    --------                 ---------------
   Default Policy                                  Lowest                  Alias -ne $null
   Windows SBS Email Address         Lowest                  Alias -ne $null
   Policy
   
   Can you spot what is wrong?
   ..
   ..
   ..
   
   Both policies have the SAME priority, not only that, they have the default LOWEST priority. This priority is a special case, where its actual value in active directory is 2147483647, this is the highest this value can be, thus the lowest priority. Our code queries for all AD objects that are of objectClass=msExchRecipientPolicy and the one with the lowest msExchPolicyOrder is the primary, we should not have duplicates.
   
8. To fix this we need to correct the priority of the “Windows SBS Email Address Policy” as that is clearly incorrect. Unfortunately we cannot change it using the Exchange native tools as we get an error:
   
   [PS] C:\>Set-EmailAddressPolicy "Windows SBS Email Address Policy" -Priority 1
   Set-EmailAddressPolicy : The operation cannot be completed on the default e-mail address policy.
   At line:1 char:23
   + Set-EmailAddressPolicy <<<< "Windows SBS Email Address Policy" -Priority 1
   
   To get this fixed we had to use ADSIEDIT.MSC and manually edit the AD object:
   
   
   
   
   
   
   Changing the attribute to the correct value was all that was needed to regain functionality.

This was a very strange situation, the most likely cause was that the original Default Policy had been manually renamed to the Windows SBS Email Address Policy and a subsequent service pack for Exchange tried to recreate the missing Default Policy or it could have been as simple as some incorrect manipulation of AD objects..

Since we announced the availability of the beta version of Windows Small Business Server Code name “Aurora” and Windows Small Business Server “7”, both products have been downloaded more than 9000 times through both our partner and customer community. Today as we move forward with these new releases, Microsoft is announcing the final names, licensing and estimated availability for the next generation of the Small Business Server family currently in public preview.

• Windows Small Business Server 2011 Essentials (formally Windows Small Business Server Code Name “Aurora”) is ideal as a first server for small businesses, providing a cost-effective and easy-to-use solution to help protect data, organize and access business information from virtually anywhere, support the applications needed to run a business, and quickly connect to online services such as Office 365, hosted e-mail, collaboration and CRM.  Windows SBS 2011 Essentials can be used by up to 25 users, requiring no CALs for user access and is expected to release in H1 2011. SBS 2011 Essentials will be available through all current Microsoft server licensing channels and estimated retail pricing is $545US.
  
• Windows Small Business Server 2011 Standard (formally Windows Small Business Server “7”) is designed and priced for small businesses with up to 75 users, delivering enterprise-class server technology in an affordable, all-in-one solution. Windows Small Business Server 2011 Standard helps protect business’ information from loss by performing automatic daily server backups and greater productivity through on-site features like e-mail, Internet connectivity, internal Web sites, remote access, and file and printer sharing. Licensing for Windows SBS 2011 Standard is consistent with previous versions of Windows SBS 2008 Standard, which required both a Server License, plus CALs for each user. Estimated retail pricing for Windows SBS 2011 Standard is $1,096US, with CALs approximately $72US. Windows SBS 2011 Standard will be available through all current Microsoft server licensing channels and is expected to release in December 2010. Further availability through OEM’s and System Builders is expected starting February 2011.
  
• Windows Small Business Server 2011 Premium Add-on, consists of an additional server that provides support for SQL Server based LOB applications and access to Window Server 2008 R2 technologies in a cost effective solution for a small business environment. The Windows SBS 2011 Premium Add-on includes Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard, and SQL Server 2008 R2 for Small Business and can be added to both Windows Small Business Server 2011 Essentials and Standard editions. The Premium add-on provides the ability to run a vast number of line-of-business applications on an additional server and the capacity to make more informed business decisions with rich analysis and reporting technologies. It is ideal for role based deployments such as LOB application support, Remote Desktop Services, Backup domain controller, and Virtualization though Hyper-V. The decision to move to an add-on model was taken to provide our customers with more flexibility and deployment options providing the ability to purchase additional servers either up front or as needed. While access to the Windows Server components for the Windows SBS 2011 Premium Add-on will be covered by the Windows SBS 2011 CAL model, users will still require Premium Add-on CALs for access to SQL Server. Estimated retail pricing for Windows SBS 2011 Premium Add-on is $1,604US, with CALs approximately $92US. The Premium Add-on will also be available with the release of Windows SBS 2011 Standard in December.

To learn more about Windows Small Business Server 2011 Standard, download the datasheet.

To learn more about Windows Small Business Server 2011 Essentials, download the datasheet.

To learn more about the Windows Small Business Server Family, download the family overview brochure.

To download previews of Windows SBS 2011 Standard and Essentials you can visit here.

Thanks
Manlio Vecchiet
Director for Windows Server Product Management, Windows Server Marketing