The folks on the Windows Cluster team are restarting their blog very soon, which covers failover clustering and network load balancing.  According to a post back in Nov, "5 developers have volunteered to contribute to this blog, so we expect to have at least one post each week, so check back often!"

 Cool!

This is extremely funny!!

http://www.istartedsomething.com/20080107/bill-gates-last-day-microsoft-video/

With the release of Exchange 2007 SP1, you can deploy cluster continuous replication (CCR) on Windows Server 2008, and enjoy the benefits of Windows 2008 failover cluster improvements.  But did you know the deployment of CCR on Windows 2008, including the formation and configuration of the cluster, can be done via the command-line, without using any graphical user interface (GUI) interfaces, such as the Failover Cluster Management tool, or the Exchange 2007 SP1 Setup Wizard.  Here's a series of commented commands you can use to do the deployment.  You can even add the commands into a script, and automate the deployment.

Note that these commands assume that you have the following:

Configuration, rule, and help updates for the Exchange Best Practices Analyzer were released today.  This update is for ExBPA version 2.8, and it includes the latest XML and ExBPA.CHM files.

Enjoy!

Microsoft.com has some new pages with Windows 2008 certification information:

·         Get Certified on Windows Server 2008

·         Transition your Windows Server 2003 MCSA/MCSE to Windows Server 2008

·         Frequently asked questions about Windows Server 2008 certifications

See also, Get exam notification and 40% off, which is not new, but worthwhile nonetheless.

Enjoy!

Today marks a milestone for customers and partners with the release to manufacture of Windows Server 2008, the most advanced Server operating system Microsoft has developed to date!

 Windows Server 2008 builds on the success and strengths of its Windows Server predecessors while delivering valuable new functionality and powerful improvements to the base operating system. For more information, see http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/default.mspx.

Today marks another milestone for partners and customers, with the release of Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista.  Service Pack 1 is a very important milestone because it addresses many of the key issues that our customers have identified with Windows Vista over the last year both, directly and through programs like the Customer Experience Improvement Program.

For more information on Windows Vista Service Pack 1, see http://windowsvistablog.com/blogs/windowsvista/archive/2008/02/04/announcing-the-rtm-of-windows-vista-sp1.aspx.

SCCP 2007 just RTM’d and is now freely available for all to download.  Previously, this tool was available only for TechNet Plus and MSDN Premium subscribers, but now it’s available for all.

See http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/sccp/default.mspx for more information, and a link to the download.

The new version adds the following new capabilities:

•        Application model for Exchange Server 2007

•        Extensibility with new models from Microsoft, including Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0.  A model for System Center Operations Manager 2007 will be available soon.

•        New, more powerful deployment wizards deliver unprecedented ease of use

•        Support for 64-bit processor architectures

•        Comprehensive reporting of disk IO and storage utilizations

•        Increased flexibility in customizing server usage profiles

Enjoy!

Today, Microsoft released the Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT) to the web.  RSAT is the collection of Windows Server 2008 management tools which enable IT professionals to manage their Windows Server infrastructure from their PCs running Windows Vista with Service Pack 1.

The list of Windows Server 2008 administration tools which are included in RSAT are:

Role Administration Tools:

·               Active Directory Certificate Services (AD CS) Tools

·               Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) Tools

·               Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services (AD LDS) Tools

·               DHCP Server Service Tools

·               DNS Server Service Tools

·               Shared Folders Tools

·               Network Policy and Access Services Tools

·               Terminal Services Tools

·               Uniiversal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI) Services Tools

Feature Administration Tools:

·               BitLocker Drive Encryption Tools

·               Failover Clustering Tools (yay!)

·               Group Policy Management Tools

·               Network Load Balancing Tools

·               SMTP Server Tools

·               Storage Manager for SANs Tools

·               Windows System Resource Manager Tools

The tools in the following list are can be used to manage Windows Server 2003 servers:

·               Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) Tools

·               Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services (AD LDS) Tools

·               Active Directory Certificate Services (AD CS) Tools

·               DHCP Server Tools

·               DNS Server Tools

·               Group Policy Management Tools

·               Network Load Balancing Tools

·               Terminal Services Tools

·               Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI) Services Tools

Download RSAT today from:

Yes, that's right...rabbits.  The video speaks for itself:

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vC9taroEsI

Many cool changes were made this week to both the TechNet and MSDN Web sites.  These changes include a slick new look to the Exchange Server TechCenter, as well.

What's also extremely cool, are the changes you can't see - both the TechNet (1 million hits a day) and the MSDN (3 million hits a day) Web sites are running inside of Hyper-V (and actually have been for weeks, without any issues)!  Check out http://www.virtualization.info/2008/05/microsoft-migrates-msdn-and-technet-on.html for more information.

A colleague at work shared the URL to a very well done Halo movie at http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1817553.

You might want to watch http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ym0BtwmCvoc first in for background information.

Enjoy!

While at TechEd IT Pro North America 2008, I also had the opportunity to attend Brent Alinger's session on Exchange Server 2007 and Hyper-V.  Brent is a Senior Test Lead on the Exchange Team at Microsoft, and he's leading our testing efforts around Hyper-V.

Brent described a number of terms, such as the Hyper-V root (which is the parent or the host machine), Hyper-V guest (which is the child or virtual machine), virtual hard disks (VHD), passthrough disks, fixed and dynamic disks, and virtual machine state files.  Some of the more noteworthy bits of info from the session are:

• Within 60 days of Hyper-V's RTM, the Exchange team will publish a detailed support statement for Hyper-V, and a TechNet article with best practices. I'm part of the Exchange Virtualization Working Group and will be helping to deliver some of this content.
• Customers should not deploy Exchange on Hyper-V until our support guidance is available.
• Early results show that performance of Exchange 2007 on Hyper-V is quite good, and that it scales very well from 1-4 processors per VM.

In terms of best practices and requirements, Brent shared the following:

• We're only supporting guests running Exchange Server 2007 SP1 on Windows Server 2008.
• We're only supporting fixed disks, and not dynamic disks.
• Storage should be on spindles that are separate from the Guest operating system VHD physical storage.
• Storage must be SCSI passthrough or iSCSI (with a preference of SCSI passthrough for queues, databases and log files).
• All Exchange server roles, except for the Unified Messaging server role, will be supported.
• There's a limit on VHD size of 2040 GB.

Brent also mentioned that Hyper-V is a good fit when Exchange servers in branch offices cannot be consolidated to a central datacenter (for example, because of bandwidth or connectivity issues).

In terms of workload, not every workload is a candidate for virtualization.  For example, server roles such as Client Access and Hub Transport can be good candidates, but a more heavy hitter like the Mailbox role (which often uses all available resources on a physical server) might not be the best candidate for virtualizing.

It was a great session, and you can expect to hear a lot more about Exchange 2007 and Hyper-V over the coming months.

I just finished watching a slide show narrated by Bill Gates that displays images from his and Microsoft's past.  It's well worth watching.

Only two more days until Bill Gates' last official full-time day at Microsoft. For 33 years, Bill Gates devoted his time, energy, and passion to building one of the most exciting and influential companies in the history of business. Through his vision, hard work, and dedication, he helped create an industry and bring the power of software to millions of people around the world.

To see who he is and what he's done so far, watch the video below.

To see what he's up to next, visit the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Today, Microsoft released Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, the hypervisor-based virtualization technology that is a feature of select versions of Windows Server 2008.  I've been using Hyper-V for some time, and it is rock solid, easy-to-use, and scalable.  As I blogged previously, both the TechNet (1 million hits a day) and the MSDN (3 million hits a day) Web properties are running inside of Hyper-V and have been for weeks, without any issues.

Since then, because things went so well for TechNet and MSDN, Microsoft Operations migrated 25% of the Web servers running microsoft.com, one of the world's largest Web properties, to Hyper-V. We've not encountered any performance, stability, or availability issues at all. More Web servers for microsoft.com will be deployed in Hyper-V once the needed hardware arrives. For more details on this, see http://blogs.technet.com/windowsserver/archive/2008/06/25/microsoft-com-powered-by-hyper-v.aspx.

Hyper-V is quite flexible, supporting a number of virtual machine (VM) guests, such as:

This is too funny (and too close to real life) to not share.  Check out the video at http://www.thewebsiteisdown.com/salesguy.html.

Warning: NSFW  :-)

One of the Exchange Server PMs on the Front-End team shared this cool tip for disabling the Play on Phone capabilities of Exchange 2007 Unified Messaging.

The Exchange 2007 Unified Messaging Play on Phone feature enables a UM-enabled user to access a voice mail message. However, instead of playing the media file over their computer speakers, they can listen to the message on a telephone.

When users sit in office cubicles, use a public computer, have a computer that is not enabled for multimedia, or have a voice message that is confidential, a UM-enabled user may not want to or may be unable to play a voice message over their computer speakers. The Play on Phone feature lets the UM-enabled user play the voice message over a telephone. The Play on Phone feature is available in Exchange 2007 Outlook Web Access and in Office Outlook 2007.

To disable Play on Phone without affecting any other Unified Messaging functionality you set the OutCallsAllowed property on all UMIpGateway objects to false.  For example:

set-UMIPGateway NameofGateway -OutCallsAllowed $false

You can also navigate to the Properties dialog for the IP Gateway object and uncheck the check box for Allow Outgoing Calls.

The flag instructs the Unified Messaging server to never to send SIP Invites (new calls) to the corresponding gateway object. If there are no gateway objects with the property set to true, then Unified Messaging will not attempt to place any outbound calls.

When using this tip, be aware that:

• Play on Phone is the only Unified Messaging feature that will result in no outbound SIP Invite.
• This has no impact on call transfers (which uses SIP Refer), so Auto Attendant and Outlook Voice Access are unaffected.
• This is not a feature segmentation flag. This means that the client user interface will still show the option for Play on Phone. However, user will get an error if they try to use the feature.

For more information about Play on Phone, see http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb124387.aspx.

As part of our monthly content refresh today, we released a new White Paper - Continuous Replication Deep Dive.  This comprehensive deep dive white paper includes technical details about the replication components, the replication service, log shipping and replay, scheduled and unscheduled outages, lost log resilience, transport dumpster, database re-seed scenarios and incremental reseed, log truncation, and more!

You can read the White Paper at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc535020(EXCHG.80).aspx, and a Printer Friendly version can be found at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc535020(EXCHG.80,printer).aspx.

Yesterday, we released SP1 for ISA Server 2006.  ISA Server 2006 Service Pack 1 introduces new features and functionality for both the Standard and Enterprise Editions. The new features focus on configuration change management and enhanced troubleshooting. SP1 includes the following new features and improvements:

• Configuration Change Tracking   Registers all configuration changes applied to ISA Server to help you assess issues that may occur as a result of these changes.
• Test Button   Tests the consistency of a Web publishing rule between the published server and ISA Server.
• Traffic Simulator   Simulates network traffic in accordance with specified request parameters, such as an internal user and the Web server, providing information about firewall policy rules evaluated for the request.
• Diagnostic Logging Viewer   Now integrated as a tab into the ISA Server Management console, this feature displays detailed events on packet progress and provides information about handling and rule matching.
• Improvements for existing features, including:
• Support for integrated NLB mode in all three modes, including unicast, multicast, and multicast with Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP). Previously, ISA Server integrated NLB-supported unicast mode only.
• Support for use of server certificates containing multiple Subject Alternative Name (SAN) entries. Previously, ISA Server was able to use either only either the subject name (common name) of a server certificate, or the first entry in the SAN list.
• Support for Kerberos Constrained Delegation (KCD) cross-domain authentication. Credentials from users located in a different domain than the ISA Server, but in the same forest, can now be delegated to an internal published Web site by using KCD.
• Support for client certificate authentication in a workgroup deployment. This removes the requirement to map each client certificate to an Active Directory account.

Jeffrey Snover, the inventor of Windows PowerShell, has posted an important message on how to speed up startup of Windows PowerShell.  The fix is detailed here.

Are you prepared for outages that affect e-mail service or data availability? Have you defined recovery strategies and procedures for disasters big and small? In this webcast, I'll cover the recommended strategies for protecting Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 messaging service and data, with an emphasis on the ultimate disaster: a full site failure.  Join me this Friday (August 15, 2008) from 9:30 AM to 10:30 AM PST as I also dive deep into standby continuous replication (SCR), which was designed with these disasters in mind. This is a 300-400 level Webcast that covers disaster recovery options and strategies for Exchange 2007 SP1, standby continuous replication, and site resilience.

You can register for this free Webcast at http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032381322&Culture=en-US.

Thanks to the nearly 150 folks who attended my Webcast last week.  A recording of the Webcast is now available at https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/mseventsbmo/view?id=1032381322&role=attend&pw=27903285.  I recommend that you download or view the High Fidelity Live Meeting Replay, as that version will also show the animations that were used on several slides.  The WMV version does not include the animations.

As an aside, part 1 of this 2-part Webcast (which is presented by Ayla Kol, a PM on the Exchange high availability team) had some initial audio problems and is being re-recorded.  The recording is expected to be available on August 26.  I'll post a link here when it's ready.

Enjoy!