I got around to installing the Microsoft Office 2010 Technical Preview yesterday. All in all I’m very impressed with what I’m seeing.  I’ve beta tested Office 2003 and Office 2007, as well as run all their Technical Previews and I think I can already say this one runs much smoother than any I’ve tested in the past.   It runs fast, smooth, and as desired with only a few problems so far.

64bit
This is long overdue. I live out of Outlook and it gets put to the test on a daily basis. Any bit of extra power I can get out of Outlook is a huge plus in my book.  Granted there aren’t many functions that will make use of 64bit processing, but again every bit counts.

Splash
The first thing you’ll notice upon launching Outlook 2010 is the new splash screen. I know it seems insignificant, and this change lacks any sort of functionality, however it’s nice to see all aspects of the product being improved.  One very small thing the splash screen does do is show the progress of the startup process, which might prove to be helpful in the future.

Outlook takes a while to load up the first time.  It seems to have sped up with each subsequent launch.  I suspect that is due to caching and indexing finally completing.

Ribbon
Microsoft did what I thought they should have done with Outlook 2007 – give the same style ribbon that the rest of the Office products received with Office 2007.  This is long overdue in my opinion.

Quick Steps
One of the cooler things with this release is the inclusion of “Quick Steps”.  Thnk of them as customizable repeat actions. You can create a quick step to take care of things you do all the time, such as forward an email to a specific person or manager, reply or reply all to a message with a Meeting Request, move a message to a specific folder and much more.  You can even create a quick step, that will with on click, Reply (all) to a message, change the subject and insert predefined text in the body. I know this was all possible with rules and templates with previous Outlook versions, but never this simple and quick.

My one hope for Quick Steps is that Microsoft opens up the Quick Steps to allow users to create Quick Steps with much more detailed actions that they don’t offer by default. Currently they only give a short list of very basic functions.  You can’t tease me with an awesome idea like this and not expect me to want more

Search
Search within Outlook 2010 looks to be much more useful to the common user. Microsoft has including some predefined search criteria options which made often made it a pain to do more complex searches within Outlook 2007. It seems so simple, but we never had it like this before. I think Microsoft is really starting to listen.

Active Directory Authentication
The only, and potentially fatal problem I’ve had so far is since I’ve installed Outlook 2010 my Active Directory account seems to be getting locked out.  Its happened twice within the last day.  I’ll open Outlook and it will keep asking me for my username and password.  Then, I’ll log onto my Domain Controller and see that my account has been locked out – and yes I am typing the right password.  I’m not sure what is Outlook is trying to do, but it’s doing it unsuccessfully. My Domain Security Policy is vanilla, so Outlook is failing at authenticating something the magic number of times. I hope this is a bug that Micrsoft has assigned some resources to.

Conclusion
Other than the major problem with my Active Directory account getting locked out Microsoft is right on track with this one.  The interface is clean and fast and there few improvements I’ve seen thus far scream the fact that Microsoft is putting in a lot of effort.

I don’t usually have much of a need for the other Office apps, but when I do I usually work in them all day for a special project. I hope to get some alone time with Visio 2007 next week.

A few months ago I started the process of getting all my ducks in a row for a migration that involved moving all physical servers a customer had to a VMware ESX environment. This environment wasn’t anything special: 60 users running Microsoft Active Directory, Exchange 2003, Blackberry Enterprise Server and Sage Timberline Office as their accounting app.

The Microsoft parts were easy.  I was sure there would be no problem those. My one concern was with the Sage Timberline software package. This program never ran particularly well, and its obvious it is running using very old programming languages much like alot of the LOB apps companies use these days.

I needed to make sure this package would both a) run within a VMware environment and b) be supported by Sage from a technical perspective. When I called the Sage Customer Support desk and asked their response was:

Sage Timberline Office is not supported running as a virtual machine, however we will troubleshoot any issues you have to a reasonable extent, while not allowing any support calls to be escalated to the engineering department.”

That actually sounds pretty fair. The woman I spoke with sounded fairly knowledgable about the Sage product and had been one of the technicians to previously work with another Sage customer that had issues running their software in a virtual environment. I asked her what the specific issues encountered were and all she really could tell me was that the Pervasive Database performed very badly and lots of unexpected things would happen while using the software.

So here I was – ready to get a signature for a proposal that would cost my customer 10′s of thousands of dollars and I had no factual evidence that showed that the accounting package they used would even work. If there were ever going to be a problem with this software it would be related to performance alone, right? There only about 10 users that access this application, so that shouldn’t really be an issue, right?

Well it turns out Sage Timberline Accounting software runs just fine in a virtual environment. It runs better running in VMware ESX 4 than it ever did on its own dedicated Dell Poweredge 1650 with RAID5.

I guess the moral of the story is that if it should work and it isn’t, you’re probably doing something wrong. Fight through the problems with a sense of resolve, do your research, follow guidelines and procedures and most things will run just fine in a virtual environment….and never take no for an answer.

Anyone familiar with ESX will know how finicky it and vCenter can be about name resolution for all parties involved.  I typically make my VI and vCenter Server HOSTS file identical.  This usually solves all my HA problems and other weird issues that arise.

Today I realized it’s also beneficial to duplicate the HOSTS file on a machine that is being converted from physical to virtual using vCenter Converter (the machine I am converting). Before I appended those entries to the I was receiving “FAILED: A system error encountered during an operation.” each time I tried running the conversion.  The error cleared up right away.

I still don’t know why this continues to be an issue. The infrastructures are setup as vanilla and as “by the book” as possible.  DNS and WINS are always setup and working properly.  Short name and FQDN resolution always works from every host and client on the network.

I suppose it isn’t the end of the world. Seems like it should be an easy thing for VMware to “fix”…then again maybe they don’t consider it to be broken.

Last week I had the unfortunate and immediate need to migrate IIS 6.0 from one Windows Server 2003 to another. I thought this process was going to be very painful, when in fact it was quite simple and straightforward. It’s hard to believe that after all these years I’ve never had to do this. There really is a first time for everything!

Luckily I run everything within VMware ESX Environment, so no data needed to be copied from one machine to another. I simply provisioned a new Windows Server 2003 guest and added the old server’s VMDK disk to the new machine.

• The first thing you need to do is backup your old IIS configuration. In IIS Manager, right click in IIS Manager > All Tasks > Backup/Restore Configuration.

• Probably the most imporant part of the whole process is to make sure you “Encrypt the backup using password”. This makes th e IIS config “portable”. If you don’t encrypt it, you won’t be able to import it on a different system as there are sessions keys stored withing the IIS metabase.

• By default the configuration backup goes to C:\WINDOWS\system32\inetsrv\MetaBack. So you will need to grab both files it has created and move them on over to the new server. Place them in the same location on the new server because IIS doesn’t give you a choice to browse for a backup – it looks in that directory each time.

• Now you’ll restore that configuration from within IIS Manager, right click in IIS Manager > All Tasks > Backup/Restore Configuration. Choose the one you want to restore and restore. It will ask for the encryptin password.
• Now we need to restart IIS. This will actually re-create the IUSR account in the Local User Manager, which kind of impressed me. The password will be wrong for this account so you need to set it to something manually by the normal Reset Password function.
• Now you need to need to tell the metabase about that new password. Microsoft has a nice article outlining how this is done.
  http://support.microsoft.com/kb/297989
• Restart IIS and for the most part you should be good to go.

I opted to simply reset the password for the IUSR account that the metabase created automatically for me. The name was wrong (hence IUSR_computer), however this meant I wouldnt need to change all of the special IUSR permissions set for special files such as MDB and other special case files. You can easily tell the metabase to use a new user account as the IUSR account using the metabase explorer, but I’m not going to go into that right now.

As reported on serveral sites such as BerryReview.com over the past few days RIM has announed they will be giving the axe to Blackberry Professional Software (BPS). For those of you not familiar with BPS, it began as “BES Express”, basically BES with a CAL limit of 15 users without the need to plop down $3k to get started.  They then rebranded BES Express as BPS and upped the CAL limit to 30 and changed their development branch.

BPS users have been waiting for HTML support for several months, all the while RIM has been telling us to be patient.  Well it looks like thats just a dream now.

This news might have horrible implications for companies like mine who thrive on the Microsoft Small Business Server installations for the 5-15 user offices.  One our biggest selling points is giving users the ability to be completed synced up wirelessly without having the spend the $3k like big guy’s do. That’s all gone now.

Anyone that has met me knows that I have a hard time functioning without my Blackberry in hand. I push this technology on customers, friends and barmates.  Once BPS is gone for good can I really continue to convert people Blackberry’s?

There is alot of speculation that RIM must be planning on replacing BPS with some other product, or at the very least a new pricing model for the full-fledged BES.  But alas this is still just speculation.  We can only hope they hear us loud and clear.  Make this right!

So I’ve had the problem in the past where I need to remove very old snapshots for ESX virtual machines and eventually after hours of merging it fails with no apparent reason.  Recently I was looking into how I could get aroudn this.  The idea I was testing was to use Converter Enterprise to esentially do a V2V.  That way, if the conversion failed I will still have the original machine in its old working state.

After starting this process on a test VM, after 3 hours of converting it failed.  The logs gave me the following:

UNKNOWN_METHOD_FAULT(vim.fault.NotAuthenticated)

I stumbled upon a post on the vmware communities that suggested I try the following

When setting up the conversion, don’t use “convert all disks and leave current size”, use “select volumes…” and leave all volumes selected and the default options checked.

I gave it another try and voila! Conversion worked without error.

I wonder if multiple disks has anything to do with the snapshot merging problems I’ve had so many times.  As I attempt to remember specifics of all past failed attempts, I believe they’ve all had multiple disks.  Maybe that was the problem all along?  As long as this Plan B works I’m happy!

Noticed a couple weeks ago while walking a customer through the reporting functions of the Cymphonix DC10 was throwing a Java Exception while adding a user to a report filter while logged in as a non-admin user account.  I updated the firmware to the newest, 8.3.6, but the problem persisted.  I tested this functionality on a DC30 and I had the same results.

I spoke with Cymphonix support and they did their own testing and confirmed this to be a bug with the Firmware. Cymphonix support was very helpful in determining this was a bug, however they were unable to get a firm release date for a fix to this problem from the engineers. Bugs happen.  It’s just a part of the industry we’re in – which is fine, but in my situation I needed to give my customer a firm timeline for this to be fixed, and so far nothing was known.

They suggested I setup broadcast emails for these reports.  This is fine temporarily but not long term.  The only problem with this was that for 2 weeks I haven’t been able to send broadcast reports.  I tested, made sure my smtp server was correct and relaying – it was.  What gives?  Turns out broadcast reports get relayed through Cymphonix HQ servers – not my smtp server for some proprietary reason.  Their server had been down for a couple weeks and they had just realized it that morning.  Ironic.  Now its working.

I spoke with my sales manager, and we had a call with someone that i can only imagine is some sort of Quality Control manager about the bug I found and frankly they agreed.  They got engineering on the line and they are working on getting this thing fixed asap. Lets see how long it takes!

Strange VMware Tools issue while upgrading one of my Ubuntu 6.06.2 VMware Guests to Ubuntu 8.04.1.  The Ubuntu upgrade itself seemed to go just fine, but installing the updated VMware Tools gave me an error:

Your kernel was built with "gcc" version "4.2.3", while you are
trying to use "/usr/bin/gcc" version "4.2.4". This configuration
is not recommended and VMware Player may crash if you'll continue.
Please try to use exactly same compiler as one used for building
your kernel. Do you want to go with compiler "/usr/bin/gcc"
version "4.2.4" anyway? [no]

It didn’t take very long to find a thread about this – http://ge.ubuntuforums.com/showthread.php?t=963825.  I took the suggest of some of the users here and chose YES.  SNAPSHOT YOUR MACHINES BEFORE YOU TRY SOMETHING UNPROVEN!

Well now it complained that it couldnt locate the Linux C Header files:

The header files in /usr/include are generally for C libraries, not for the
running kernel. If you do not have kernel header files in your /usr/src
directory, you probably do not have the kernel-source package installed. Are yousure that /usr/include contains the header files associated with your running
kernel? [no]

Weird.  So now I had to manually install the Linux Headers.  I did this by issuing:

apt-get install linux-headers-`uname -r` build-essential

I now re-ran perl /usr/src/vmware-tools-distrib/vmware-install.pl.  I again of course had to tell the installer to continue compiling using gcc 4.2.4, but now it didnt complain about the C headers. The install completed successfully.

I had completely forgotten about this. WIth past ESX builds Ubuntu was only *sort of* supported.  In order to get VMWare Tools installed on Ubuntu you had to basically merge the native VMWare Tools with open-vmware-tools.

The process of merging the two sets to tools together was simple enough, and successful enough – but doesnt it feel great when something is really supported and when it works the way it’s supposed to? For the shiny new supported VMWare Tools I simply ran ./vmware-install.pl from the console of my Guest, waited about 5 minutes and voila!

ESX 3.5 Update 3 Release Notes

I was doing some regular maintenance today in Virtual Center 2.5 today and realized Its been a couple months since I’ve installed any updates on my ESX 3.5 hosts.  I don’t think I’ve installed any updates since way back before August before the bugged Update 2 was release. Back then I had reinstalled VI 2.5 and forgot to reinstall Update Manager in VI.  Funny how you forget about things when they aren’t right in front of you.

When I first attempted to Scan for Updates I received the following error in VI:

metadata for patch missing

Searching through the forums suggested the ESX host FW wasn’t properly listening for connections and suggested I run:

esxcfg-firewall --openport 80,tcp,out,dynamicupdates
(port 80 was specific to my environment and may vary for your setup)

Once I did this the Scan for Updates ran just fine

Onto the upgrade….

Before the upgrade

[root@esx-03 root]# vimsh -n -e 'hostsvc/hostsummary' | grep fullName
File not found.
fullName = "VMware ESX Server 3.5.0 build-82663",

1.Reinstalled Update Manager and attached the Critical and Non-critical Baselines to the ESX hosts

2.Put my first ESX host into Maintenance Mode and agreed to all the informational messages that come with that

3.Selected all Guest VMs and migrated them to another ESX host (I’m still not absolutely sure if entering Maintenance Mode actually evacuates all the running VMs.  I just migrate them manually because I can see it working)

4.Right clicked on the ESX host and chose Remediate, chose both Baselines and Next’ed through the wizard.

5.30 minutes later the ESX host was back up and running with the newest patches and updates. Repeat steps on all other Hosts.

After the upgrade

[root@esx-03 root]# vimsh -n -e 'hostsvc/hostsummary' | grep fullName
File not found.
fullName = "VMware ESX Server 3.5.0 build-123630",

One thing I noticed after the upgrade was that the SSH server didn’t automatically start even though it was set to

I clicked START and all was well.  I will do more troubleshooting on this the next time I need to reboot the Hosts.  I’d rather not evacuate all my Guest VMs for this reason alone. For now I’m happy being up to date.