I’ve already mentioned that I use excel to manage task lists from time to time. Sometimes reality catches up and a task is invalid before you get to it. You could obviously remove the task from the list, but I prefer to keep a reference of the task and why it became invalid. Instead I set the value of my status column to “Cancelled”. (Other possible values are: “Not started”, “Ongoing”, and “Done”.)

Now in case a task gets cancelled I want to apply a strikeout effect to the entire row, not just that one cell. This is not to difficult to establish, but I always forget about one of the details and need to look up an old copy. Hence I’m writing this post “for future reference”, hopefully somebody else out there finds it useful.

Have a task list at hand and select the rows in it:

Office 2010 Ribbon > Home tab > Conditional formatting > new rule

Select “Use a formula to determine which cells to format”

The formula syntax needs to be along the lines of:

=$e2="Cancelled"

Click the “format” button and check the “strikeout” effect:

The end result:

Now go ahead and try to make a rule that sets a green background for tasks where the status is set to done:

Things that usually go wrong (it’s in the details):

• Typing the wrong cell number; you need the row number of the first row in the area you selected
• Forgetting about one of the equal sings or the quotes
• Not specifying the formatting to apply
• Incorrectly selecting the area the formatting needs to apply to

http://www.pro-exchange.be/blogs/exchange2010/archive/2011/08/26/applying-housekeeping-retention-policies-to-the-end-users.aspx

Read the remainder of this post @ http://www.proexchange.be/blogs/exchange2010/archive/2011/08/11/basic-housekeeping-with-exchange-2010-sp1-retention-policies.aspx

The event I attended today is called Community Day (the 5th edition already) and given the name it won’t come as a surprise that it’s basically a gathering of most of the Belgian ICT user groups.

Opening Keynote

We started off in the biggest room reserved for the event with a fun movie the @ComDayBe team made in Leuven. They were basically asking some random people which versions of windows and office they were using and whether they knew what Cloud Computing is all about.

Session: What if disaster strikes – Failover clustering explained

I have worked in an operational team that supported multiple fail-over clusters so I’m familiar with most of the concepts, except for the “Dependency Report” that  is. I did have the impression that there was some mix-up between shared storage and Majority Node Set (MNS) clusters though.

It was also stated that deploying such a cluster is pretty straight forward. That might be true from a technical point of view, but it’s an entirely different story if you have to start dealing with server, network and storage teams. Additionally, It has proven difficult to ensure people are using the correct network name to connect to their database or application.

Session: Communication Enabled Business Processes using Lync 2010

Next up was the first of 2 sessions of the community I’m most involved with myself; Pro-Exchange. Johan Delimon showed us some demos and examples of applications that are build on top of the Lync client or server APIs and Exchange Web Services (EWS).

Lunch

IT-Pro Chalk Talk

My colleague @MVanHorenbeeck used all his credits during this interactive Q&A session. Hence we mostly discussed about “the cloud”:

• Cloud vs. Jobs
• Cloud vs. Security
• Cloud vs. Monitoring (both SLA & security)
• ADFS not feasible for small companies

On a side note; this VIP room was really nice. I can certainly see my self watching a movie in this environment. Lots of leg room! No that I have such a long legs, but I’m not very good at sitting still for a longer periods of time. Ask my wife ;-)

Sponsor Presentation: From Box to Solution in one session with the HP/Microsoft Business Decision and Messaging Appliances

We kicked of the afternoon with a session hosted by sponsor HP. They talked about joint effort from Microsoft and HP in combining their technologies. The result is a kind of purposely built appliance. Apert from 3 SQL server related appliances there’s also one related to Exchange Server; the E5000 Messaging System. Obviously I was more interested in the latter.

Some notes:

• load balancer required (read: not included)
• meant for SMB; the entry-level model supports about 500 mbx of 1GB while the largest one supports 3000 users of 2,5GB
• HA out-of-the-box; no active component which is not redundant, but then again both servers are still in the same rack/data center.

It certainly looks interesting at first sight. We will need to investigate and compare prices to decide whether this could be a useful for our customers.

Session: Roll-out and Manage Multi-Platform Mobile Devices using some simple tools… and Exchange 2010

Second Pro-Exchange session of the day. Wim Borgers kicked of with a bit of history on the evolution of the smart phone platform and discussed some of the issues with managing lots of mobile devices with different operating systems, versions and makes.

Ruben Nauwelaers took care of the second part and discussed what can be done when using native Exchange 2010 features and/or some 3rd party tools:

• Apple Push notifications services
• SCCM
• Exchange Server 2010
• iPhone Configuration Utility

Session: Operations Manager 2012 Overview

A bit unfortunate, but only 6 people showed up for the SCOM session. We were kindly invited by @AlexVerkinderen to come and sit on the first row, which results in huge slides. Anyway my notes for this session read:

• SCOM 2007 Management Packs will be compatible with SCOM 2012
• New functionality will require deploying “feature packs” thus allowing customers to upgrade their monitoring infrastructure without to big of an impact.
• SCOM vs. cloud
• An MP for monitoring Azure already exists.
• Project Concero will allow monitoring of infrastructure deployed in the cloud and on premise
• Root Management Server (RMS) is replaced with a peer-to-peer architecture of management servers
• In depth network monitoring and SNMP v3

We ran out of time and didn’t get to see the entire presentation. I’m certainly interested to see the remainder of it, be it with or without a Duvel.

Closing

We ended the evening with some, mainly developer oriented, price draws. I quickly returned home to put the kids to bed, but not before doing some sight-seeing around the construction works in Vilvoorde.

Note: I hope the mango update for Windows Phone 7 comes quickly because not being able to turn of the shutter sound is getting annoying, especially for the other people in the room…

However for troubleshooting/validation purposes you may want to know the exact host you’re connected to. There are a number of solutions for this but the easiest one by far is using Help > About in Outlook Web App in Exchange Server 2010:

A new pop-up appears to get you started;

Happy Christmas!

When looking in the logs for the CBTMotion errors I found following messages.

CBTMotion: scsi0:1: Clone: failed to start block tracking session on source disk: Change tracking is not active for this disk.
CBTMotion: scsi0:1: failed to clone disk from /vmfs/volumes/694286b5-b7bf1d73/VM01/VM01_1.vmdk to /vmfs/volumes/2b0e242d-40129/VM01/VM01_1.vmdk.
CBTMotion: disk clone failed, aborting Storage VMotion.
Msg_Post: Error
[msg.cbtmotion.disk.clone.failed] Disk clone failed. Canceling Storage vMotion.

To solve this I created a snapshot on the VM and committed it. After this the storage VMotion worked successfully.

Here’s a twitter-style overview of the stuff we discussed.

1. ExMon: community member wondered why he couldn’t see the client latency anymore when using exmon
2. Somebody else explained a complicated (from the admin side) Public Folder based system for an end-user to be able to manage distribution lists themselves. Additionally this very same customer also used some public folder based contacts to hide recipients in some cases (if I understood the story correctly). Suggestion from the product team was to use ECP for most of this functionality. This would however require a lot of effort in training the end-user.
3. MS IT DB Design
4. DAG takes care of switching mbx db to another instance, but the default PF store is still hard-coded. So you’re in trouble if that one went down togheter with the active mailbox database. Probably fixed in next roll up, but no guarantee.
5. MS IT Storage design: 300mbx/db on a single physical disk containing both the database it selves, the content index and the transaction logs. In case of hard disk failure another copy of the database in the same datacenter is activated. MS IT refreshes hardware every 3 years. During this refresh the mailbox quota is doubled. However they use thin provisioning for their mailboxes, while mailboxes have a 5Gb quota only 3Gb is available for them. When designing their solution they take 10 years of trending into account. PTSs are still allowed at Microsoft because of legal requirements around the Globe. Retention policies do exist but are opt in.
6. Archiving in E2K10. Read only access does not exist as such. Suggestion was to use either single item recovery or delegation hold. Quota’s do exist in the dumpster. 20Gb warning & 30Gb error.
7. Single Instance Storage: SIS is removed in E2K10. When moving from E2007 to E2010 that should not be an issue as SIS is nowhere taken into account when showing mailbox size. The counter that existed was inaccurate. SIS has been removed in favor IO improvements: search, sort, mailbox move etc. A sort of the inbox takes 1 IO operation as opposed to 7 in previous versions.
8. MS IT Backup strategy: Ross discussed the case where they lost 3,5 days worth of email for 8000 users because of a SAN crash. Documented the evolution of the strategy over time.
9. Storage calculator. (Ross is the author of this tool).
10. CAS HA on VM; multiple CAS or rely on vmotion? MS obviously recommends setting up multiple CAS servers. Use HLB to reduce number of machines required. Aim for 80% CPU. Look at Kemp for cheap hardware load balancers.
11. X500 & LegacyExchangeDN: chicken vs. the eg. Kept for backwards compatibility.
12. UAG vs. TMG. White paper available. TMG mainly for outbound traffic. UAG for inbound traffic, but built on top of TMG. TMG is the way to go if you only need to publish exchange. If you need/want more than use UAG. However it cannot do certificate based mobile devices!
13. Recovering entire folder structures is not possible anymore. Will probably not change.
14. Outlook 2007 archiving add-on <=> No date.
15. EAS mbx policy difference in RTM vs. SP1: “allow block quarantine” brought to ECP
16. Outlook anywhere client certificate authentication. Smart card authentication will be possible when using Outlook 2010 SP1 + Exchange 2010 SP1 + … Will be IPSec based. White paper on the way.
17. Vanity domains (as Greg called it): there’s only one common OWA legacy URL however. Use multiple OWA virtual directories or servers.
18. Renaming forest with exchange server present. Not supported and never will be. Risky. Also consider SMS, SAP etc.
19. Select from address; no plans. Add-ons do exist however. (e.g. http://www.howto-outlook.com/tag/mail-composing)
20. HT tries to collapse multiple meeting requests. Think of an original followed up by a number of corrections.
21. Operational improvements is E2010: PowerShell, ECP, out of office etc.
22. Sent/deleted items in the wrong folder. I personally have a case where I cannot get the steps explained by Ilse to work.
23. Recovery database
24. Some more storage calculator discussions and a little demo.

Somewhere in between these friendly people from MS were kind enough to answer a number of questions provided to me by some colleagues:

1) Retiring/uninstalling the fist CAS server in a domain/site has effect on the RPCClientAccessServer attribute which can affect/interrupt mailbox access. Are there other issues we can encounter while retiring a/the first CAS or HUB or MBX server?

==> Recommendations is to always create a CASarray even when there’s only one CAS server. Other impact may be PF, OAB generation+distribution, Routing table, arbitration mailboxes, …

2) We would like to separate the traffic between our  regions  NA – EU (North America – Europe) and the traffic in the regions, (NA= E2K7 and  EU = E2K10) is it possible to force the hub transport traffic between those sites over a/2 dedicated hub transport servers as this is easier to troubleshoot. We did it in e2k3 with routing groups.

==> Not possible

3) We want to achieve the pic below… so Outlook/mapi traffic is always connected to CAS1 and CAS2 but not to CAS3 and CAS4 as we want to separate our intern mapi traffic from owapp traffic.

All server are in the same site. CAS1 and CAS2 are in one nlb Cas3 and 4 in another NLB.

The clientaccessarray has the fqdn of the nlb of cas 1 and 2. And rpcclientaccessserver points to the clientaccessarray.

Get-clientaccessarray although gives the 4 Cas servers as members… does this also means that Outlook can connect to cas 3 and 4 as they are NOT in the nlb(which we  do not want)?

==> This is possible by proper configuration of DNS aliases and NLB setup. Generally not a good idea however. I CAS2 fails or is in maintenance then CAS1 becomes a single point of failure

Last but not least there were also a number of questions I had of my own. Most of them are coming from discussion with customers in the past. They mostly confirmed my answer, which is always a good thing :-)

1. Routing intra exchange org e-mail over the internet? Possible by using Riverbed for instance. Not supported. (Note: most of the comment came from the community, not from MS.)
2. “Something” inbetween ISA (DMZ) & CAS (LAN). ==> you could put e.g. Cisco firewalls in front of the ISA but there’s not really any advantage in adding something between ISA & CAS.
3. Secondary address resolved to primary in older versions? ==> Has always shown this behavior.

Full database backup/restores were working fine and we deployed the mapi toolkit as documented in the IBM Tivoli Storage Manager for Mail: Data Protection for Microsoft Exchange Server Installation and User’s Guide V6.1.2. Didn’t work. The customer subsequently contacts Tivoli support and comes back with the answer “install the CAS role on your MBX servers”.

That let to kind of a “huh?” moment as we used the Exchange Server role based architecture in our deployment. A clever colleague of mine came up with a document confirming that statement:

In order to perform Mailbox Restore (IMR) operations on Exchange Server 2010, the Exchange Server that you are performing the mailbox restore on must have the Mailbox Server Role and the Client Access Server (CAS) Role.
Workaround: Perform the mailbox restore operation on an Exchange server that has the Mailbox Server Role and Client Access Server (CAS) Role.

Source: Known Issues and Limitations: Version 2.2 FlashCopy® Manager for Microsoft Exchange & V6.1.x Data Protection for Microsoft Exchange Server

What we did not find were any “design” guidelines. So a couple of questions remain:

• Do we need to install the CAS role on every MBX server?
• Do we need database copies (we’re talking DAG here) on the server with MBX+CAS roles? Do they need to be active?
• Can we use a “management” server with an empty db, outside of the DAG for this?
• How are we going to shield this CAS from users and applications?
• …

Al lot of questions and few answers in a project that is nearing completion. Hence we recommended the customer to use the recovery database feature and restore-mailbox management shell cmdlet to restore individual items. Worked perfectly.

Anyway, I’m still interested to learn how IBM thinks we should set this up in an environment that does not deploy all roles on a single server. Which is not the type of customers that would pick TSM as there backup software of choice in the first place.

Invest in an iPad, a Kindle 3 or stick with my netbook for my ereading needs. Choices…