Nested Hyper-V 2012 on ESXi 5.1

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Today I needed to get a Hyper-V host up and running so that I could mount the Citrix XenApp 6 EVA (Evaluation Appliance). Unfortunately I could not find the a VMware version of the appliance so I went ahead and downloaded the Hyper-V version. I know I could always convert the VHD to a VMDK, but I figured I’d learn a little Hyper-V while I am at it!

Having a lab, I figured why not try and get the Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V going as a Virtual Machine on one of my ESXi hosts. I tried getting Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V working, but no matter what I did, the VM’s would not start.

hv1Doing some more research I came across successful configurations with Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V running as a nested hypervisor on an ESXi 5.0/5.1. In my case, I was running ESXi 5.1 so the steps we need to take to get Hyper-V working are little different from 5.0. To give credit where it’s due, I found William Lam and David Davis‘ articles on how to get nested Hyper-V working really helpful. To summarize the steps we need to take to get all of this going is as follows:

1. SSH on to the ESXi host or hosts (in my case its two hosts) and add the parameter vhv.enable = “TRUE” (ESXi 5.1) or vhv.allow = “TRUE” (ESXi 5.0) to /etc/vmware/config, in my case I used VI editor (vi /etc/vmware/config)

hv22. Next, we need to modify the vmx configuration file of the virtual machine in order to trick Hyper-V to think it’s running on a physical server. To do this, we need to add the following parameter hypervisor.cpuid.v0 = FALSE like this:

hv33. That’s it, we should now be able to install and launch a virtual machine within the nested Hyper-V virtual machine:

hv4Happy labbing!

Achieving MCITP: Enterprise Messaging Administrator on Exchange Server 2010

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Anyone that works in IT, especially in a windows role, most likely worked with Exchange in some capacity. Its one of those applications you really have to know well in order to be comfortable with administering, installing, troubleshooting, deploying, etc. I decided to pursue the exchange exams because I figured it would be a good challenge, I would learn new things, and so on…

After roughly 3 months of preparation, 2 months for 70-662 and 1 month for 70-663, I am happy to say that I’ve achieved the MCITP: Enterprise Messaging Administrator certification. So what did it take?

My method has always been to learn the technology by doing, not just by reading. I have section of my blog dedicated to my home lab. I built my home lab for that exact purpose, to pass exams and to learn new technology.

The exams are tough! I am not kidding! You really have to work with Exchange for at least 1 year straight to get that experience. I don’t want to discourage anyone from taking these exams, I just want to make sure that if you’re going to work on these exams, make sure to try and get as much hands on as possible. Setup a simple VMware Workstation lab on a laptop or a computer and take the time to build the Exchange environment, don’t rush, its not a race. The reason I was able to pass both exams in 3 months is because I’ve been working with Exchange in large environments for 7 years, 2 of those years were on Exchange 2007 and 2 years were on Exchange 2010. That experience helped me a lot!

So here are some tips that I hope will help those who are preparing for the exam.

Review the blueprint

Any time you’re considering to work on a certification, always look at the blueprint of the exam you’re taking. The blueprint provides us with some idea as to what topics are going to be tested. It’s very hard to study for an exam, when not knowing what’s going to be tested on the exam. The blueprint can always be found on the vendor’s website. I know both Microsoft and VMware sites have sections dedicated to certifications so its easy to find.

Experience

The most important thing to have in my eyes, is experience. Nothing can replace experience no matter how much theory one can learn. In real life things don’t happen by the books and the books don’t always teach things that happen in real life. With that said, not everyone will have experience with every piece of technology. For example, I do not have a lot of experience with Exchange Unified Messaging role. So to compensate  I learn by playing with UM in my lab.

Practical Hands On

This has always been my favorite part of certification preparation. Having the chance to deploy the software, configure, troubleshoot, manage, etc is very helpful. I don’t care if you’re an expert or a beginner, having a lab for a serious IT pro is definitely a must. The labs don’t have to be something huge, but at least something like VMware workstation and enough RAM/Storage to run some VM’s should be enough to get by.

Repetition

Repetition is one of those tasks that some might find boring and to some extent annoying or irritating. I know sometimes I just want to skip a section because its more complicated than I expected. However let’s be honest with ourselves, repetition is what makes as better at what we do. For example, if I deploy a new Exchange Server once, I will learn something, but if after that first time I don’t touch Exchange for a month or more, I will forget a lot of the things I learned. However, if I deploy the Exchange Server many times, during the course of repetitive action, not only will the information stick, but I will also become much more at ease with the technology and the action becomes almost like second nature. If you ask yourself sometimes, how can some IT Pros be so good and know so much detail about a product? The answer is that they practice a lot of hands on, and not just in the lab, but also in real environment.

Practice Exams

Take as many practice exams as you can! I mean it! Practice exams prepare you for the real test, they guide you and help you strengthen your weak areas. One of the things I do when starting to study for an exam, before I read any books, I take a practice exam just to see how strong I am in the subject. I then know how much effort and in what sections I need to dedicate my time to. Sometimes we might know a section of the exam really well so you might not need to spend a lot of time concentrating on that topic and thus cutting down your preparation time. In fact, one of the reasons why I passed both exams in such a  short period, is because I was able to skip a good 30-40% of the preparation due to the fact that I had a lot of experience with that specific section.

Time Management

Know how to manage your time when it comes to your studies. Dedicate at least an hour a day to your study to keep the momentum going. I know sometimes its tough, but try to get it out of the way. For me, what works is the commute to work and back, that’s easily 90 minutes of my day that I spent studying for the exams aside from the time I would spend at home.

Schedule The Exam!

One tactic that I find works great for me, is to go and schedule the exam right away. That way I have motivation to study but also gives me the push I need to get me going. I know it can be tough, but hey, all good things in life are never easy!

I hope this will help to those who might be new to certifications but also to those who perhaps are struggling with how to prepare for an exam. It took me a few years to figure out what study techniques work for me.

Good luck!

Lync 2013 + Duplicate Contacts ” This contact was added from Microsoft Lync 2013″

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The other day I was troubleshooting an issue with an ActiveSync device that had duplicate contacts. Now, this is not a new issue, there a quite a few articles on TechNet that describe possible issues that could related to duplicate contacts.

However, In this particular case, the issue seems to have been related to Lync 2013 client. When looking at the duplicate contact on the ActiveSync device, I noticed that the contact description had a message saying:

This contact was added from Lync 2013

At this point, its clear what’s causing the duplicate contact issue, so what is this and how do we fix it? If we check Microsoft Outlook 2010/2013, we can see under contacts that we have a new contacts folder called Lync Contacts. Now this folder will only appear if you have Lync client installed. In the Lync Contacts folder, we’ll notice right away that we have duplicate contacts.

Here we have a couple of options of how we want to fix this.

  1. Clear the Lync Contacts folder and re-synchronized ActiveSync contacts (Issue might comeback)
  2. If you’re on Lync Server/Client 2010 you can disable Lync contact sync under personal options of the Lync Client
  3. If you’re on Lync Server/Client 2013, we have to run a powershell command that disables the sync
  4. Create a filter within the Lync Contacts with the “lyncignore” (I have not tested this)

In my case, the infrastructure is Lync 2013 so I had to run a powershell command to disable this feature. The following is the command that needs to be run:

Set-CsClientPolicy Global -EnableExchangeContactSync $false

Once the command is run, the Lync Contacts folder will need to be cleared and ActiveSync device needs to be re-synchronized with the contacts. Lync will now stop synchronizing your contacts with Microsoft Outlook.

Thoughts

In some environments you might want to give this a careful thought before disabling this feature, however in my case, this is not really used so it’s safe to disable it. It is also just as easy to enable it.

Exchange Server 2010/2013 coexistence EAC redirection issue

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One of the first things I’ve noticed when I finished installing Exchange Server 2013 in coexistence with Exchange Server 2010, is that when we navigate to the EAC URL at https://CAS_SERVER_NAME/ecp/

ecp1

Then login, we automatically get redirected to Exchange Server 2010 ECP instead.

ecp2

At first this made a lot of sense simply because my Administrator mailbox is still residing on the Exchange Server 2010. However this is going to be a common scenario for everyone when doing these types of coexistence deployments. So how do we get around that?

I searched on TechNet and came across article about Exchange Admin Center in Exchange 2013 that mentions something interesting that fixes this issue. Here’s the quoted text from this article describing a workaround:

If you’re in a coexistence scenario, where you’re running Exchange 2010 and Exchange 2013 in the same organization, and your mailbox is still housed on the Exchange 2010 Mailbox server, the browser will default to the Exchange 2010 ECP. You can access the EAC by adding the Exchange version to the URL. For example, to access the EAC whose virtual directory is hosted on the Client Access server CAS15-NA, use the following URL: https://CAS15-NA/ecp?ExchClientVer=15. Conversely, if you want to access the Exchange 2010 ECP and your mailbox resides on an Exchange 2013 Mailbox server, use the following URL: https://CAS14-NA/ecp?ExchClientVer=14.

So the key element to this post is the ?exchclientver=15. By adding this line to the original ECP link, we would then be able to access the Exchange Admin Center. For example:

https://CAS_SERVER_NAME/ecp/?exchclientver=15

ecp3

 Thoughts

It would be nice to have this fixed, after all, this should be automatic, if we want to get to the EAC we should just simply type the correct link and connect and vise versa. Hopefully this issue will be addressed soon.

vOpenData / CloudCred / Veeam Backup Tape Support

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I wanted to dedicate a post to a couple of new announcements and projects that have been taking place recently.

vOpenData

vopdThis is a very interesting project that came to be when Duncan Epping asked a question about the average disk size for a virtual machine… from that moment on, Ben Thomas and  William Lam created the vOpenData – Crunching Everyone’s Data for Fun And Knowledge website. The project is quite interesting actually, the way it works is by each professional who chooses to participate can submit their vCenter infrastructure statistics such as number of LUNs, vCenter instances, Clusters, disk size, and so on. This information is then tallied up and displayed here for the public to see what the averages are:

http://dash.vopendata.org/public

More info can be found here:

Cloud Credibility

ccVMware has launched a fun website where people can team up and starts building up their team with points as well as individual points. Each individual and Teams need to complete tasks and challenges to be awarded points. The idea behind cloudcred is to show how much you know, how much you participate in the vmware community, network with your peers and of course, learn something new! Everyone likes learning something right? :)

So hop on over to Cloud Credibility and sign up!

Veeam Backup Tape Support!

veeamVeeam recently announced that with version 7 of Veeam Backup, will now offer tape support! I honestly think this a good move for Veeam. I’ve heard many customers wanting to have tape support for quite a while now so this will be a great addition to already a great product that Veeam is. More info on the product can be found here: Count Down to V7

Installing Exchange Server 2013 With Exchange Server 2010 For Coexistence

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Last weekend I decided to upgrade my Exchange Server 2010 lab to Exchange Server 2013 and have it coexist for a little bit just until I pass 70-663 and move on to the Exchange Server 2013 exams. With that said, I went ahead and documented the procedure of what of what I did in my lab. In production of course, things are most likely going to change. This post won’t include the configuration settings that I’ve done afterwards, perhaps I might create another post on that later on. For now, this is going to be a simple prepare and deploy post.

Prerequisites

Exchange Server 2013 Minimum System requirements

  • Windows Server 2008 R2 or Windows Server 2012 (in my lab, I used Windows Server 2012)
  • Microsoft Outlook 2007 SP3, Microsoft Outlook 2010 SP1, Microsoft Outlook 2013, Entourage 2008 for Mac, Outlook 2011 for Mac
  • x64 bit CPU either AMD or Intel
  • Memory for Mailbox – 8GB
  • Memory for Client Access – 5GB
  • Memory Mailbox and Client Access – 8GB
  • 30GB of space on the partition where Exchange will be installed

Exchange Server 2010 Service Pack 3 basic info

  • Introduced support for coexistence with Exchange Server 2013 (must be installed for migration)
  • Support for Exchange Server 2010 installation on Windows Server 2012
  • Support for Internet Explorer 10
  • Other fixes and rollup updates included from previous versions.

Exchange Server 2013 Documentation

Installation Of Exchange Server 2013

1. Just like any Exchange server installation, we need to install the necessary components on the OS where Exchange is going to be installed to support all the features of the exchange rolls that we’re going to be implementing. Depending on what roles we’re going to be installing, we’ll need to install the required updates and features on the OS before proceeding with the installation. In my case, I am only going to be using one VM to host both CAS and Mailbox roles. For this reason we need the following features installed:

  • Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT) on Windos Server 2012
Install-WindowsFeature RSAT-ADDS
  • Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT) on Windos Server 2008
Add-WindowsFeature RSAT-ADDS
  • Other Windows Server 2012 Features such as Desktop Experience, RPC-Over-HTTP-Proxy, Web-Management-Console, and so on
Install-WindowsFeature AS-HTTP-Activation, Desktop-Experience, NET-Framework-45-Features, RPC-over-HTTP-proxy, RSAT-Clustering, RSAT-Clustering-CmdInterface, RSAT-Clustering-Mgmt, RSAT-Clustering-PowerShell, Web-Mgmt-Console, WAS-Process-Model, Web-Asp-Net45, Web-Basic-Auth, Web-Client-Auth, Web-Digest-Auth, Web-Dir-Browsing, Web-Dyn-Compression, Web-Http-Errors, Web-Http-Logging, Web-Http-Redirect, Web-Http-Tracing, Web-ISAPI-Ext, Web-ISAPI-Filter, Web-Lgcy-Mgmt-Console, Web-Metabase, Web-Mgmt-Console, Web-Mgmt-Service, Web-Net-Ext45, Web-Request-Monitor, Web-Server, Web-Stat-Compression, Web-Static-Content, Web-Windows-Auth, Web-WMI, Windows-Identity-Foundation

ex162. We will now launch the Exchange Server 2013 installation and as you can see from the image below, one of the first choices we need to make is if we want to check for Windows Updates prior to going through with the Exchange Server 2013 installation

ex1In my case, I chose not to check for updates, we now need to click on Next.

3. Exchange will now copy and extract the necessary files so that the installation can begin

ex2

ex3

4. At the introduction, we are presented with a couple of links to the Exchange Server 2013 documentation (I recommend that before installing Exchange Server 2013, you’d go through the documentation to understand more about the product and its new features)

ex45. Accept the agreement and click Next

ex5

6. Next, we’ll select if we want to use CEIP, I chose not to since this is a lab configuration, but some might want to enable this feature, its up to you

ex67. This is the part where we need to chose the roles that we’re going to be installing. Its important to note that you should make sure you know what roles you’re going to be installing by the time we get to this part of the installation. This is because we need to install the necessary features and hotfixes on the OS before installing Exchange. If we install the features for the mailbox server only and not the CAS, then the installation prerequisites check will fail if we select both roles

ex78. The next step will notify us of the storage requirements and give us the option of choosing where we want to install exchange

ex89. We’re finally getting there :) We now need to chose if we want to use Malware Protection or not. This is new in Exchange 2013 so I wanted to test it out and I opted not to disable this feature. Of course this might not fit everyone, some might have third party software that integrates with exchange so again, for this option, you’ll need to chose what best suits you, for me, since this is in the lab, I chose to not disable malware since I’d like to play with a little and see how it works in Exchange Server 2013

ex910. At this point, the setup is going to check and make sure that we meet all the prerequisites. Just like in previous version of the exchange, we must pass the readiness check in order to proceed with the installation

ex10

ex1111. As you can see above, everything checked out and we can now click Install to begin the exchange installation

ex1212. There we go, Exchange is has now been successfully installed and we can begin configuring Exchange Server 2013 to support all the features we need during and after coexistence

ex13One thing to note, recently, Exchange Server 2013 CU1 has been released which I recommend gets installed, it fixes a number of bugs and issues that was found with RTM. More info on CU1 can be found here: