Monthly Archives: January 2012
Microsoft PST Capture Tool is available for download | Download Microsoft PST Capture | How to capture PST files | How to import PST files into Microsoft Exchange Server 2010
Author: Zahir Hussain Shah | MVP Exchange Server, CISSP
In past, I published a blog post as News: Microsoft Exchange 2010 PST Capture Tool Coming Soon!, and today, Im pleased to inform you that Microsoft has recently released a public version of this tool! You can download this from Microsoft Download Centre.
This tool is a good addition to Microsoft Exchange Server tools inventory, and will surely help the organizations to make their environment PST free, where lot of other E-Mail Archiving Solution provider has always been projected importing PSTs into the Microsoft Exchange Information Store, while capturing and importing these PST files from the users machine over the network, as one of the hot and out-of-the-box feature of their Exchange E-Mail Archiving product, and was also something, which I feel that something as major was missing from Microsoft Exchange Native Online-Archive solution, but with the addition of this great tool, now Microsoft Exchange Administrators have been given a great piece of flexibility to get the user PSTs imported into the Exchange Server with less pain and more control.
How Microsoft PST Capture Works? – Check out the documentation here.
To know more about Microsoft PST Capture Tool, visit below URL:
http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2012/01/30/pst-time-to-walk-the-plank.aspx
Cheers!
Good News! Microsoft Open-Door Registrations for UAE are now opened!
Author: Zahir Hussain Shah | MVP Exchange, CISSP
Recently, I got to know that Microsoft TechEd Middle East event has been replaced by Microsoft Open-Door event, which will held on 12 13, March, 2012 at Madinat Jumeirah, Dubai.
So for what you are waiting for, go and get register yourself for two-days great learning and networking event in the town, register for Microsoft Open-Door UAE, click here
What is Open Door?
Open Door is Microsofts premier technical education event aimed at offering technology professionals and decision makers the chance to explore and connect with a broad set of current and soon-to-be-released Microsoft technologies, tools, platforms and services.
An all-encompassing 2-day event, Open Door is the perfect venue for customers and partners to engage and interact, while learning about Microsofts breadth of solutions, technologies and innovations.
Who is coming to Open Door?
Open Door will be attended by a wide range of Microsoft customers including IT professionals, developers and IT decision makers from small and medium-sized businesses, government institutions and large enterprises.
I’m also planning to visit, and if I get there, then you will probably see me around MVP booth.
Regards,
How to prepare for CISSP Certification Exam | CISSP Study Guidelines
Author: Zahir Hussain Shah | CISSP, MVP Exchange Server
I recently published a blog article about, how to prepare for CISSP Certification Exam, and where I tried to sum up all the study recommendations and suggestions, which may help to better prepare for your CISSP Certification exam, and gain knowledge from this wonderful certification.
Wish you all the very best of luck for your preparation and exam!
How to: CISSP Certification:
http://zahirshahblog.com/how-to-cissp-certification/
Note: This blog post doesnt provide any information related to exam questions or any other certification material, which are against to (ISC)2 / CISSP Code of Ethics, this article will only provide information for the educational and training purposes.
Cheers!
How to get Private key from a Certificate | Generate Private Key for a Certificate | Find Private Key from a Internal CA Generated Certificate | Generating Private Key for Cisco Iron Port | IronPort Certificate Private Key
Guidelines for generating Private key from a Certificate to upload newly created Certificate from Internal CA for Cisco IronPort
Recently we ran into a situation, where I have asked to generate the Private Key of a certificate, which we created using our Internal Certification Authority (Microsoft Certificate Services), so then I started searching for how to generate the Private Key, and then I found a wonderful tool as “OpenSSL”, which works perfectly fine, and generates the Private Key for your certificate.
We saw this requirement of having the Private Key for our Cisco IronPort Certificate Renewal / Upgrade, so if you are planning to upgrade your Cisco IronPort Certificate, you can use the below mentioned steps to generate the key, and upload your certificate.
Download OpenSSL for both 32BIT and 64BIT.
Place the certificate as .pkcs12 in the same directory and run the below command from Windows Command Prompt:
| C:\OpenSSL\openssl.exe pkcs12 -in Cert_Name.pfx -nocerts -out privatekey_Name.pem |
Then you will have the generated PrivateKey_Name.pem in the same directory, from where you ran the OpenSSL binary:
For getting decrypted private key from the above step, you can run the below command using openssl.exe:
openssl.exe rsa -in privatekey_New_Name.pem > privatekey_decrypt_new.key
And for converting SSL Certificates from different formats to different formats, you can use the online SSL Converter site.
Cheers!
Hyper-V Live Migration is not working | The disk structure is corrupted and unreadable | Cluster resource ‘Virtual Machine VM in clustered service or application VM failed | Virtual Machine VM failed to start.
Author: Zahir Hussain Shah | MVP Exchange Server
Applies to: Hyper-V Live Migration is not working | CSV is not accessible from passive cluster nodes| Validate Disk Failover failed | Failed to write file data on cluster disk 0 partition 1, failure reason: The disk structure is corrupted and unreadable | Virtual Machine VM live migration did not succeed at the destination | Cluster resource ‘Virtual Machine VM in clustered service or application VM failed | Virtual Machine VM failed to start.
Microsoft Hyper-V Clustering Recommendation and Best Practices for Live Migration and Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV) – Quick Solutions Guide
This is my second blog post related to Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Clustering for Microsoft Hyper-V 2008 R2 Clustering and High Availability, in my previous blog article for building Hyper-V 2008 R2 High Availability, in which I presented to you the links to a wonderful video series for building Hyper-V HA for creating Highly Available Virtual Machine work-loads with Hyper-V Live Migration and Cluster Shared Volumes.
In this article, I will walk you through the several post-implementation related issues and their resolution, which you may get encounter with your configuration and some of the best practices, for helping you to fix your problem, and get your highly available VMs running on Hyper-V Cluster.
Okay, now lets start here with each post-issue, I have seen occurs after Implementing Hyper-V Cluster with CSV and Live Migration, I will explain one by one.
1) Failed to write file data on cluster disk 0 partition 1, failure reason: The disk structure is corrupted and unreadable
By the way, it is not a post-implementation problem, but I would like to share this with you, this happened to me, while I was building my five nodes Windows Failover Cluster on Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 for Hyper-V, this issue is related to Cluster Validation failure for Failover Disks, it happened to my newly attached CLUTER DISKs (LUNs), which I formatted and made offline before I ran Cluster Validation, but I got the failure that “The disk structure is corrupted and unreadable.”
Problem:
Failed to write file data on cluster disk 0 partition 1, failure reason: The disk structure is corrupted and unreadable corrupted and unreadable.
Resolution:
To fix this problem, I formatted all the disks, made them offline again, and re-run the Cluster Validation Test, and this time it turned out as passed!
2) Live Migration Best Practices and Post-Implementation Issues and their Resolutions:
In this section, I will guide you the best practices for fixing issues related to the Live Migration, after the post-implementation of Windows Failover Clustering for Hyper-V with CSV:
I. Recommended Cluster Network Microsoft Failover Cluster Settings:
Lets assume you got two networks physical cards in your Server, as follows:
LAN Connected Server VLAN
Cluster Heartbeat Network Cluster Network for Live Migration
In the Failover Cluster Manager, you have to set the below settings for both of them:
-
- image001
-
- image002
II. Recommended Cluster Network File and Printing and NetBIOS Settings:
As you know that disabling File and Printing Services and NetBIOS, for Cluster Internal Network, have always been a recommended practice, but with Live Migration and Hyper-V Clustering, it is required to turn on these both settings on the Cluster Network, which we will be using for Live Migration.
III. Refreshing Virtual Machine Configuration:
With my experience, while I saw that the Quick Migration was working but Live Migration was not working, so I gave a Refresh Virtual Machine Configuration from the Microsoft Failover Manager, and after that tried to give a live migration, and it worked, so you can say that after making any changes to VM (Highly Available) in Clustering, you should give Refresh to VM Configuration Cluster, so which tells the cluster that these are the changes made to the VM, and which directly interact with Clustering behavior of the VM.
IV. CSV- Cluster Shared Volumes behavior:
When you add CSV in the Microsoft Cluster Failover Manager for the support and funtionlity of Live Migration, you see a different behavior of these disk, as compare to the other type of storage on the Cluster Nodes, and over time, I have seen some misconception and misguided assumptions about these CSV LUNs, so let me explain the expected behavior of CSV LUNs on the Cluster nodes as follows:
a. Online / Offline: CSV LUNs will only be online on the Current Owner of the LUNs in the Cluster, e.g. as shown in the below image that only disk three is online and disk 1, disk 2 are both offline, is because that the Cluster Node 1 is the current owner of the DISK 3, and thats why it is showing here online, and both DISK 1, and DISK 2 are offline.
b. Reserved: When you add at LUN to Cluster as CSV, the Disk as become Reserved, means that it will only work for Windows Server 2008 R2 CSV functionality, where it is allowed for file-level locking, not the disk level.
c. Accessing CSV LUNs from Windows Explorer and over NetBIOS SMB session:
After adding the CSV LUNs to the Failover Cluster Manager in the CSV Tab, you will start seeing the below behavior in the C: drive of the Cluster Nodes, and when you will double click on the ClusterStorage, it will get buys, but will let you go inside the folder after sometime, depending on your Network speed and server performance, but as per expected functionality, you should be able to open this folder on all cluster nodes.
Additionally, while it is taking time to opening the folder, if you try to open the same location over SMB NetBIOS session, it will open it bit fast, but make sure that you enabled the File and Printer Sharing and NetBios settings on the Cluster Network, and others. E.g. \172.16.55.1c$ClusterStorageVolume1.
V. Same Hyper-V Virtual Network Settings on all Hyper-V Nodes in the Cluster:
Lets assume that we got five cluster node setup for Hyper-V clustering, and before building the cluster, as recommended we installed the Hyper-V role on these five cluster nodes, and as part of configuration, we will be creating Virtual Network in Hyper-V for VMs to communicate to the reset of the Network, and therefore we created a Network called Server-VLAN, and for allowing the any type of Migration, whether its a quick migration, live migration or VM move, it is required that you keep the same Virtual Network name on all Cluster (Hyper-V) nodes, because when the Virtual Machine moves in case of Live Migration with VM Configuration file, when the second node where you try to make the VM online, the migration process tries to open and make online the VM with the pre-configured VM configuration parameters, where if the Network Name would be different or the same name of Virtual Network (Server-VLAN example) is not there, VM migration and making the VM online will fail.
I hope with the all above explained as a best practices, will help you to make your Hyper-V High Availability Implementation a success project.
Cheers!
Earned Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) Certification | Information Systems Security Blog Series
It is my great pleasure to publish this blog post that recently that I have successfully passed and earned the Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) Certification exam in the First Attempt!
Moreover, Im also planning to write an article series of how to prepare for CISSP Exam, and where I will be sharing some of the CISSP exam study material and exam tips.
The good-news is that now, I will be starting publishing blog articles related to the below mentioned CISSP Security Domains, including Cloud Computing, Microsoft Hyper-V, and especially Microsoft Exchange Server.
At last, I really want to thank you all, and especially those ones, who have been providing their feedback, and comments in particular on my blog post, and helped me to contribute more efficiently. I have been hosting this blog since last two years, and I really enjoyed the experience of sharing knowledge, and helping the community to learn and grow.
CISSP convers the below Information Systems Security Domains:
Access Control
Telecommunications and Network Security
Information Security Governance and Risk Management
Software Development Security
Cryptography
Security Architecture and Design
Operations Security
Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Planning
Legal, Regulations, Investigations and Compliance
Physical (Environmental) Security
Cheers!
Install Windows Server 2008 R2 Cluster for Hyper-V | How to build Hyper-V Clustering | Hyper-V Live Migration | Hyper-V Cluster Shared Volumes | Create Hyper-V VM from Failover Cluster Manager | Hyper-V Quick and Live Migration – Hyper-V Training Video
Author: Zahir Hussain Shah | MVP – Exchange Server
Step by Step Video Training for Building Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Failover Cluster for Microsoft Hyper-V High Availability with Cluster Shared Volumes, Pass-Through Disk and Managing Hyper-V VMs from Windows Server Failover Cluster Manager snap-in
Being a Microsoft Exchange Server Solution Architect and MVP, we all can see the Hyper-V as product getting mature day by day, and its fast growing usage at every level of business sector, and as initially Hyper-V introduced himself as a Hypervisor for Testing / RnD VM based Servers, and a Virtualization Layer for its competitors, but with the recent fast growth of the product, and changes the people perception, now Microsoft Hyper-V is being used as a Production Hypervisor, and many Application and Systems Developers started making their products to run over Hyper-V, which is indeed a success of Hyper-V in the todays Information Technology world.
As long as Microsoft Exchange Server is concerned, so I’m pleased to inform you that Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 is officially supported over Microsoft Hyper-V, and for information, please read my below posts:
http://zahirshahblog.com/2011/12/19/microsoft-exchange-server-2010-virtualization-support-compatibility-with-different-hypervisors-microsoft-hardware-and-application-virtualization-support-for-microsoft-windows-server-and-microsoft-e/
http://zahirshahblog.com/2011/12/25/exchange-server-2010-virtualization-virtualize-microsoft-exchange-2010-with-hyper-v-installing-exchange-server-2010-on-hyper-v-how-to-virtualize-microsoft-exchange-server-2010-with-hyper-v/
Let’s back to the Hyper-V, in this blog post, as it sounds with the blog post name, I will be provide you training video for “Step by Step Video Training for Building Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Failover Cluster for Microsoft Hyper-V High Availability with Cluster Shared Volumes, Pass-Through Disk and Managing Hyper-V VMs from Windows Server Failover Cluster Manager snap-in”, created by Matt McSpirit as part of his screencast at Microsoft TechNet – TechEdge.
Matt divided this screencast into four video, which are linked as follows:
Ø Hyper-V R2: Building a Hyper-V R2 Cluster : Part I
Ø Hyper-V R2: Making Highly Available VMs : Part II
Ø Hyper-V R2: Introducing Cluster Shared Volumes : Part III
Ø Hyper-V R2: Failover & Live Migration : Part IV
I hope this blog post and Matt’s screencast will help all of you, who wants to start with Hyper-V HA and Live Migration, it really works…
Cheers!
VM could not initialize – Hyper-V Virtual Machine is not starting | Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V VM is not initializing
Author: Zahir Hussain Shah | MVP Exchange Server
<VM> could not initialize Hyper-V Virtual Machine could not be initialize | Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V VM is not starting
Today while I was setting up one of my machine for Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V, and after I enabled the DPE and Intel VT Virtualization Technology, and gave a try to start the VM, it simply said that VM NAME could not initialize, so once again I revisited the BIOS settings to verify, but found that everything is seem okay, so why the VM is not starting?
Problem:
<VM> could not initialize Hyper-V Virtual Machine could not be initialize
Cause:
After doing some research, I found that there is a bug in Windows Server 2008 R2, which has a CPU is installed that supports the AVX feature, and due to this bug, it prevents the VM created on Windows Server 2008 R2 to start.
Resolution:
For fixing this problem, either you can download the Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1, and install on the effected Hyper-V instance, or you can just download a single hotfix, and install on the server to fix this problem.
For reference:
check out this link
I hope this article will help you to get Hyper-V Virtualization journey in a smooth and pleasant way.
Cheers!
Optimize Microsoft Hyper-V Server Networking Performance | Improve Microsoft Hyper-V Server Networking Performance for Microsoft Exchange Server Virtualization
Author: Zahir Hussain Shah MVP Exchange Server
Improve Microsoft Hyper-V Server Networking Performance for Microsoft Exchange Server Virtualization, and in general
Recently, while I kicked off the Installation and Configuration of our HP c7000 Blade Systems for building Microsoft Hyper-V Servers, as the first layer of Virtualized Infrastructure for our Internal Cloud (aka Private Cloud) implementation, so I tried to search for How to optimizing / improving the network performance of a Microsoft Hyper-V Server, and then I came to know the series of article from Cristian Edwards, where he documented the various elements of a Windows Server, which can be tweaked to get the better performance from a Microsoft Windows Server, and Microsoft Hyper-V Server in particular.
You can visit the below links to see the each part of his series of article for Hyper-V Network Optimization:
Hyper-V Networking Optimizations Part 1 of 6 (TCP Chimney Offload)
Hyper-V Networking Optimizations Part 2 of 6 (VMQ)
Hyper-V Networking Optimizations Part 3 of 6 (RSS)
Hyper-V Networking Optimizations Part 4 of 6 (Jumbo Frames)
Hyper-V Networking Optimizations Part 5 of 6 (Features compatibility matrix)
Hyper-V Networking Optimizations Part 6 of 6 (Monitoring Hyper-V Network consumption)
Note: There is a link to a Microsoft PowerShell Script Advanced_NetFeature.ps1, he wrote, which provides a nifty overview of the different TCP /Network level settings on your Server, you can download it and run in on the server before, you perform any of modification for the Network level settings.
Below are the links to my past blog post, in which I explained the best practices for Virtualizing Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 on Hyper-V in particular, and if you want, you can also apply these recommendation on any of the Hypervisor you use to virtualize the Exchange Server.
I hope this post would be help for you, and will provide a nifty way to improve the network performance of our Hyper-V Servers.
Cheers!
