The virtualization wars are slowly starting to yield some benefits!

So this just in. Just in case if you were still wondering if there was anything to the virtualization mantra that is being constantly recited through the IT community, Symantec has announced that you no longer need to purchase individual Symantec Backup Exec agents for each guest OS that exists on one physical box. Instead you only need to license once per Hypervisor with Symantec Backup Exec 12.5.

That’s right, you heard me, one agent, multiple virtual servers, one physical box. Can I get a booyah!?!?! I told you this competition would be great for consumers! Microsoft breaking into Hyper-V to compete with VMWare has been great for the market. First VMWare’s ESXi becomes free, then Microsoft relaxes their licensing restrictions in relation to VMWare, and now Symantec makes it cheaper for businesses to use Symantec’s backup software if they virtualize.

Now that’s what I’m talking about! It’s about time companies stopped penalizing people for virtualizing and instead start encouraging it! This is a great move and I commend Symantec for taking this step. Symantec Backup Exec is probably one of the most popular pieces of backup software out there and this announcement will definitely help push business in what I believe is the right direction towards virtualization.

 I hope this war doesn’t end for a long time, because the longer it plays out, the more benefits to the consumer it will bring! You can read more about the announcement here.

 -RP

BlackBerry Javelin? I want one!

So you may have heard about the pending new BlackBerry called the Javelin from Rim. I want one! A BlackBerry with the keyboard of my Curve but with a higher resolution than the Bold? I’m all over that!

 Unfortunately I hear it won’t support 3G but that’s the rumor for now. Apparently it will have a 3.2 MP camera which is sweet for the cell phone world. It will also feature GPS and bluetooth not to mention WiFi! I’m sure this phone will sell well in the corporate market. Sure the Bold is great and you can get it right now but as I’ve mentioned before, I’m not really partial to it. The smaller Javelin I think will definitely peak the interest of those BlackBerry users out there.

A few co-workers of mine are using the Bold and I have to say the display is excellent and the use of WiFi is cool, but I still love my Curve…..at least until the Javelin comes out! You can read more about the Javelin here.

-Cheers, RP

Problems moving disabled Exchange 2003 mailboxes to a new server…

Here’s an interesting problem that will come up for you from time to time when doing Exchange server migrations. If you go to move mailboxes using the mailbox migration wizard built into Exchange, you’ll find that the wizard will fail on moving any mailboxes that have had their Active Directory account disabled. This can be a problem especially if you still want to keep that e-mail in your new Exchange server because you plan on re-enabling that account at a later date.

The reason this happens is because when you disable a mailbox you might lose the msExchMasterAccountSID attribute off of the account. To fix this you can just regenerate this attribute. It’s fairly easy to do. Just go into the account in the Active Directory Users and Computers console and go to the properties of the account. Then you can go to the Exchange Advanced tab and click on Mailbox Rights. In there you will find the SELF object listed as one of the users and then just add the Associated External Account permission to it.

 This will fix the problem however you will have to wait for a long time before you can move the mailboxes again. According to Microsoft you might have to wait up to at least 2 hours before the mailboxes will be ready to move due to directory replication and Exchange cache refresh latencies. But then once you wait and come back, you will see that the mailboxes move like a charm.

This doesn’t help you however if you have a billion disabled mailboxes to move. Going into each mailbox individually and modifying it could literally take forever and a day. So instead Microsoft has a way for you to do it for large amounts of disabled accounts. You can find their instructions here in their knowledgebase article. Happy migrating!

-RP

Paul Chan is leaving VMWare

Hi folks, this just in from the VMWare world. Paul Chan, Vice President of Product Development at VMWare is hitting the road!

This guy has been working for VMWare for 7 years and is now finally leaving the company. Considering the recent shakeup at VMWare with Diane Greene, former CEO, what does this mean? Obviously VMWare is already feeling the weight of the Microsoft giant bearing down on them and these changes could well be effects of that. This is of course speculation on my part but it does make one wonder.

Up until now VMWare has had the luxury of being able to claim that at least they are a level 1 hypervisor over Microsoft’s level 2 hypervisor. But now Microsoft has announced the pending release of their own level 1 hypervisor product with Hyper-V Server 2008. With this announcement VMWare has got to be feeling the crunch.

You can read more about Paul Chan’s departure here and read more about standalone Hyper-V here.

-RP

BlackBerry announces support for Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007

So BlackBerry just announced support for Microsoft OCS 2007. What does this mean to us? This means greater support and integration between BlackBerry and Microsoft products.

One of the greatest things missing in my opinion from the BlackBerry suite of software is interoperability with other applications and vendors. This move to support Microsoft OCS 2007 is a great step in that direction. Some of the features they’ve announced such as being able to tell the presence of a user is just fantastic. We’ll see how this plays out. I for one am quite excited about it and can’t wait to test it out in the lab.

Now if only BlackBerry would announce full Asterisk and Jabber IM support I would be in 7th heaven!

You can read more about the announcement here.

-RP

Changing the Service Console IP address in VMWare ESX Server

Hi folks, have you ever setup ESX server and set the IP just to find out later that it’s taken and you have to change it? I have, and I have to say I hate it when that happens.

Luckily there is an easy way to resolve this. With the proper command line commands you can quickly change the IP address of the service console.

Just connect to the console of the ESX server and at the shell prompt type in: esxcfg-vswif -d vswif0

This deletes the existing vswif0 and it will give you a message about “nothing to flush”. You can safely ignore this.

Then type in: esxcfg-vswif -a vswif0 -p Service\ Console -i 192.168.1.5 255.255.255.0 -b 192.168.1.255

That will recreate the vswif0 with the IP 192.168.1.5. You can of course use whatever IP and subnet mask you wish. The last address is the broadcast address.

If you have changed the IP of the service console to a new subnet then you will also have to change the default gateway. You can edit the file “network” in the directory /etc/sysconfig. Just use the vi editor to update the file and save it.

After all of this is done, restart the entire ESX server and that should fix it.

-RP

RIM announces new BlackBerry Pearl Flip 8220……stay away

BlackBerry has announced a new phone again. It’s a new flip version of the BlackBerry Pearl. My advice….stay away!

I have had the “pleasure” if you can call it that of supporting the old BlackBerry pearl phones for my clients and I have to say I hate them. If for no reason other than they seem to break  fairly easily and they are extremely hard to use when typing. This new phone looks like it has a similar keyboard to the Pearl.

I would rather people buy the newer BlackBerries with the full size keyboards. Of course if you like flip phones and don’t mind the user interface of the Pearl, then this could be the phone for you.

You can read more about the phone here.

 -RP

How to enable address lookups for individual companies in Hosted BES environments

Sometimes when you are hosting a BES server in an environment where you are hosting multiple domain names on a single BES server you need the ability to separate global address list lookups. You wouldn’t want people in one organization looking up contacts from another organization.

There is a way to do this but it involves some registry hacking:

Check to see that the users are members of the same company in Active Directory. Then in the registry go to the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Research In Motion\BlackBerry Enterprise Server\Agents registry key. Create a new DWORD value called “Hosted Server”. Then in the value type in a “0″ and click ok. Then set the DWORD value for AllowAddressLookup to “0″ as well. That’s it!

-RP

Assigning the proper permissions for besadmin on BlackBerry Enterprise Server

Sometimes the problems administrators run into with BES are simply due to improper permissions. The besadmin account (the BlackBerry administrator account) requires certain permissions to do it’s job correctly.

More often than not we find out that someone has been mucking around with the permissions or they just weren’t set correctly in the first place and this causes an issue with BlackBerry devices sending and receiving e-mail.

BlackBerry has some nice directions on their web site on how to setup the appropriate permissions. You can find them here.

 -RP

Hyper-V and NIC teaming and Quick Migration

Apparently Microsoft’s new Hyper-V product is not compatible with NIC teaming. I hope Microsoft quickly resolves this as not being able to team NICS to provide redundancy in 24/7 servers is a big issue.

Also another area where Microsoft seems to be deficient is with Quick Migration. VMWare’s VMotion allows you to quickly migrate a virtual machine to another ESX host so you can perform maintenance on the original host. Microsoft’s Quick Migration should enable the same thing but people have been running into major issues with it as the process has caused some issues causing administrators much grief.

I recently have spoken with many people who are going the Hyper-V route because it’s “free”. I have to argue that now that VMWare’s ESXi is free, people really have no excuse not to go with VMWare based on their proven track record in the industry. These people are quick to point out the recent debacle with Update 2 but then you can’ t tell me that Microsoft hasn’t royally screwed up a patch in the past either. At the end of the day I still say that VMWare is your best bet at this point in time to keep your servers running smoothly.

-RP