TECHNETSRILANKA.NET | IT Professional Community Sri Lanka

Windows 2012 data de-duplication

Susantha Silva — Tue, 01 May 2012 14:33:00 GMT

Windows 2012 (aka Windows 8) has been making big buzz in the IT industry and seems like Microsoft want it to be like that. Personally I feels like every Windows version always gives the new excitement feeling and curiosity.

Anyway back to the track to talk about one of the feature in the upcoming Windows 2012 which I find really cool “Data de-duplication” Now I can keep on writing more and more words about it but again I guess a video would do the work with little bit of info here and there through a PPT.

You can download the PPT file from here. Video can be access from here.

Apart from that always refer this link for the up-to-date information.

The query cannot be completed because the number of lookup columns it contains exceeds the lookup column threshold

Danushka Silva — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 11:05:06 GMT

Recently I published an InfoPath form and got an error. “The query cannot be completed because the number of lookup columns it contains exceeds the lookup column threshold enforced by the administrator” and the event log was like this This is because SharePoint 2010 has a new resource throttling for web applications. It’s an easy fix. Go to Central Administration site and navigate to Application Management – Manage web applications under Web Applications. Select the web application you need to change...(read more)

New SharePoint developer tools in Visual Studio 11 Beta

Danushka Silva — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 12:29:43 GMT

Check the new SharePoint developer tools in Visual Studio 11 developer preview. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee290856%28v=VS.110%29.aspx...(read more)

SCVMM 2012 setup

Susantha Silva — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 17:46:00 GMT

Greetings for everyone for the New Year. This is a great year for Microsoft System Center product family. As for the Virtualization point of view this would be a significant year around VM management. I do believe lot of customers will move ahead and adopt the hybrid HYPER VISOR solution.

SCVMM 2012 has a big role play this year. During my lab setup I’ve captured very high level how you can setup the SCVMM 2012. Click the VMM 2012 logo to access the video.

Apart from that I found below mention urls are really valuable through your journey of learning SCVMM 2012.

SCVMM Blog: http://blogs.technet.com/b/scvmm/

SCVMM 2012 on TechNet: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg610610.aspx

SCVMM 2012 error codes: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/4906.aspx

Note: Adding a existing HYPER-V host to SCVMM 2012 video cast can be viewed here.

Redhat linux on hyper-v

Susantha Silva — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 05:14:53 GMT

Few days back I mention about the latest version availability of Linux IC for HYPER-V. Soon after that got a chance to test this on RH 6.1. Below steps will guide through the setup process of RH 6.1 along with Linux IC. Once completed you have the mouse drivers setup properly. Some of the latest improvements of the Linux IC’s are,

First I went ahead and created a VM with default settings. Important part is to add a Legacy network card initially,

Adding legacy card will allow the Linux OS to have network communication without Linux IC (Integrated components)

Rest of the process is typical Linux installation and will be shared with you’ll with screen captures,

Make sure you’re tick “Connect automatically” for the NIC in bootup.

Make sure you select customize now and add the desktop component

At this moment Linux setup is completed. After the boot up you’ll have the chance to register with RedHat Network. This will help you to get the latest updates. Since I didn’t had a RH account I have skip this option,

Now we go ahead and mount the Linux IC iso file which we have downloaded from Microsoft web site.

Go ahead and open the Terminal and login under root account by typing “su –“

Mount the CD Rom to the system, once mounted you can type “ls” and view the files in the CD Rom,

Now it’s time to install the integrated components, depend on your operating system 32bit or 64bit execution files will be different,

For 64-bit versions:

# yum install /media/x86_64/kmod-microsoft-hyper-v-rhel6-60.1.x86_64

# yum install /media/x86_64/microsoft-hyper-v-rhel6-60.1.x86_64

# reboot

For 32-bit versions:

# yum install /media/x86/kmod-microsoft-hyper-v-rhel6-60.1.i686

#yum install /media/x86/microsoft-hyper-v-rhel6-60.1.i686

# reboot

I had a 32bit version of RH 6.1 ,

To see if Linux IC setup properly,

After this completes you can reboot the system and then check the mouse integration and also the functionality of the second NIC.

Latest Linux IC can be downloaded from here.

Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit 6.5 Available

Susantha Silva — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 14:26:00 GMT

Recently enough Microsoft released the latest version of it’s assessment and Planning toolkit’s latest version (6.5) Fro those who don’t know MAPS it’s a software which available freely for you to do assessment prior getting your hands certain projects. This tool is really useful for consultants, engineers as well as for the end user as well to carry out their own assessment of their current infrastructure. Some of the benefits of the latest version are as follows,

Discover Oracle instances on Itanium-based servers for migration to SQL Server: useful for SQL Server migration projects when you tire of the price and virtualisation support of Oracle.
Assess your software usage and evaluate your licensing needs with the Software Usage Tracking feature, now updated with the Forefront Endpoint Protection (FEP) scenario: get your licensing right before and auditor does.
Accelerate planning for the private cloud with Microsoft Private Cloud Fast Track Onboarding: FAST is the Microsoft private cloud architecture for their big international partners.
Identify migration opportunities with enhanced heterogeneous server environment inventory: this stuff supports MySQL, Linux and VMware scanning.
Accelerate planning and migration with the new UI and usability updates in MAP 6.5: All new UI to lay out stuff more logically.

Personally I recommend to use the MAPS before you jump into HYPER-V projects and do recommendation based on your assumptions. Some would argue that based on the experience which is great but backing up that with some real data is much more cooler MAPS will do that part for you with great deal of data with nice presentable manner. Another cool thing about MAPS it can do this even in very large network environments. Recommend to let the scan gather information at least for one week time. This is one of the best tool I can recommend given by Microsoft for free

Apart from that as I mention customers can use the latest version to carry our license assessment on their environment. This is really helpful for them taking decision on license purchasing and fall under compliances.

You can obtain the latest version with sample databases in here. Before setting up MAPS spend some time reading the FAQ pages as well.

PowerShell module for hyper-v

Susantha Silva — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 02:29:33 GMT

PoweShell is a very powerful tool you can use across Microsoft technologies. Microsoft will keep on adopting and improving this technology every time. Right now PowerShell module ver 2 for HYPER-V has been released. This article will dicuss how can you install the modules correctley into your Windows 2008 R2 server. Please note this is for Windows 2008 R2 only!

First get the PS modules from the codeplex web site. Url is here

Download the zip file to a root drive or any preferred area and unzip. Once that complete locate the “install.bat” file and execute it with administrator privilege.

Once the instllation completed, we’ll move the unzip folder in the PS module folder located in the root drive, (I’ve rename the folder as HyperV and copied to the modules folder)

Now we can import this to the system by excuting through PowerShell. Open the Powershell and try to run “import-module HyperV” you’ll grant with a error message

We need to enable the execution permissions to import the module, please follow the instruction mention in below screenshot,

After that import the Hyper-V modules,

Now when that complete we can run the command “Get-Command –Module hyperv” to list down the available commands,

Now we have plethora of task can be automated combing these commands, it’s all about your imagination

hyper-v guest operating system support on Linux distributions

Susantha Silva — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 01:24:28 GMT

Few days back the above topic came to the discussion table with my colleagues. We got a project where customer got few RedHat machines. One argument went on RedHat Linux would not have mouse movement when we do a P2V and setup the IC’s (Integrated components) Going deep on this matter it is revealed Microsoft has not officially mentioned mouse integration will work properly and it is misunderstanding if someone states.

Following table show the supported guest OS and the capabilities HYPER-V will support on them,

Guest operating system	Device and service support
CentOS 5.2 – 5.6, 6.0 (x86 edition and x64 edition)	Drivers: IDE, SCSI, and networking Services: Time synchronization, operating system shutdown, and heartbeat
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0 and 6.1, x86 edition and x64 edition	Drivers: IDE, SCSI, and networking Services: Time synchronization, operating system shutdown, and heartbeat
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.6 (x86 edition and x64 edition)	Drivers: IDE, SCSI, and networking Services: Time synchronization, operating system shutdown, and heartbeat
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 (x86 edition and x64 edition) with Service Pack 1	Drivers: IDE, SCSI, and networking Services: Time synchronization, operating system shutdown, and heartbeat
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 (x86 edition and x64 edition) with Service Pack 4	Drivers: IDE, SCSI, and networking Services: Time synchronization, operating system shutdown, and heartbeat
Windows Server 2008 R2	Drivers: IDE, SCSI, networking, video, and mouse Services: operating system shutdown, time synchronization, data exchange, heartbeat, and online backup

The above list is taken from the TechNet site. You can download the latest Linux Integration services from here.

TechNet Forum Assistant

Susantha Silva — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 13:53:31 GMT

The TechNet Forum Assistant is a free Windows gadget, available in the Microsoft Download Center. This gadget will help you better utilize the great information in TechNet Forums and community. By downloading, you have the support and expertise of Microsoft TechNet Forum Support Engineers directly right on your desktop. Receive support on your terms by downloading the TechNet Forum Assistant.

Windows Server 8 and Hyper-V 3.0

Susantha Silva — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 01:32:22 GMT

It’s been a weeks’ time since the Microsoft BUILD conference and the Internet is still buzzing with talk of Windows Server 8. The next generation of Microsoft’s general purpose server operating system promises to be a revamped virtualization platform that introduces the world to Microsoft’s latest hypervisor, Hyper-V 3.0. Most of the reviews have already carried out covering the features in depth, but here is a summary of the interesting Hyper-V 3.0 features for those of you that haven’t had a chance to see them yet:

Up to 63-nodes, 4000 Virtual Machine Clusters
Up to 32 vCPUs, 512GB RAM, and 2TB of disk space per Virtual Machine
Increased Guest NUMA Support (memory segmentation for better performance)
New VHDX storage containers with 16TB of capacity
Support for concurrent Live Migrations using SAN (Storage Area Network) and DAS (Direct Attached Storage)
Support for NAS (Network Attached Storage) using SMB 2.2 and NFS Protocols
“Hyper-V Replica” built-in Asynchronous Virtual Machine Replication
Integrated Source and Destination De-depulication
Network Virtualization
Cisco Nexus Virtual Switching and Routing Infrastructure Support

While the list is certainly impressive and is sure to make many Windows system administrators giddy, this release marks something greater than just an incremental upgrade for the Windows Server platform. Since its beginnings, Hyper-V’s deliverables have been commendable but have lagged significantly behind competing products. While Microsoft has supported it with the robust System Center platform to great acclaim, the hypervisor itself has always been outmatched by its competitors. With this release of Hyper-V, Microsoft has finally started focusing of achieving feature-parity with competitor hypervisor offerings. The promised updates to the Windows Server platform represent a more mature approach to virtualization, providing a feature-rich and high-performance platform that starts with hypervisor itself, allowing it to stand on it’s own now more than ever. A recent review of the HYPER-V hypervisor can be read over here.

With the tight integration of System Center Product Suite HYPER-V ver 3.0 stands strong to deliver the customer requirements as well as their future demands. Customer demands of ease management, visibility of applications, and speedy provision of applications apart from hyper visor itself. This is where I see Microsoft seek truly into customer requirements and provide true support for their core business applications availability.

Using Windows 7 management tools to your advantage

aMila oNlinE — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 06:08:00 GMT

Using Windows 7 management tools to your advantage The more enterprises get to know Windows 7, the more useful features they'll find. Among the neatest things in that operating system are the management tools for the Ultimate and Enterprise versions (often in combination with Windows Server 2008 R2). Here are my three favorites: AppLocker Arguably the most-needed from a security perspective, AppLocker lets you define and manage via Group Policy Objects (GPOs) exactly which executables run on...(read more)

Enterprise password protection checklist

aMila oNlinE — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 06:05:00 GMT

Enterprise password protection checklist Despite the good intentions of IT departments, end-user education and advanced forms of authentication, password protection -- or a lack thereof -- remains a vexing problem for enterprises. Users still create easy-to-guess passwords, write passwords down, store them in plain text, or email passwords to their friends and co-workers -- even though passwords are often the first, and sometimes only, line of defense against intruders. Many enterprises still use...(read more)

Exchange 2010 SP1 Rollup 3 not installing

Susantha Silva — Sun, 14 Aug 2011 19:11:00 GMT

Recent customer onsite job I had to setup Exchange rollup 3 for the Exchange servers with fingers cross to fix some of the existing issues. Environment consists of 2 HUB/CAS in NLB mode and 2 MBX servers in DAG.

Previously I’ve already applied rollup 2 for all servers. During the rollup 3 setup to one of the HUB/CAS servers I’ve been thrown with an error of “The user who's currently logged on doesn't have sufficient permissions to install this package. You need at least Exchange Server Administrator permissions on the current computer to complete the task.”

Since I’ve used the same user account for the pervious machine rollup 3 update I know there is no permission issues for the account. To isolate the issue I tried running the update with logging enable by using the following command,

Exchange2010-KB2529939-v3-x64-en.msp /lxv* c:\Rollupdat3.log

Error log didn’t help much with the given details apart from pointing out ,” Exchange ADAccess service not being able to access AD” This can be easily fix by restarting the “Microsoft Exchange Active Directory Topology” service. No luck when ran the rollup.

Did some research on the net to see if I’m the only guy with this pain J According to the internet search I did, one of the fix that did work for me is,

1. Stop the Exchange services, IIS Admin, WWW, Windows Search (Exchange) and WMI service.

2. Restart the server and trying the setup again.

Exchange 2010 SP1 Rollup 3 update can be obtained from here.

How to solve Error 10436 in SCVMM

Susantha Silva — Sun, 31 Jul 2011 03:17:00 GMT

I was testing SCVMM with few host machines located in Domain environment and also in workgroup environment. After applying latest updates to the SCVMM I found out the host computers in the workgroup environment giving an error saying unable to update the SCVMM agent installed in those servers. Exact error is as follows,

“Error (10436) Virtual Machine Manager does not support updating an agent on a host that is in a non-trusted domain or on a perimeter network

Recommended Action
If the host is in a non-trusted domain, remove Xxxxhost01 from VMM in Hosts view of the VMM Administrator Console. Then use the Add Hosts Wizard to add the host and automatically install a new agent.
If the host is on a perimeter network, after you remove the host from VMM, you must manually uninstall the VMM agent from the host computer, install a new agent locally on the host, and then add the host to VMM.”

According to the recommended action when tried to remove the Remote agent from the host computer and removing from the SCVMM console didn’t work.

Found the the main problem is due to the SCVMM agent latest version is not exist in the CD but in the SCVMM machine itself. Located the path to the Remote agent path in CVMM console,

Took a copy of the amd64 folder to the host computer in the perimeter network and apply the agent. During this update process I didn’t remove the host computer from the SCVMM and found out it work without any problems. Didn’t had to reapply the security file either

Generic Error In Importing CRM 2011 Ribbon Customizations

Amal Amaranayake — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 03:37:24 GMT

Hi Everyone,

Writing in the blog after a long long time. Been busy with a lot of CRM 2011 stuff and a huge project in hand and no time to write. After deployment, now have a little bit of free time to write about thousands of issues that I have run into and resolved. Well here’s the first.

I was in the process of doing a lot of customizations to the CRM 2011 entity ribbons when I ran in to the below hurdle. Solution import fails at the ribbon component and this is the generic error message generated.

“An error has occurred. Try this action again. If the problem continues, check the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Community for solutions or contact your organization's Microsoft Dynamics CRM Administrator. Finally, you can contact Microsoft Support”

Had no way of identifying what the actual issue was other than to run a platform trace. so here’s the outcome for that.

>Crm Exception: Message: Found more than one RibbonDiff entity., ErrorCode: –2147220970

Didn’t have any references in Google (at that time, don’t know what the situation is now) did a dig with the exception message and found a support article.

So here’s the Cause:

You will receive a similar error message when one of the IDs of your ribbon elements (Custom Action, Command, Local Label etc.) is duplicated within a single Entity / Global <RibbonDiffXml> node.
Important to note that, when you upload the customization with a duplicate ID for the first time, CRM imports the solution without any issues. Every ribbon import after that point fails with the above message.
At the import of the customization, CRM picks the nodes to be updated from the master RibbonDiffXml, based on the ribbon element IDs included in the customizations file. When it finds many elements with the same ID in the master RibbonDiffXml, it simply returns a failure without processing the ribbon customizations further.

Here’s the Solution:

Export the RibbonDiffXml for the entities that you have performed customizations.
Open the customizations.xml and check for ribbon elements with duplicate IDs and correct.
Comment the entire RibbonDiffXml node for the problematic entity and insert a <RibbonDiffXml/> to create a blank ribbon. (Revert to default)
Import the customizations, which should result in a success if you have identified the problem and corrected properly.
Remove the <RibbonDiffXml/> which you have inserted later and uncomment your original – corrected, ribbon definition.
Import the customizations and publish.
Shouldn’t be a problem after that :)

References:

The clue to look for this cause was the below KB Article.
- http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2503029
Although this refers only to Local Labels, this will be true for all types of ribbon elements.

Jetico BCWipe 5.02.2

aMila oNlinE — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 07:08:00 GMT

Use military-grade procedures to surgically remove all traces of any file. BCWipeTM data wiping software enables you to permanently delete selected files so that they can never be recovered or undeleted. BCWipe embeds itself within Windows and can be activated from the Explorer FILE Menu OR from the context (right-click) menu OR from BCWipe Task Manager OR from a command-line prompt. BCWipe complies with U.S. Department of Defense (DoD 5220.22-M) standard, U.S. Department of Energy (DoE M 205.1-2...(read more)

Avast! Internet Security 6.0.1203

aMila oNlinE — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 07:04:00 GMT

Maximum protection, now powered by new avast! SafeZone technology Protects your sensitive online shopping and banking transactions Ensures your safety on social networks (Facebook, etc.) or IM chats Blocks hacker attacks, to protect your identity avast! Internet Security provides complete antivirus, anti-spyware, antispam, and firewall protection, complemented now by new avast! SafeZone technology. It creates an isolated virtual desktop, invisible to any possible attacker, where you can do your online...(read more)

Spadix Disk Size Manager 2.1

aMila oNlinE — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Disk Size Manager is a powerful hard disk space manager for Windows. Using Disk Size Manager you can keep track of your hard disks space to ensure its most efficient use. With its 2D/3D pie and bar charts as well as detailed descriptions in words, Disk Size Manager provides you with the complete information about folders and drives you indicate. The information includes folder/drive space (total available, compressed, used by different types of files, etc.) in units of volume (KB, MB, GB) or percents...(read more)

ARASH feat Helena "Pure Love" (Official video)

aMila oNlinE — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 03:46:00 GMT

...(read more)

Securing HYPER-V environment & Best Practices

Susantha Silva — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 02:23:00 GMT

Yesterday during monthly ITPro forum in Sri Lanka I’ve discuss the above mention topic. When Virtualization becomes commodity model in IT industry next concern would be security as usual During this presentation I’ve discuss about the importance of properly implementing the HYPER-V server and how we can use the tools and utilities give to secure the environment. HYPER_V architecture has been analyzed in detail level to understand how the components work with each other and where attacks can occur.

During this presenation I’ve highlighted the risk of running the HYPER-V role in a GUI method and the advantage on Server CORE. How to use the AZ Man and other Microsoft security tools to tight the security around the HYPER-V host and protect the guest machines.

ITPro-June2011

VIEW SLIDE SHOW

DOWNLOAD ALL

You can download the presentation file from here.

VisualSVN for Visual Studio 2.0.6

aMila oNlinE — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 07:27:00 GMT

VisualSVN makes your life easier with a reliable plug-in that integrates Subversion seamlessly with Visual Studio. VisualSVN is a Visual Studio plug-in that integrates Subversion and TortoiseSVN seamlessly with Visual Studio. VisualSVN virtually eliminates the management of your project source code files within Subversion. Program, design, debug and deploy with VisualSVN as your silent partner that safeguards your source code. With VisualSVN deployed throughout your development organization, all...(read more)

Acronis Backup And Recovery Server 11.0.1 With Universal Restore

aMila oNlinE — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 07:15:00 GMT

Fast Restore of Operating System, Applications, Files and Data: * Fast and simple complete disk image backup and recovery * Allows for easy bare metal recovery to the same, different hardware, or virtual machine * Backup and recovery individual folders or network shares * Recover individual files and folders from image backup * Convert backups to virtual machines format Broad storage support: * Local folders, SMB or FTP network shares * USB flash drives and HDDs * Acronis® Secure Zone® - a special...(read more)

Slow mailbox move in exchange 2010 sp1

Susantha Silva — Sun, 26 Jun 2011 06:07:42 GMT

Recently I was engage in a project of migrating Exchange 2003 environment to Exchange 2010. User was having around 500 mailboxes on various capacities. During the mailbox migration process we found out the process was extremely slow. 500 MB mailbox transfer took more than 20 minutes!

Doing some search around found out this is a due a recent change on the Exchange 2010 SP1. The value of “MaxActiveMovesPerTargetMDB” was change from 5 to 2. This means only 2 mailboxes can be migrated simultaneously Not a good idea and so far no idea why Microsoft did that. You can edit this value in “MSExchangeMailboxReplication.exe.config” to 5 from 2.

Open the above mention file from a notepad and locate the entry of MaxActiveMovesPerTargetMDB and change the value.

Once you do that you have to restart the Microsoft Exchange Mailbox Replication service in HUB CAS servers. Try doing the Mailbox moving and you’ll find the difference.

Note: This information specifically given “AS IS” there is no such documentation found in official in Microsoft web site.

Hithuwewath Nathi Dawasaka(Hamuwuna) - Shalitha And Mahesh

aMila oNlinE — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 03:43:00 GMT

...(read more)

Important patch update for hyper-v environment

Susantha Silva — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 01:08:12 GMT

Microsoft recently announced a remediation process for once of the vulnerability found in HYPER-V. The identified vulnerability s per Microsoft words as follows,

“vulnerability could allow denial of service if a specially crafted packet is sent to the VMBus by an authenticated user in one of the guest virtual machines hosted by the Hyper-V server. An attacker must have valid logon credentials and be able to send specially crafted content from a guest virtual machine to exploit this vulnerability. The vulnerability could not be exploited remotely or by anonymous users.”

Out of the above I’ve highlighted the key things an end user need to give an attention about.

Patch has been already released and advised to apply he patch on the HYPER-V environment.