Download OEM Installation Files for Office

Many of our smaller customers use OEM versions of Microsoft Office. Dell has not been shipping installation media for these versions. Office has been included in the image from Dell. So, what to do when you want to reinstall the OS?

Go to this web site to download OEM installations of Microsoft that you can use for reinstall. It includes downloads for Office 2007, Office 2010, and Office 2013:

• http://office.microsoft.com/en-ca/products/download-back-up-restore-microsoft-office-products-FX103427465.aspx

SSD + Dedup in Win 2012 - WOW!

I do a lot of work with Hyper-V virtual machines in a test environment. My Hyper-V host is a white box kludged together cheaply, but with reasonable hardware.

The VMs that are used for Microsoft courses use base drives for the core OS and then differencing drives for each individual VM. The bouncing back and forth between the base drive and the differencing drive tends to drag down performance. In addition, I often use snapshots to give me a backout point when developing labs. Which reduces performance even more.

I've got the storage system setup as four 7200 RPM SATA drives in a RAID 10 array using the Intel Storage Technology enterprise that is built into the motherboard. This gives far better performance than a single drive, but still not enough when I'm running many VMs. Storage speed is the bottle neck in this system.

Today I bought a Kingston 240 GB HyperX SSD drive to improve performance. Since the drive is not very large, I though I'd start by moving only the base drives onto the SSD to see what the performance improvement was like. Then I mounted the SSD as the folder that I copied the base files from. This retained the proper association between the differencing drives and the base drives.

The performance improvement was huge! Tasks that were painfully before now behave like normal servers. I figure that labs which took me an hour or more to complete will now take about 20 minutes just because of the wait time. As an example, for course 20417C there is a lab where AD FS is configured to authenticate an application. Accessing this application the first time used to take 2-3 minutes. Now it happens in a few seconds.

The differencing drives and the snapshots are still stored on the RAID 10 array. So, all write activity and some read activity is still done there. Even in this configuration the performance difference is amazing.

All together I have about 200 GB of base drives. Basically, they filled the SSD. Then I remembered that Windows 2012 has data deduplication functionality. I have never tried it before, but thought it might work.

Windows Server 2012 adds support for deduplication on live virtual hard drive files, but I didn't require that for these base disks because they are static and don't change.

I thought that deduplication might cut the space usage by half since I had multiple base disks for each operating system like Windows 7 and Windows Server 2012. However, when I ran the test tool (ddpeval.exe) it showed that the 200 GB would be reduced to about 63 GB without compression and 35 GB with compression. It was right!

After enabling deduplication disk utilization dropped from 200 GB to 34 GB leaving over 200 GB free on the SSD drive. I was scared that this might impact performance of the VMs but I could not see a performance difference at all.

Overall, I'm very impressed.

For details about how to implement data deduplication in Windows Server 2012 see here:

• http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh831602.aspx

Free Online Hyper-V Training

I work with Hyper-V a lot for Microsoft training and we've starting to use it as our standard virtualization platform for clients. I've seen a lot of improvements in it since it was first introduced and honestly think that for smaller organizations it's easier to work with than VMware. For larger organizations, I think it's a contender.

One of the biggest impediments to implementation is knowledge. Microsoft is making online training for Hyper-V in Windows Server 2013 R2 available for free. They're also kicking in a certification exam.

Check it out:

• http://www.virtualizationsquared.com/

Windows Live Mail Not Forwarding Embedded Pictures

I recently ran into a computer using Windows Live Mail in conjunction with AOL. This resulted in some emails with embedded pictures not forwarding. It generated a warning about this when you went to send.

What seemed to fix it was disabling the option in Windows Live Mail to convert emails with pictures to picture emails. However, this conversion happened when the messages were received. For existing emails that have already been converted, right-click and forward as attachment seemed to do the trick.

To disable picture emails:

• File > Options > Mail > Compose > Convert messages to photo e-mail when adding photos

Converting a Mail User to a Remote User Mailbox

I have an client with an existing Office 365 implementation and a separate on-premises Exchange organization. As part of linking these two together into hybrid mode, the local AD account became a Mail User.

A Mail User is a local AD account with an external SMTP address configured. This allows the user to have an email address in the GAL, but is not a local Exchange mailbox.

To move mailboxes, this Mail User needs to be configured as a Remote User Mailbox. A Remote User Mailbox also has a proper remote routing address property configured.

I couldn't find any documentation on performing this process. However, I did find a script that indicates it fixes up user accounts when a mailbox move to Office 365 does not complete properly. I used this script to identify the changes that needed to be made.

The script is here:

• http://exchangeservertips.com/powershell/script-to-fix-office365-mailboxes-not-getting-displayed-as-remote-mailbox/

The changes that need to be made are:

1. Configure the user attribute targetaddress to contain the remote routing address for the mailbox. This should be in the format of userid@domain.mail.onmicrosoft.com. In my case it would have been testmailbox@byronwright.mail.onmicrosoft.com.
2. Set the msExchRemoteRecipientType attribute for the user account to equal 4.
3. Set the msExchRecipientDisplayType attribute for the user account to equal -2147483642. (yes, this is a negative value)
4. Set the msExchRecipientTypeDetails attribute for the user account to equal 2147483648.

Those steps changed the Mail User to a Remote User Mailbox. However, I was still unable to move the mailbox from Office 365 to the on-premises Exchange. This was due to the ExchangeGUID attribute not being set properly on the local user account. To fix this, I performed the following:

1. In Office 365: get-mailbox testmailbox | fl ExchangeGUID
2. In on-premises Exchange: set-remotemailbox testmailbox -ExchangeGUID 12345678-1234-1234-1234-123456789abc (note GUID is from step 1)

After setting the ExchangeGUID moves to the on-premises Exchange worked properly.

UPDATE: See a similar procedure for room mailboxes at: http://byronwright.blogspot.ca/2014/06/putting-office-365-room-mailboxes-in.html 

UPDATE: While the above seemed like a good procedure at the time. I've since become aware that you can use Enable-RemoteMailbox in this same scenario to fix up the local mail users to remote user mailboxes. For a script to do it on a whole OU, see here: http://byronwright.blogspot.ca/2014/10/script-to-resolve-error-when-running.html

AD FS Service Hangs on Starting

In previous versions of Windows Server and AD FS, it was not recommended to install AD FS on a domain controller due to security issue cause by running IIS on a domain controller. In Windows Server 2012 R2, AD FS does not use IIS. So, it is now possible to run AD FS on a domain controller.

I"m not sure whether is was possible in previous versions of AD FS, but AD FS in Windows Server 2012 allows you to run the service by using a group Managed Service Account (gMSA). The main benefit of using a gMSA is automatic password changes. The account password is changed automatically in the background to enhance service security.

It turns out that if you run AD FS on a Windows Server 2012 R2 domain controller and use a gMSA for the service, it prevents the service from starting. When you do the initial installation, it will look fine, but after you do a reboot, the service will have a status of Starting and hang. There are no events in the event log to indicate what the issue is.

I first noticed the hanging issue in prerelease versions of Windows Server 2012 R2, but didn't understand exactly what was causing the issue. This behavior still exists in the RTM release of Windows Server 2012 R2.

To avoid this issue, do one of the following:

• Use a standard domain user account instead of a gMSA
• Install AD FS on a Windows Srever 2012 R2 member server

You can see that this behavior has been confirmed by others here:

• http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windowsserver/en-US/a290c5c0-3112-409f-8cb0-ff23e083e5d1/ad-fs-windows-2012-r2-adfssrv-hangs-in-starting-mode?forum=winserverDS

Free ebook on Windows Server 2012 R2

Just got the following from Microsoft:

Introducing Windows Server 2012 R2

Download

PDF	PDF is here (108 pages, 5 MB)
ePub	EPUB format is here
Mobi (Kindle)	MOBI format is here
Print	If you prefer a hard copy of the book, you can order it here from our official distributor, O’Reilly Media, for $9.99

Description

This book is intended to provide you with an overview of the new features and enhancements introduced in Windows Server 2012 R2. The intended audience for this book is IT pros who deploy, manage, and maintain Windows Server workloads in data center, private cloud, and hosting provider environments.

We assume that you are at least somewhat familiar with the features and capabilities of the previous platform Windows Server 2012. If you are not familiar with all the new features and enhancements Microsoft introduced previously in Windows Server 2012, we recommend that you first read Introducing Windows Server 2012 RTM Edition (Microsoft Press, 2012).

A key feature of this book is the technical sidebars that have been contributed by Microsoft insiders. These sidebars were written by experts who have been closely involved in the Windows Server 2012 R2 development process and include Program Managers, Support Escalation Engineers, Technical Consultants, Data Center Specialists, and others who work at Microsoft in various capacities.