Remove Exchange 2007 Public Folder Database After Exchange 2013 Migration

After I was done performing a migration from Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2013, I received the following error when trying to remove the public folder database from the Exchange 2007  EMC:

Object is read only because ti was created by a furture version of Exchange: 0.10 (14.0.100.0). Current supported version is 0.1 (8.0.535.0).

Ok. No problem. I'll just remove this from the Exchange 2013 side. However, I found that shell in Exchange 2013 does not have the Remove-PublicFolderDatabase cmdlet.

The only fix I found was to remove the public folder database by using ADSI Edit. You can find the public folder database in the following path in ADSI Edit:

• Configuration\Services\Microsoft Exchange\OrganizationName\Administrative Groups\Exchange Administrative Group (FYDIBOHF23SPDLT)\Servers\ServerName\InformationStore\StorageGroupName\PublicFolderDBName

 After removing the public folder object, I could delete the storage group and uninstall Exchange 2007.

At this point, in the event log, I was seeing errors for the mailbox databases on the Exchange 2013 side like this:

Source: MSExchange ADAccess
Event ID: 2937
Process MSExchangeMailboxAssistants.exe (PID=XXX). Object (mailboxdatabase). Property [PublicFolderDatabase] is set to value [domain/Configuration/Deleted Objects/DatabaseName, it is pointing to the Deleted Objects container in Active Directory.

In Exchange 2013, the property is not used and you can't set the value to $null by using the Set-MailboxDatabase cmdlet. So, the fix is to yet again go into ADSI Edit and manually remove the value from the property in the mailbox database object as shown in the graphic below. Note that the property you edit is msExchHomePublicMDB.

The path to the mailbox databases is:

• Configuration\Services\Microsoft Exchange\OrganizationName\Administrative Groups\Exchange Administrative Group (FYDIBOHF23SPDLT)\Databases\DatabaseName

Find Unused Exchange Mailboxes

Every once in a while you need to identify mailboxes that are no longer in use. This PowerShell command will find any mailbox where no one has logged on to the mailbox for 60 days.

Get-Mailbox | Get-MailboxStatistics | Where-Object {$_.LastLogonTime -lt (Get-Date).AddDays(-60)}

You can use this information to further investigate whether these mailboxes are required.

If the LastLogonTime is $null (blank) it means that the user has never logged on. This is normal for shared mailboxes and resource mailboxes.

Samsung Network Printer Won't Wake

Yesterday I installed a new CLP-415NW printer for a client. Install was easy and the client loved the print quality. But we ran into one snag....

When the printer went to sleep after 5 minutes (default setting) it wouldn't automatically wake up when you sent a print job. The printer appeared offline and you needed to physically press a button on the printer to wake it up. When it was asleep, you couldn't print to it, you couldn't access the web interface, and you couldn't even ping it.

I figured this was crazy that there has to be an easy solution for it. So, I started looking at settings on the printer and nothing seemed to fit. I tinkered with when sleep occurred, but had no success.

I emailed Samsung support and they provided the following link, which described how to disable bidirectional support in the network port. This had no effect.

• http://tinyurl.com/p5xcmhr

Then today I spent a frustrating hour and a half on a web chat with Samsung support. I got the following suggestions, of which none of them fixed anything:

• Change to a static IP address. I had a DHCP reservation so, this had no effect. However, offline printers can occur when the printer changes IP. So, at least this was relevant.
• Install a new version of the Samsung  SyncThru software on my PC. This software wasn't in use.
• Set the sleep timeout to maximum value. This was the final bit where the tech support guy gave up and basically said it would need to print every 60 minutes to avoid needing to wake it  up with a button. Not cool.

 Here's the good news. I think I finally found the setting that fixed it.

In the network options there was a setting for Ethernet Power Save that was On. I've turned off this setting and several hours later I'm still able to connect to the web interface and it shows the printer status as in sleep mode.

It makes sense that if this Ethernet Power Save turns off the network connection that you wouldn't be able to wake it up over the network. It's also possible that there is a magic combination of switch and printer that causes the powersave to appear as off to the switch, but some switches may work properly with it. This particular printer is plugged into a small desktop switch in someone's office.

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