DAG(Database Availability Group) is a new feature provided in Exchange 2010 to facilitate automatic database level recovery. In Exchange 2003/2007, there is no option to recover a single damaged/corrupted mailbox store alone than restoring the DB from backup. In this case, I will loose all the data added to the store after backup. This feature(DAG) of Exchange 2010 avoids this data loss and provides a seem less and automated recovery with up-to-date information regardless of when you last backed up the store.

Few points I have to highlight about DAG

• A DAG can consists of 16 exchange 2010 servers max. Which means that any database in these 16 exchange servers can be failed over to another server in the same DAG incase of curruption. The failover time is as low as 30 seconds and transparent to users.
• DAGs use continuous replication and a subset of Windows Failover Clustering technologies to provide continuous mailbox availability. So you need to install this manually on Exchange 2010 server or it will get installed automatically when you add it to DAG
• It’s needs a file share witness share to maintain the availability of Exchange servers in DAG
• DAG configuration has some similarities with Cluster configuration like, CNO creation, multiple network cards for exchange hear beat data and public data, common IP to access DAG CNO, etc

Reference links:

Technet
MsexchangeTeam (it has videos; don’t miss them)

Happy Learning..,
Sitaram Pamarthi

When I heard about it in Microsoft Tech-ed India 2009 session, I got a feeling that it is a very big feature that every one should look into it. Though I couldn’t understand it properly in that session, I did some search/research after coming back to my desk to know what it is and below are the points I collected about it.

#1. First of all it’s a not great feature that every corporate will get benefited largely. But one can enable this feature on requirement basis looking at the functionality it has
#2. It gives a secondary mailbox for every user which will appear under your normal mailbox in outlook/OWA. No additional configuration is needed, if the archive feature is enabled outlook detects it automatically and adds it into your configuration.
#3. You can migrate all your PST data to this archive mailbox and you can access the data when you are in roaming. You can migrate your PSTs by just doing drag drop operation onto archive mailbox
#4. You can configure retention policies in primary mailbox to move the items into archive mailbox.
#5. You can maintain separate quotas for your primary and archive mailboxes. This results in high performance and speed of your primary mailbox while you store your large amount of mails in archive mailbox.
#6. Search across primary and secondary(archive) mailboxes is possible
#7. You can either choose to keep primary and archive mailboxes on same store or in different stores based on your requirement and frequency of archive access.

I haven’t tested these features any lab environment as my E2010 lab is not ready yet. I will post more and correct my self if required after doing so.

See this blog entry for nice explanation of archive feature and few FAQs.

Happy learning..,
Sitaram Pamarthi.

While browsing for something, I came across this nice windows built-in tool called, “typeperf”. This tool redirects the output of performance counter values to command prompt. The normal way for collecting performance values is to open perfmon and configure the options trough GUI to capture the output into some CSV or other file. But this command line tool is very handly to have the counter results from command line.

If some one asked me to monitor the CPU utilization of remote system, I will simply issue below command in my command prompt(ofcourse I need admin rights on remote machine or the account I am using should be member of permon related groups if the remote machine is of a server OS). This command has most of the options that you can set using perfmon.

c:> typeperf “\RemoteMachineprocessor(_Total)% Processor Time”

“(PDH-CSV 4.0)”,”\RemoteMachineprocessor(_Total)% Processor Time”
“05/20/2009 20:55:11.402″,”37.682755”
“05/20/2009 20:55:12.465″,”12.502240”
“05/20/2009 20:55:13.465″,”33.825223”
“05/20/2009 20:55:14.559″,”36.987914”
“05/20/2009 20:55:15.668″,”21.877000”
“05/20/2009 20:55:16.668″,”3.127480”
“05/20/2009 20:55:17.668″,”9.377320”
“05/20/2009 20:55:18.668″,”6.252400”
“05/20/2009 20:55:19.668″,”10.939780”

Below is the command help and I know you can build your custom command using this. Let me know if you need any help.

Refer this link for syntax and to have more examples. You can type
“typeperf /?” at command prompt to get help on this command.

I WELCOME YOUR COMMENTS;THAT MAKES ME PERFECT:-)

Happy learning..,
Sitaram Pamarthi.

I attended Microsoft Tech-ed India 2009, Hyderabad from Mar-13th to 15th and it’s really great experience to be there with elite group of IT professional who are highly technical. Out of this three days program I attended last two days sessions completely and I am also there for Steve Ballmer’s (CEO of Microsoft Corporation) key note happened on day one.

May 13th….

My excitement to attend tech-ed made me to get out of bed early which is not my daily routine. In fact my mom got surprised :-). I reached the venue (HICC) by 9:30AM to complete registration formalities. In few minutes, I entered the tech-ed area which is already filled with people who are introducing each other. I waited for Chandu(my friend + X-colleague + colleague) to join me and we both made to the key note area and sat in a row from where we can clearly see the people on stage. In few minutes Steve entered the stage with a big round of applaud from all audiences and I really felt happy to see such a great business giant in real. He is like any other person for looks but not for thoughts. He started giving presentation on road map of Microsoft and upcoming releases with few jokes in between to gain peoples attention. I got completely involved in his presentation as I curious to see what Microsoft is cooking in their kitchen. In his presentation, he mentioned that innovation in any field is indirectly linked with innovation in IT(Information Technology). So, the world should say “MORE IT” not “NO IT”. After the presentation, the floor is opened for Q/A session. Many people in the room are ready to shoot some or the other question to Steve but only few got chance who reached the Q/A mike very early. And don’t ask me what questions they asked and Steve’s answers. They(the questions) appeared some kind of crap to me…or I should say, questions are valid but people asked wrong person. What he can comment on future versions of Silver light and other Microsoft products. However, I want to share two questions with you. One is humor involved and another is really worth asking him I feel. Q1: “What is that Microsoft learned from recession and what plans they made to get rid of it future ?”.Hmmm… Steve started answering this question with a smile on a his face. He said, no one can predict the recession when it can come and it is not limited to one organization. Recession comes once in life time(next recession is expected to happen in 21xx considering the previous pattern) and MS has no plans for it yet. He restated that considering the recession time, Microsoft is working on producing products at low cost again with all the latest features that customers are looking for. The Q2 is, “Steve never attended any Microsoft Tech-ed before, since it’s launch 17 years back and Why he made to India Tech-ed and Why to the one happening in Hyderabad?”. He answered that, It’s India tech-ed because, India is the country which has fast growth in no. of people who is studying computer science. It’s India because, Hyderabad has got Development center which is big after the one in Redmond. Wah..!! What a delightful statement that every Indian loves to hear.
After his 45 minutes session, I made to office to catch-up my daily tasks and chandu stayed back to continue for Windows 20008 sessions by Microsoft.

May 14th…

I started to attended technical session from this day and I have chosen “Unified Communication and collaboration” sub track under IT pro track.
Sessions highlights that I want to share with you are…

1. Introduction to Microsoft Exchange 2010
2. Exchange 2007 High availability and Disaster Recovery

Introduction to Exchange 2010 features:

As the title says it’s just a introduction session and below are the features in short that speaker covered

• Separate mailbox for archiving
• Searching across multiple mailboxes is possible
• You can configure IRM for mail items based on from/to addresses and based on content
• Mails tips to reduce the load on server; see http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2009/04/28/451193.aspx for more
• Now voice mails will have text preview
• IM through OWA provided you have LCS/OCS
• Easy filtering options in OWA and rich OWA interface is not limited to IE but also to Firefox, safari, chrome.
• Conversational views in OWA (like the way you see in forums)
• Customize voice mailbox message to give different messages to different people.
• Calendar sharing between two organizations
• Now you don’t need downtime for mailbox movement from from store to another
• Self service page in OWA which enables users to update certain fields like address, mobile, extn of their own
• Auto-group membership provisioning.

Exchange 2007 High availability and Disaster Recovery:
In this session they just re-iterated the points which most of the IT pro family is already aware of. They talked about CCR, LCR, SCR and their usage. There is very huge amount of material for these in internet. One thing they covered in detail is about Transport Dumpster feature in Exchange 2007 HTS server. You can read more about this at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa997963.aspx.

March 15th…

It is the last day of tech-ed. People geared to get most out of the event by participating many events conducted over there.
The day started with Exchange Online and hosted services. This is a new concept which I heard from Microsoft but very early realized that giants like Google are already into this kind of market. The idea of Exchange online is simple, they provide antivirus, anti-spam and Quarantine facilities for enterprises. If a organization wants to out source these services, then they can choose Microsoft as their vendor. The organization has to point their MX records to Microsoft servers and Microsoft will relay these mails to your exchange servers after anti-virus, anti-spam scans. They have Quarantine facility with enterprise/user level black list and white list.
Microsoft Online services is a bit different from Hosted services. In online services Microsoft will host your mailbox, IM, and share point sites in their cloud(a.k.a datacenters) and end users can connect to them using a single sign on client. If the end user have a PC, they can download single sign on client and the client will automatically configure user outlook and office communicator for usage. If any one is interested at Online services, get a trail account from http://www.microsoft.com/online/exchange-online.mspx
Apart from Exchange stuff, I attended two more sessions. One is about OCS VOIP features and another about Office Live meeting. They are just normal and didn’t come across much interesting features except few internal which are useful for Network/OCS administrators.
With this I completed technical sessions at Microsoft Tech-ed India 2009.
Apart from technical stuff, I had lot off fun at the stalls kept in the tech-ed area. Especially, I enjoyed the games played in X-box 360. They kept for display/sales and delegates are allowed to play them. I spent most of my free time playing games there :-). Other stalls at Tech-ed are, Microsoft learning center where we can get certified for free of cost. Counter are available to test your applications on windows 7 and to see various features of it.

Few things I liked at tech-ed….

• Microsoft Learning center where we have access to lot of books
• Windows 7 experience and application compatability testing
• Microsoft Surface
• Microsoft Sam (a robot which can be programmed using Visual Studio)
• Polycom CX5000 video collaboration device

Photo gallery follows…

Steve Ballmer at Tech-ed India 2009

Sitaram Pamarthi(me) with formula-1 car by KingFisher kept for display at Tech-ed area

Microsoft Sam roaming around in tech-ed area

Microsoft Sam roaming around in tech-ed area(Video)

Thanks for reading long story 🙂 and I welcome your comments.
Sitaram Pamarthi

[If you missed to read part-1 of this article, read it from here]

In part-2, I am going to cover the steps taken by a windows XP computer when the DC it cached goes down. As said earlier, XP caches DC name intially and supplies the DC name to applications that are requesting for it. Also netlogon process frequently checks for the availability of cached DC by doing a LDAP ping. If it finds that cached DC is down, it tries to get another available DC by using /force discovery flag(see nltest help). In this case it may go to a DC which is sitting in other AD site if no local DCs are available. But what I observed is, in some of the cases netlogon is not trying to force rediscover even if the cached DC is down. I guess it has some schedule and it is waiting for it. In this case one can restart netlogon service or use nltest /dsgetdc:domainname.com /force command to refresh the DC list. So now XP is happy that it got another available domain controller at the cost of slow access(because it is in remote site connected by wan links). But remember that XP will not switch automatically to local DC when local DC becomes online again. The netlogon refresh everytime finds the DC(remote one) it cached is available and will not try for force discovery. The XP can get local DC only if either Remote DC it connected goes down or when XP machine is rebooted.

I did some discussion on netlogon behavior in one of the forum and a guy has written to a tool to address the situation where in netlogon fails to get new DC when the cached DC goes down. You can download this tool from here.

Please refer to http://www.petri.co.il/forums/showthread.php?t=31534 for more details.

Happy learning…,

Sitaram Pamarthi

Many users often complain to their system adminstrator that their clipboard is not working and they are unable to do copy/paste operations and it is the task of sys admins to break their head to find out the reason. Dear sysadmin…no more you need to do that. I came across a good tool which can help you to solve this problem.

This problem generally occurs when a process locks clipboard for reading and writting and didn’t release it properly. Clipboard will function normally after killing that process. The tool (GetOpenClipboardWindow) will help you to identify the culprit process. Download this tool now and share it with users.

From my experience, I can say that mostly mstsc.exe is the process which blocks the clipboard. The reason I assume here is simple because it dealts with clipboard of connected computer and your computer.

Happy Learning..,
Sitaram Pamarthi

Microsoft has released it’s next version of messaging system, Exchange 2010(beta) a couple of days back.

This is a pretty stunning news for many of M$ customers who just completed their migration to E2k7 or in middle of doing it. Download and have a look at it if you are interested. I am yet to go through the details of it. I will post more after my readings
Reference : http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2009/04/14/451032.aspx
~Sitaram

Well, before going much into the details of DCLOCATOR process, I will give brief description of what it is.

“DCLOCATOR is a process(or a procedure) which describes the steps involved in a windows XP client computer trying to identify it’s nearest domain controller”

A windows XP computer tries to identify its nearest domain controller in mainly two scenarios:

1) During it’s start-up
2) When the domain controller to which it is connected goes down

In this part-I, I am going to give details about the first scenario. I hope you already know about the requirement for a windows XP computer to locate its nearest domain controller.

If not, find them below.

o Faster authentication
o Less utilization of Wan Links
o Faster GPO processing

So, we know why XP has to get it’s nearest DC. Now lets look at the details of how it identifies nearest DC. Any computer that is booting into network will be either a new computer that is added to domain or an existing computer. The new computer needs an additional step when compared to existing computer

A new computer booting into the network will make a query to its DNS server by passing IP address (uses the DSGETSITE api). The DNS server returns the SITE name by verifying AD sites and services and subnet assigned it to. The client caches this returned information in registry. An existing computer which is booting into the network will not require this as it already cached the SITE name during its previous boot process.

After knowing the site name, client performs the below steps to identify the DC

1) Client makes below DNS query to find the SRV records of DCs which are available in the site that client belongs to. DCs will register these SRV records in DNS during their startup.

_ldap._tcp.mysite._sites.dc._msdcs.mydomain.com
where mysite is the site name of client

2) DNS returns all the DC SRV records available in enquired site to client irrespective of their DC availability.

3) Client picks up one DC randomly from list and checks for the services(authentication service) it is looking for and caches the DC name if it succeeds.

4) If client finds the picked DC as unavailable, then it picks another DC from list and caches it after checking the availability.

5) The cache will be maintained by netlogon service and it passes the cached DC name for all DC requests that it receives from applications installed on client.

NOTE: If the can not find it’s site name, it queries the DNS for all DCs using the below SRV record and picks one from the list returned by DNS. There is no guarentee that it can get the nearest DC and the pick is random. These type of clients may experience during their boot/login time.

_ldap._tcp.dc._msdcs.mydomain.com

In part-II, I will give details about how a window XP client switches to another DC when the DC it cached goes down.

Happy Learning..,
Sitaram Pamarthi

While reading TechNet Magazine of March 2009, I came across the this new utility from Microsoft. I have seen many screen capturing recording softwares, but this appeared something special to me for few below reasons…

a) First of all, it is a FREE utility from Microsoft.
b) Giving option for recording activities of a single application window and full screen
c) Captured file is not cumbersome. I recorded for half a minute and the size is 45KB.

It has a very simple interface to start and stop recording. But the captured output can be saved as WMV file only. You can download this tool from Microsoft Download Center

Happy Learning..
Sitaram Pamarthi