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Archive for the ‘Microsoft Products’ Category

Here is another great tool from Microsoft. This is the Exchange Server Deployment Assistant. It is for Exchange 2010 deployments. It can assist you in creating a step by step plan for your Exchange deployment. It can help with On-premise, Cloud, or Exchange Hybrid deployments. This tool will also help you with upgrade scenarios.

Basically the tool will ask you a series of questions about your environment and how you want to setup Exchange. It will then populate a checklist that you can follow for your deployment. You can click through the checklist in the browser, download it or print it.

Here is a link to the tool:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/exdeploy2010/default.aspx#Index

One of the best features of Active Directory in Windows server 2008 is a security tool called Active Directory Rights Management Services (AD RMS). AD RMS allows organizations to secure content such as word documents, excel spread sheets, email’s and even can be integrated in SharePoint. A user would need to be authenticated before they could access the data from any of those content sources. I know this topic has been covered before but I wanted to post the steps from my deployment of AD RMS.

A Windows Server 2008 domain is required before you begin.

On the server you will deploy AD RMS on:

• Open Server manager
• Expand Roles
• Right click and select Add New Roles
• Click Next
• Select AD Rights management Services and click next

The following roles will need to be added as well.

• Click Add Required Role Services.

• Click Next

You can explore more about AD RMS on the next window by clicking any of the links. When done click next.

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Yes the title of this post is misleading. That was intentional. I have seen many fellow IT Pros in the community asking if backing up system state of Windows clients is possible with DPM 2010. Well it is not and it will not be possible with DPM 2012 either. DPM was designed to protect client data but not the machine entirely. DPM does a great job of protecting client data but there is a real need in some environments to protect client PC’s as a whole.

There is not an officially supported solution for this but there is a work around to protect the entire client.

For XP clients you could backup system state of your XP machines to a network share or folder and then have DPM pick it up from there.

Windows Vista/7 does not have a system state backup option. That was replaced with “Complete PC Back up”. Complete PC Back up in Windows Vista/7 is an image of the computer so it achieves a similar goal to system state. You can schedule to run the Complete PC Back up out to a folder or network share and then let DPM pick it up from there.

Again this is not ideal but it is a good alternative when you need complete protection of your client.

Here is the process to set this up on Windows 7.

• Go to Start>>>Control Panel>>>Backup and Restore

Note that Windows backup has not been setup yet.

• Click on Set up backup.

The Windows Backup wizard will start. This can take a while to open so be patient here.

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Have you ever needed to give a user access to their desktop on a Remote Desktop Services Server?  In my situation I had a user that was accessing an application via Remote Desktop Web Services. This user would also use Excel and pull reports from the applications database. These Excel reports would save locally on the server not the end users desktop.

I needed a quick and easy way for the user to access these reports in the event he needed to pull them back up. I also needed a way to accomplish this without confusing the user about being on his local desktop or the servers desktop. One of the requirements was also that the user was not allowed to log onto the server directly so having him access the desktop that way was not possible.

What I did was created a simple batch file that puts the user right into his desktop and then I published this batch file to the user via the RD Web Access interface. The end result is that he would get a Windows Explore window with all of his Excel files listed when he clicked on the app.

Here are the steps I took to set this up:

I created a batch file called USERNAMEDESKTOP.bat The file contained this syntax:

explorer.exe C:\Users\USERNAME\Desktop

I placed this in a central location in this case I created a folder called: example C:\RemoteAPP Scripts. I made this folder in case we need to create more scripts like this in the future.

I then went into RemoteAPP Manager and published the app to the user.

I then went into the properties of this app and changed the icon from the standard command prompt icon to the desktop icon.

Here is the path to the Windows icons: C:\Windows\system32\imageres.dll

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There may be a time when an AD RMS install goes bad or you have to remove it for whatever reason. In my case this was deployed by someone else and it needed to be removed because it was not deployed correctly. RMS was not working properly to the point where you could not get into the console.

Because it was not working I could not use the traditional way to de-commission it. I had to force a removal of RMS which should always be a last resort. Here are the steps to do this:

Go and download the AD RMS toolkit from here:

http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/confirmation.aspx?id=1479

Install the AD RMS toolkit

• Open an elevated command prompt
• CD out to %systemdrive%:\Program Files (x86)\RMS SP2 Administration Toolkit\ADScpRegister\
• ADScpRegister.exe unregisterscp https://rms.domain.com

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In OCS 2007 there was a tool you could use to automatically push out contacts to your OCS users. This was helpful so the end user would not have to go enter everyone they wanted to their contacts  manually in the Communicator client.

This tool was called  LCSAddContacts and it was a script you ran on the server. Well in Lync 2010 Microsoft did not add this ability into Lync 2010 and the LCSAddContacts no longer exists. Fortunately MVP Jeff Guillet has created a tool called LyncAddContacts that can do this for Lync 2010. Here is the link to that tool:

http://www.expta.com/2011/01/introducing-lyncaddcontacts.html

Hello DPM Community,

This is Steve here. I recently published a book on DPM 2010. I have been fortunate to team up with Microsoft DPM MVP’s Robert Hedblom and Islam Gomaa to write a DPM 2012 book. We are in the planning stages for this book. We would like to know from the community what specific topics would you like to see covered in this book? Post your responses here in the comments.

Thank You for your feedback.

Reporting for DPM has been a problem for many DPM administrators. You need better reporting on scheduled backup jobs, success/failures of backup jobs, details on tape jobs, SLA reports, and more. Your only other option was to create custom reports in DPM using the SQL views that come with DPM. I posted on how to do this a while back here:
http://www.buchatech.com/2011/01/building-custom-reports-in-dpm/.

Working with SQL views is not the easiest way to get custom reports if you are new to or not savvy with SQL Reporting services. Well the alternative to this is Prism.

A company named Bocada has developed a product called Prism that helps you get better reporting out of your backup solutions. They have a flavor for DPM. The nice folks at Bocada gave me a demo of this product live in action. Thanks Ralph!

I am going to give you some more details about Prism for DPM in this post.

There are many pros to Prism and only a couple of cons. One of the cons is that you still cannot bring the custom reports into the DPM console. They are however web based and easy enough to access. 
There still is a slight learning curve to learn how to customize reports.

Prism is a stand alone product that is deployed on a server and accessed via a web browser. It runs on top of IIS and accesses the DPM data directly through the DPM SQL database. Once Prism has collected information about DPM it is able to present the information as reports.

Prism can be setup to gather information from multiple DPM servers for reporting therefore it can be used in enterprises with many DPM servers.

Brocada  teamed up with Microsoft to create two default DPM specific reports in conjunction with reporting DPM related data in Prism. These reports are:

• Recovery Point Summary
  Recovery Point Summary provides a summary of the number of Non-expired recovery points, Date of the last non-expired recovery point and the average recovery point in Range for all the clients being protected. 

• Recovery Point Status
  Recovery Point Status lets you see the various success or failures of your daily recovery points. 

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Ruud Baars (Rest In Peace) of Microsoft hosted a DPM setting export/import tool on his skydrive called DPM-save-create-Config.

This tool contains 2 PowerShell scripts called DPMsaveConfig and DPMcreateConfig that could be used to save your DPM settings to an .xml file and then import the settings in from that .xml file. The link is here:

https://skydrive.live.com/?cid=b03306b628ab886f&sc=documents&id=B03306B628AB886F%21859

When you run DPMsaveConfig it creates a DPMsaveConfig.XML in %systemdrive%\Program Files\Microsoft DPM\DPM\bin.

Then when you run DPMcreateConfig it will automatically search for the DPMsaveConfig.XML and import the DPM settings from here.

The beauty of this tool is that it was created in PowerShell so you can go in and modify the scripts if you need to.

You can also download a copy of this tool directly from my blog here: DPM-save-create-Config

THE NEED:

In DPM you may run into scenarios where you are backing up a folder or a volume and there are folders or sub-folders that you actually don’t need  or want to protect. There is a way to “exclude” these from the backup. Before we talk about how to do this lets look at an example of why you would want to do this.

THE EXAMPLE:

Lets say you have a Windows cluster and you are backing up the c volume on one of your nodes in the cluster. This cluster is a Hyper-V cluster and you are protecting the virtual machines in your cluster directly. The C:\ClusterStorage folder on the c volume is where your .VHD’s and other virtual machine data is stored. You do not want to backup this folder because the virtual machines are being protected directly by DPM but you want to continue protecting everything else on the c volume. This is where  being able to exclude the C:\ClusterStorage folder comes into play.

THE SOLUTION:

Here is how you can exclude something from being backed up by DPM. There is a registry key on Windows servers called “FilesNotToBackup”. This key needs to be modified on the protected server with the data you want to exclude from the backup. It is that simple. Now here is how you do this.

Make a registry entry to the FilesNotToBackup list in the registry on the protected server you want to exclude data on.                         DPM/VSS will honor the FileNotToBackup list.

The path is: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\BackupRestore\FilesNotToBackup add a Multi-String (REG_MULTI_SZ) value and place something like: C:\ClusterStorage (or any data you want to exclude from backup) in the Value Data field.

The next time the data is protected it should skip the C:\ClusterStorage (or any data you have selected to exclude from backup).