Test Layout

When you have a DAG with only two nodes, the StartDagServerMaintenance.ps1 script is smart enough to recognize that you can't have 2 additional copies of the database. However, if you have more than 2 DAG members, then the script complains that it can't run because the local database copy is required for redundancy. I ran into this at a client where we created a database in the DR site for running test cmdlets with SCOM. There are two copies of the database in the DR site. Other databases have two copies in the main site and one copy in the DR site. You can override the default behaviour with the switch OverrideMinimumTwoCopies. Example: StartDagServerMaintenance.ps1 -Server DAGnode1 -OverrideMinimumTwoCopies

I was doing an Exchange migration on the weekend and had a large number of move requests. Being the slightly OCD computer person as most of us are, I wanted to see how things were progressing occasionally. However, I didn't want to be dumping stuff into spreadsheets and be counting items. After few false starts, I ran across the Group-Object cmdlet. For me, this cmdlet is in the same category as Measure-Object. I've never had a need in the past. Now I'm happy to have it. My solution: Get-MoveRequest | Group-Object -Property Status The results looked like this:

Exchange 2010 and later do a nice job of providing high availability with database availability groups (DAGs) and load balancing. However, one configuration detail doesn't automatically synchronize between multiple Exchange servers, and that is receive connectors. If you create receive connectors for relaying output from printers or scanners then the connector you create is unique on each server. That's fine if you are pointing the devices at individual Exchange servers but to have high availability, you need multiple load balanced servers with the same configuration. To do this, you need to create the same receive connectors on each server. During intial setup creating 2 or 4 receive connectors with the same settings for authentication and such isn't too big a deal. The item that's a pain is the remote IP ranges that are allowed to use the receive connector. Many organizations have a large list of individual IP addresses that are allowed to use the receive connector. I