Test Layout

I have one customer that uses Netvanta UC for their voicemail system. It runs on a virtual machine hosted on a Hyper-V cluster. That's a bit of an issue in itself because the software fails if the VM is migrated between hosts. To migrate it between hosts you need to reactivate it. Not cool. For the past while, they've been having audio quality issues with this system and have investigated all points in the system, but none seemed to show any signs of an issue. I'll let the customer describe it for you: We have been plagued with garbled voicemail for a while now. Finally, we found some Adtran techs who took a hard look and found that when voicemail was hitting our NetvantaUC server sometimes (fairly often actually) up to 35% of the packets were out of order, causing a robotic and sometime impossible to understand recording. They also checked our PRI gateway and noted that there were no issues from the PRI (MTS) or leaving the gateway. Of course this left one switch in quest...

Working with a large number of mailboxes is usually about the same a working with a small number of mailboxes, except that you need to include -ResultSize Unlimited in your Get-* cmdlets. However, I recently ran into the following error when getting a large list of mailboxes (approx 38K) with Get-Mailbox and piping them to Set-Mailbox: Sending data to a remote command failed with the following error message: The total data received from the remote client exceeded allowed maximum. Allowed maximum is 524288000. In the end this seemed to be a limitation of piping from Get-Mailbox to Set-Mailbox. For example, this would generate the error: Get-Mailbox -ResultSize Unlimited | Set-Mailbox -SingleItemRecoveryEnabled $true One option to work around this is to chunk up the work and do it by database instead: Get-Mailbox -Database XXX -ResultSize Unlimited | Set-Mailbox -SingleItemRecoveryEnabled $true However, my preferred workaround was this: $mbx=Get-Mailbox -ResultSize Unlimited foreach($m ...

I'm currently working with a large organization where they've lost track of mailbox removals when accounts are disabled. They keep disabled accounts for an extended period of time after users leave. So, some disabled accounts are years old and still have a mailbox. We're going through and cleaning up right now. So, we wanted a list of disabled user accounts with an Exchange Mailbox. However, since resource mailboxes have a disabled user account, we need to exclude those. It's a nice easy one line of PowerShell: Get-Mailbox -Filter {ExchangeUserAccountControl -eq "AccountDisabled" -and IsResource -eq $false} -ResultSize unlimited | export-csv C:\temp\DisabledWMailbox.csv

If you are having data connectivity issues on the MTS network this web site will show you the status of their services. Useful to figure out whether it's systemic or just you (or your customer). http://www.mts.ca/mts/support/service+status

I'm working with a client that is upgrading the load balancing infrastructure that services their Exchange 2010 organization. They are implementing NetScaler SDX appliances that run NetScaler VPX virtual load balancers. Being as this is new infrastructure, version 11.0 (first release June 30, 2015, latest release Oct 8, 2015) is being implemented. To test the new load balancing, we modified the hosts file on few computers to direct the load balanced names (outlook.domain.com/webmail.domain.com) to the IP address of the new load balancer. Initially, this seemed to be working fine, but we didn't do any specific testing. After a bit, we noticed that we often got the following error in Outlook when accessing the address book: The connection to Microsoft Exchange is unavailable. Outlook must be online or connected to complete this action. This error was reproducible after not accessing the address book for a few minutes. In addition, when looking at the connection status, we would s...

In a large organization with mailbox quotas, you will see an ongoing number of events indicating that users are at the limit of their quotas. In the event log you will see: Event Source: MSExchangeIS Event ID: 8528 The mailbox for /o=ExchangeOrg/ou=AdministrativeGroup/cn=Recipients/cn=UserIdentifier has exceeded the maximum mailbox size. This mailbox cannot send or receive messages. Incoming messages to this mailbox are returned to sender.  The mailbox owner should be notified about the condition of the mailbox as soon as possible. The overall identifier for the mailbox is the LegacyExchangeDN attribute for the user mailbox. Most of the time, you can look at this value and quickly figure out which user is having the issue. If it's a current user, you can wait or contact them. In a large environment, you may not personally know the users, and you can investigate whether this is a disabled account that needs to be removed. Today I was looking at one of these events and saw that the f...

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