SysAdmin Talk

Continuing on a theme of how to fix those niggly little problems in Exchange Server, today it’s the turn of this error when starting Outlook:

With dozens of virtual servers on tens of virtual test networks here in the Exchange division, all getting hammered quite a bit with Naughty Things that Probably Shouldn’t Be Done, we tend to break things quite regularly.

One of the more common failures is Outlook Web Access under Exchange Server 2007. One way or another, it just stops working – sometimes in a minor way, sometimes more extensively. This morning, it simply presented me with a blank page after login.

I just came across this problem (Windows Server 2008 can’t boot, winload.exe can’t be located) and as it took me about 3 (yes THREE!!) hours to fix I thought I’d share with you all to save you time.

Working on Exchange email archiving software and PST Importing tools we have a test network with quite a few virtual machines, many with Windows Server 2008 installed.

Testing in an Exchange environment has been a challenge for Red Gate Software for some time now as we developed and tested Exchange Server Archiver. Now we are working on a PST Importer tool, we had to once again ‘fire up’ our virtual servers. The problem was a bit more complex this time, because if we want to create a realistic test environment we should have about a hundred virtual machines that we could hook on to our domain. As before, we’ll need mailboxes for these users but this time we would like some of the PST files to be opened in some of the users’ Outlook (I’ll explain this later). So here’s how we managed to do this all without actually creating all the machines for it.