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.

The first lesson learnt was to never try to create a virtual (or real) Windows 2008 network with less than 50 GB of hard drive space. The Windows installation itself takes up about 10 GB, and then everyone’s favourite the winsxs folder will just grow and grow,  and in the end you run out of disk space although you have nothing else on your C drive but a basic server installation and Exchange (Exchange installation that is, all relevant data files and databases are on a different drive of course).

Anyhow, after a while we found ourselves in a situation where we have a nice pool of complex networks with virtual machines and half of them are complaining about low disk space. The solution is to extend the virtual disk, but it’s not as easy as one might think.

First, you have to shut your virtual machine down, open a command prompt on your host and navigate to your VMware server installation where you’ll have to use vmware-vdiskmanager.exe as such:

vmware-vdiskmanager.exe –x [Size][dimension] [path to virtual disk]

e.g.: vmware-vdiskmanager.exe –x 50Gb E:\virtual_machines\Medium\Exchange4\Exchange4.vmdk

Make sure that you specify the real virtual disk’s path and not the flat file or a partial slice (the tool’s error reporting is very poor on that regard). You also have to make sure that you have no snapshots for the computer in question otherwise the tool will refuse to work (with the proper error message this time at least).

If everything goes well, your virtual disk will be resized to the specified value after the process finished. The next step is to mount this drive into a different virtual machine, and edit its partitions using Disk Manager (built-in UI) or diskpart which is a built-in command line tool. If you choose the former, you’ll have to select the drive that you wish to make bigger, right click on it and select “extend”, while in diskpart type:

list volume
select volume [n]
extend

List volume lists all available volumes, with the select command you can select the one that is to be extended and type extend to carry out the action.

After all this, theoretically just unmount (remove) your disk from the second machine, start the first one up and it should all work fine.

It worked for Windows Vista, but my Windows 2008 failed to boot with the error:

Can’t find c:\Windows\System32\winload.exe the file is missing or corrupted

This seemed vaguely familiar, I thought it’s just the old “NTLDR is missing or corrupted” that I was always able to fix using the installation disk. I was looking forward to have some built-in tool in the installer that might just have been developed to fix such issues. To my surprise, there was none.

The repair options were “Restore computer”, “Windows Memory Diagnostic Tool” and “Command Prompt”. Unfortunately Restore Computer needs a backup file to work with that I obviously didn’t have (virtual test machine) and rebuilding it wasn’t an option as it was one of my exchange servers in the system… I started to get rather upset and stressed about it and began googling for the problem desperately.

The first few hits were of no help and at some point I even wandered around Microsoft’s TechNet forum where I read that the start-up repair option was removed from 2008 per design (!?). It wasn’t easy, but after several unsuccessful searchers I found another blog post with the solution:

Execute next commands in repair mode (Vista / Win2k8):
c:\windows\system32\bcdedit /set {default} device partition=c:
c:\windows\system32\bcdedit /set {default} osdevice partition=c:
c:\windows\system32\bcdedit /set {bootmgr} device partition=c:

It worked like a charm, my system could boot without any problems and I didn’t have to waste a day to reinstall the server and exchange.

The first step was the easiest – create around a hundred machines in different organisational units in active directory.

We needed this part as our Search wizard queries Active Directory for computers in the system. The user than can select the computers they wish to search for PST files. The grid where they are displayed and various features around selection should be tested, but at this stage it is enough if the computer is simply created in Active Directory. You can go to your Domain Controller, run “Active Directory Users and Computers” management console, right click on any container, select “New” and select “Computer”. This way you can create any computer in your AD tree without physically having it in your system. If one desires to create a larger amount of computers, doing it manually really shouldn’t be an option, in which case a simple .bat file solves the problem.

To create an OU where the new computer(s) should go:

dsadd ou "OU=[name_of_OU],DC=[name_of_domain],DC=[name_of_domain]"

For embedded OUs:

dsadd ou “OU=[name_of_OU_child2], OU=[name_of_OU_child1], OU=[name_of_OU_parent],DC=[name_of_domain],DC=[name_of_domain]”

To add the computer:

dsadd computer "cn=[computer_name],ou=[ou_name(s)],dc=[name_of_domain],dc=[name_of_domain]" -uc

And now that we have the window open anyway, to add a user:

dsadd user "CN=[user_name],OU=[name_of_ou],DC=[name_of_domain],DC=[name_of_domain]" -samid [name_of_user (SAM id)] -upn [user_name@fqdn]
-fn [First_name] -ln [last_name] -display "[display_name]" -pwd [password]

This enables us to test most of the basic grid functionality and enablement. In order to check that these non-existing machines are handled correctly when the PST agent is installed on them our developers created a “data faker”, that browses the AD tree to get all computer names and we can set all available statuses for the computers found. This data faker is used to simulate search results as well.

We usually do a script that creates these user/computer names with an incrementing counter, but in some cases it might be a collection of really nasty characters/deeply embedded OUs or other special cases.

*Coming up in Part 2 – Reka will cover scripts to create mailboxes in Exchange 2007, and how to modify access rights on them.

Something that came up this afternoon was a question about recovery of archived messages in the event of a catastrophic failure of the Exchange environment (think: no backups, nothing, all gone). Doing some research around the area, we found the recommended practices for backing up one of the other major archiving tools. It went along these lines (name removed to protect the guilty):

PREBACKUP.BAT:
REM ---------------------------------
REM prebackup.bat
REM This script is to put **** into read-only mode so we can run backups
REM ---------------------------------
net stop /y "*** Task Controller Service"
net stop /y "*** Storage Service"
net stop /y "*** Indexing Service"
net stop /y "*** Shopping Service"
regedit /s c:\readonly.reg
net start *** Storage Service"
net start "*** Indexing Service"
net start "*** Shopping Service"
net start "*** Task Controller Service"

Hang on just one second… your recommended backup plan involves:
a) Having to stop all your services, preventing users from retrieving their archived messages
b) Running a regedit script?!
c) Doing all this in a batch file?

I mean, really? In this day and age, that’s a recommended thing to do as part of your regular maintenance plan?

Whenever I’m supporting customers, I always get rather anxious if I think I’m even going to ask them to recycle an IIS application pool, which shouldn’t take anything down for more than a second if at all… and as for restarting a machine, well, that’s an absolute last resort.

Is it just me?