I’ve moved my blog from here to my own site, please update your links :)
Monday, 17 August 2009
Friday, 31 July 2009
SBS 2008 and Anonymous Mail
As previously mentioned we’re running CommitCRM as our CRM and PSA tool and the program needs to interact with Exchange to both receive and send emails. Although we had this working to a degree, I finally got around to troubleshooting why we weren’t getting certain emails through. I had previously read on UKSBSG that Exchange 2007 by default wouldn’t allow anon email to be routed internally – something a scan to email device might need to do. CommitCRM has a tool to test the email settings and this was giving the following error:
AUTH CRAM-MD5
504 5.7.4 Unrecognized authentication type
AUTH LOGIN
RequestDone Rq=11 Error=504 5.7.4 Unrecognized authentication type
A quick Google didn’t turn up anything useful so I turned to the ever resourceful MS Partner Online Technical Community (PTOC). As always I got a extensive reply and because it was in the SBS forum this was within four hours. Shawn from MS explained that the application was trying to use “UTH CRAM-MD5”, but that this was supported by Exchange 2003 and not Exchange 2007. To work around this problem Shawn laid out the steps to create a new Receive Connector for Commit to use:
- 1. In EMC, expand Server Configuration, highlight the Hub Transport.
- 2. Start new Receive Connector wizard
- 3. On the Introduction page, follow these steps:
- a. In the Name: field, type a meaningful name for this connector. This name is used to identify the connector.
- b. In the Select the intended use for this connector: field, select Custom.
- c. Click Next.
- 4. On the Local network settings page, click Next
- 5. On the Remote Network settings page, remove the existing 0.0.0.0 - 255.255.255.255 entry. Then add only the IP of the application server to the list
- 6. After completing the Wizard, open properties of the new created receive Connector
- 7. Enable the option "Exchange Servers" under Permission group
- 8. On the authentication page, enable "Externally secured" option
- 9. Restart Microsoft Exchange Transport service
This helped partially, but I also needed to allow Commit to send emails anonymously:
- 1. Open the properties of the Receive Connector we created.
- 2. Under the Permission Group tab, enable Anonymous users.
- 3. Under Authentication tab, only enable "Basic Authentication"
- 4. Restart the Exchange Transport Service.
I was now closer and could send emails internally, but not externally. Via further communication with Shawn I discovered that Exchange 2007 doesn’t allow anonymous users to relay, but this can be changed with the following command in the Exchange Management Shell:
Get-ReceiveConnector "Connector_Name" | Add-ADPermission -User "NT AUTHORITY\ANONYMOUS LOGON" -ExtendedRights "Ms-Exch-SMTP-Accept-Any-Recipient"
After using this command email started flowing correctly for Commit and I’m pretty sure the same setup could be used for other devices/apps that need to route email.
Many thanks once again to the guys at MS PTOC, life is a lot easier when you know someone will have the answer.
Sunday, 19 July 2009
Getting Organised – A CRM Solution
We’ve dipped our toe in various CRM packages over the last couple of years here at Sirona, but we never quite realised how important it was until we finally had one place for everything.
We started our CRM journey using vTiger CRM, a free branch of the open source program SugarCRM. Our primary requirement was a ticketing solution, but we also populated it with customer data and played around with it’s invoicing capability. We used vTiger for a good twelve months until we decided to switch to using the ticketing system built in to Kaseya. The main reason for the switch was all our customer’s PCs and servers were listed in Kaseya and tickets could be logged against them. This meant we could run reports against individual machines to spot any issues.
We used Kaseya for probably six months until I started to want something more. My main aim was for customers to be able to email our support email address and have a ticket automatically logged. Having previously looked at both Connectwise and Autotask, I knew these products could do this. We’ve had demos of both and they are fantastic looking products; I’m personally sold on Connectwise. However, the cost of both is just prohibitive for us at the moment. I think in a couple of years when we’ve grown some more we will head down the Connectwise route, but until then I needed something else.
What initially got me thinking about moving away from Kaseya was stumbling across Cerberus Helpdesk. Cerberus is an email based helpdesk with decent pricing and was a definite contender. Seeing as we were thinking of a move, I decided I needed to look at more than just one option. Searching brought up a couple of other options, Blue Folder and Zoho CRM being the two other likely candidates. I spent a fair amount of time looking at these three and had finally decided that Blue Folder was the option when a friend suggested CommitCRM.
Now CommitCRM offered a lot more than any of the others we’d either used or trialled, in fact it bills itself as a PSA tool for IT service companies. Like any good service it offered a free trial so I downloaded it and started using it in earnest. That was about two months ago, we’ve now paid for it and use it on a daily basis.
Commit allows tickets to be logged by email and will continue to track email conversations regarding tickets. It’s not the slickest of tracking, but it works and the Commit team are actively working on improving it (we’re on the new beta and it’s already improved). We have all our customer’s assets in there so tickets are tracked against the right asset. We’re able to expand assets from just hardware to anything, so we track all software purchases and licenses. We can also track contracts as to what they cover and how much they cost. Commit will link to Quickbooks, so we’re working on getting that working to simplify the monthly invoicing tasks. We track every piece of work we do against the relevant contract, so we can see how much time we spend on a contract in a month. This will help us both to see whether a contract is profitable and also demonstrate to customers the value of their contract.
It’s still early days, but it’s already making a great difference in the way our business runs. It’s great having one place for everything, but it’s also vital that we use it for everything. Sometimes it’s easy to do it the old way, but we have to change our ways and ensure that if it happens, it happens in Commit. Going forward it’s great to know we’ll have one place for all the history for all our customers.
Friday, 12 June 2009
Hamachi Geekness
I was bathed in geekness the other day when I successfully shared my CD-ROM drive across the Internet to solve a little problem…
I was connected to an SBS server doing some application maintenance when the always annoying message ‘CD Required’ popped up. If I was a bit more organised I’d have a copy of the CDs backed up on the local hard drive, but alas I am not. I didn’t want to drive out to site to insert a CD and my usual contact there was also on holiday. I had the CDs I needed in our office, so I thought there must be a way to share my local CD-ROM drive with the server. A quick Google brought up nothing, so I was about to admit defeat and plan a trip to site when I remembered Hamachi.
For those of you who aren’t aware of the product, it’s a small piece of software that will map a VPN between two places without opening any ports. It does this by using a third party to establish the VPN, but after this all data is only sent between the two parties at either end. The software has the blessing of security guru Steve Gibson, so I’m more than happy to use it on a client site.
In this instance I fired up Hamachi on my laptop and on the server and established a tunnel. After sharing out my CD-ROM drive on my Vista laptop I mapped to it over the tunnel. In the application I was modifying I pointed it to the newly mapped drive and lo and behold it grabbed the files it needed off the CD! Application updated, job done.
Behold, I am a geek!
Sirona now Microsoft Licensing Specialists (Lite)
My business partner and I attended a MS bootcamp on Licensing yesterday, hosted by Ingram Micro with a trainer from Microsoft. It was an impressive set up at the Manchester Airport Radisson hotel and a great spread thrown in for lunch. Great to see a distributor putting on events in the north and makes me more inclined to move my business away from C2K to Ingram.
The MLSS Lite accreditation is made up of two sections – products and licensing. The ‘Lite’ name certainly rang true and as a techy who is very familiar with Microsoft’s product line there wasn’t anything mind blowing on that side, but my business partner got more out of it. The licensing side re-enforced a lot of what I’ve learnt but also threw up a few surprises, one being another OEM drawback. I always knew that if you upgraded a CPU or mobo under an OEM OS license that license was then invalid. However, what I learnt yesterday was that if a CPU or mobo fails outside warranty, then that also invalidates the OEM license… All the more reason to get at least 3 years warranty when dealing with OEM and it re-enforces the 3 year lifespan of a PC.
After lunch we were all able to sit the two exams and then get them marked while we waited. I’m very pleased to say Sirona now has two licensing specialists and we’ll now look to get it mentioned in our marketing literature.
The next step is to think about doing the higher level courses and exams, but I’m not sure of the relevance to our sector. We’re generally dealing with 5 to 35 users and therefore only a very small area of licensing is applicable. I’m hesitant to invest more time into the higher level accreditations as understandably they don’t just concentrate on our market. Maybe the powers that be will revisit this in the future and create an accreditation linked directly to SBSC, but until then I’ll just make do with my ‘Lite’.
Friday, 3 April 2009
SBS 2008 – Outlook Anywhere Hanging Outlook
Outlook over HTTPS, now renamed to Outlook Anywhere, is a great feature that we use in-house and at a number of clients. It basically gives you Exchange connectivity outside of the network without using a VPN. I use it on my laptop as my primary profile and it means Outlook works whether I’m in the office or not.
After recently deploying SBS 2008 in the office we noticed Outlook would struggle to connect over HTTPS. Once connected it would generally work without a problem for a number of hours, but it would then become un-responsive and we had to move to OWA while it recovered. If you left Outlook it would generally recover, although it could take up to an hour.
I raised this with my ever resourceful friends over at microsoft.private.sbsc.windowsserver.sbs and yet again they came back with the right answer. In our case that was the TCP Chimney Offload problem, as described in this MS article.
Following the above article I found that TCP Chimney Offload was already disabled in the OS, but not on the network card. First of all I replaced the network card drivers that the SBS setup had installed with the correct drivers from HP. Then in the Advanced tap of the network card properties I set ‘Receive Side Scaling’ to disabled.
These two actions together have cured all the problems we were having with Outlook and another hats off to Robert in the newsgroups.
SBS 2008 – Stop Mail Being Marked as Spam in the IMF
The new anti-spam engine in SBS 2008 seems to be doing a good job on one of our customer’s sites. However, the interface isn’t the greatest and I struggled to find a way to stop a particular email being marked as spam. My struggle was explained when I raised a post in microsoft.private.sbsc.windowsserver.sbs – you can’t do it through the GUI, you need to use the Exchange shell (EMS). One note about said shell, always right-click and choose ‘Run as Administrator’, certain commands, including the ones below, don’t work if you run it as a normal user.
Use the following shell command to add sender SMTP addresses to the BypassedSenders list:
Set-ContentFilterConfig -BypassedSenders foo@somedomain.com,foo2@somedomain.com
Use the following command to whitelist the sending domain:
Set-ContentFilterConfig -BypassedSenderDomains somedomain.com,someotherdomain.com
You don’t get any confirmation that the action has been taken, but you also don’t get any error message. Use the following commands to list which users or domains have been added to the BypassedSenders lists:
Get-contentFilterConfig |fl BypassedSenders
Get-contentFilterConfig |fl BypassedSenderDomains
Thanks to Robert Li in the newsgroups for this info.
Related info:
How to Specify Recipient and Sender Exceptions for Content Filtering
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa995952.aspx
Get-ContentFilterConfig
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa998807.aspx
Wednesday, 11 February 2009
Windows 7 and SBS 2008
The team at the Official SBS Blog have posted details on how to get your Windows 7 machine running on your SBS 2008 network:
Using Windows 7 BETA With SBS 2008
Windows 7
I’ve been using Windows 7 since the public beta and I’ve been very impressed. I’ve got it dual-booting with Vista on my laptop and running as my primary OS on my home machine. It runs very nicely, although these are both pretty new machines (Core 2 Duos). From what I’ve heard it will run on lesser hardware, but it still needs to be current gen hardware. One example is it runs quite happily on Atom based Netbooks, where Vista would struggle.
Unfortunately the public beta has now finished, however I’m sure readers of this blog will either have already got it, or know certain means to lay their hands on it. Also, if you’ve got TechNet, it’s still there for the taking.
I did run into a problem with it on my desktop yesterday where a RAR set made in the old 00x style wouldn’t open. However, trying the same RAR set on Vista produced the same problem. Luckily 7zip came to the rescue and happily opened the set for me.
One other problem which I’m hoping will be addressed by a driver update is some sort of conflict with my video card on the desktop. It’s a ATi 2400 Pro and I had the same problem for a while on Vista. The driver crashes and Vista would usually recover, however Win7 seems get stuck in a loop which eventually crashes the system. I’m still running the MS driver installed for the card when I installed the OS, so I’m hoping getting the ATi driver will resolve the issue.
All in all Win7 is a polished version of Vista and I’m a Vista fan. However, I think Win7 will also win over some Vista haters – it’s certainly a lot more OS X like which will to be some people’s taste.
Wednesday, 4 February 2009
How to Stop WSUS Downloading Updates in SBS 2008
In SBS 2008 WSUS is enabled by default and will start downloading updates once setup is complete. We use a centralised update service which manages updates for all our clients and means we only have to approve updates once and not for each server.
WSUS in SBS 2008 gives you the option to not install updates and download only. However, this means the server is still downloading all the updates and wasting bandwidth and disk space.
I raised this issue with the guys in microsoft.private.sbsc.windowsserver.sbs and after some internal discussion they came back and said the only way to stop the downloads was to remove WSUS. Unfortunately this has the side effect of stopping SBS reporting on patch level, but our centralised software covers this anyway.
So I’ve followed MS’s advise and so far so good. No unnecessary downloads and the server is ticking along nicely.
Tuesday, 3 February 2009
SBSC Survey
Emily Lambert has posted about the Small Business Specialist Community online survey and the deadline for this is Feb 6th – this Friday. If you’ve got five minutes today, please head on over there and fill out the survey to help MS understand us SBS’ers a bit better.
Change the Anti-Spam Setting in SBS 2008
SBS 2008 has the Intelligent Message Filter (IMF) enabled by default, so out of the box mail will be filtered and the default behaviour is block rather than quarantine. One of our customers had some missing mails so I needed to adjust this and Microsoft’s very own SBS expert Dave Overton had done a neat little blog entry that sorted it out in a few clicks:
Thanks Dave.
Wednesday, 14 January 2009
SBS 2008 – SendAs and Full Mailbox Permissions
This turns out to be a lot simpler than I thought, but a Google didn’t give me the answer, so I thought I’d share what I found. Thanks to the guys in microsoft.private.sbsc.windowsserver.sbs for the information:
SendAs Permissions
To use the Exchange Management Console to grant a user the Send As permission for another user's mailbox
1. Start the Exchange Management Console.
2. In the console tree, click Recipient Configuration.
3. In the result pane, select the mailbox for which you want to grant the Send As permission.
4. In the action pane, under the mailbox name, click Manage Send As Permission. The Manage Send As Permission wizard opens.
5. On the Manage Send As Permission page, click Add.
6. In Select User or Group, select the user to which you want to grant the Send As permission, and then click OK.
7. Click Manage.
8. On the Completion page, the Summary states whether the Send As permission was successfully granted. The summary also displays the Exchange Management Shell command that was used to grant the Send As permission.
9. Click Finish.
To use the Exchange Management Shell to grant a user the Send As permission for another user's mailbox run the following command (Run the shell as admin)
Add-ADPermission "Mailbox" -User "Domain\User" -Extendedrights "Send As"
Source: microsoft.private.sbsc.windowsserver.sbs
More info: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa998291.aspx
=================================================
Full Mailbox Access
To use the Exchange Management Console to grant the Full Access permission for a mailbox
1. Start the Exchange Management Console.
2. In the console tree, click Recipient Configuration.
3. In the result pane, select the mailbox for which you want to grant the Full Access permission.
4. In the action pane, under the mailbox name, click Manage Full Access Permission. The Manage Full Access Permission wizard opens.
5. On the Manage Full Access Permission page, click Add.
6. In Select User or Group, select the user to which you want to grant the Full Access permission, and then click OK.
7. Click Manage.
8. On the Completion page, the Summary states whether the Full Access permission was successfully granted. The summary also displays the Exchange Management Shell command that was used to grant the Full Access permission.
9. Click Finish.
To use the Exchange Management Shell to grant the Full Access permission for a mailbox
" Run the following command to add the Full Access permission directly to the mailbox (Run shell as admin)
Add-MailboxPermission "Mailbox" -User "Trusted User" -AccessRights FullAccess
Source: microsoft.private.sbsc.windowsserver.sbs
More info: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa996343.aspx
Technorati Tags: sbs 2008,exchange 2007
Wednesday, 17 December 2008
HP Bloatware on Business Machines…
We switched to reselling HP rather than Dell earlier this year and generally we’ve been very happy with the move. I’ve blogged about my dissatisfaction with Dell before so I wont go over it all again. Suffice to say they’re not channel friendly despite what they may claim.
We’ve supplied a few bits of HP kit here and there and been pleased with what we’ve seen. Last week we upgraded a five user network to HP kit and I was very disappointed to discover the large amount of bloatware shipping on the business machines we had supplied.
Something like a PDF reader I can accept, as well as HP’s various pieces of software – you’ll get that whatever the vendor. But when I discovered they’d installed the AOL IE Toolbar I felt they’d crossed the line. Not only was this ugly toolbar taking up desktop space, they’d also changed the default search provider in the top right-hand corner to AOL and the homepage was some amalgamation between AOL and HP.
With consumer PCs I can accept a certain level of bloatware, this often helps the vendor keep the costs down and it’s just become the norm. But when you’re paying a premium for high-end HP laptops and desktops I expect them to be clean of such crap.
Unfortunately there’s nothing they’re going to do about it, I just expect better from HP. I’ll just know in the future to include some extra time for each PC, to allow clean up before installing at customers.
Wednesday, 19 November 2008
SBS 2008 Training Comes to Stockport
After seeing heavily subsidised SBS 2008 training being offered in such places as the US, Canada and Australia I raised the question with Emily Lambert at the SBS 2008 launch event in Manchester. Emily asked me to drop her a mail with examples of this training, which I duly did and copied in our friendly MS PAL, Vijay.
It turned out a number of people had raised this with Emily and in early November they came up trumps with a 3 day workshop in London for only £200. After consulting my heavily pregnant wife we agreed it was worth the time away from home and I booked my spot. Unfortunately the demand had been so high all the places had gone and I’d been put on the waiting list.
Meanwhile Ric from NetLink IT had been musing over the fact that the only offering was in London and wondered out loud to Emily if we could have some further North. I obviously backed this whole heartedly, not only because I didn’t have a place on the course, but it’s always nicer to be closer to home for these events.
Last night I was catching up on my blog roll and discovered Microsoft had come up trumps again with new courses announced across the country.
Course Title: 44CO101 - Implementing and Administering Windows® Small Business Server 2008
| Location | Date | Duration |
| London | 01/12/08 | 3 days |
| London | 12/01/09 | 2 days |
| Edinburgh | 15/01/09 | 2 days |
| Stockport | 16/02/09 | 2 days |
| Birmingham | 19/02/09 | 2 days |
My booking is confirmed and paid for, I hope to see some of you there.
Monday, 17 November 2008
Single CAL Open License Confirmed
Typical, that on the same day I blog about a missing part number, my question is answered. I’m not complaining though, I always thought it was just an oversight. I’ve updated my spreadsheet with the missing part number (6UA-02673) and many thanks to Emily Lambert for confirming the information. And just to confirm how complicated MS licensing can be, here are all the part numbers for what is basically the same product:
6UA-02656 Windows Small Bus CAL Ste Sngl Lic/SA Pack OLP C Device CAL
6UA-02670 Windows Small Bus CAL Ste 2008 Sngl OLP NL Device CAL
6UA-02671 Windows Small Bus CAL Ste 2008 Sngl OLP C User CAL
6UA-02673 Windows Small Bus CAL Ste 2008 Sngl OLP NL User CAL
6UA-02750 Windows Small Bus CAL Ste Lic/SA Pack OLP NL GOVT Device CAL
6UA-02751 Windows Small Bus CAL Ste Lic/SA Pack OLP NL GOVT User CAL
6UA-02752 Windows Small Bus CAL Ste SA OLP NL GOVT Device CAL
6UA-02753 Windows Small Bus CAL Ste SA OLP NL GOVT User CAL
6UA-02754 Windows Small Bus CAL Ste 2008 OLP NL GOVT Device CAL
6UA-02755 Windows Small Bus CAL Ste 2008 OLP NL GOVT User CAL
6UA-02542 Windows Small Bus CAL Ste Sngl Lic/SA Pack OLP B AE Device CAL
6UA-02543 Windows Small Bus CAL Ste Sngl Lic/SA Pack OLP NL AE Device CAL
6UA-02544 Windows Small Bus CAL Ste Sngl Lic/SA Pack OLP B AE User CAL
6UA-02658 Windows Small Bus CAL Ste Sngl Lic/SA Pack OLP NL Device CAL
6UA-02659 Windows Small Bus CAL Ste Sngl Lic/SA Pack OLP C User CAL
6UA-02661 Windows Small Bus CAL Ste Sngl Lic/SA Pack OLP NL User CAL
6UA-02662 Windows Small Bus CAL Ste Sngl SA OLP C Device CAL
6UA-02664 Windows Small Bus CAL Ste Sngl SA OLP NL Device CAL
6UA-02665 Windows Small Bus CAL Ste Sngl SA OLP C User CAL
6UA-02667 Windows Small Bus CAL Ste Sngl SA OLP NL User CAL
6UA-02668 Windows Small Bus CAL Ste 2008 Sngl OLP C Device CAL
6UA-02545 Windows Small Bus CAL Ste Sngl Lic/SA Pack OLP NL AE User CAL
6UA-02546 Windows Small Bus CAL Ste Sngl SA OLP B AE Device CAL
6UA-02547 Windows Small Bus CAL Ste Sngl SA OLP NL AE Device CAL
6UA-02548 Windows Small Bus CAL Ste Sngl SA OLP B AE User CAL
6UA-02549 Windows Small Bus CAL Ste Sngl SA OLP NL AE User CAL
6UA-02550 Windows Small Bus CAL Ste 2008 Sngl OLP B AE Device CAL
6UA-02551 Windows Small Bus CAL Ste 2008 Sngl OLP NL AE Device CAL
6UA-02552 Windows Small Bus CAL Ste 2008 Sngl OLP B AE User CAL
6UA-02553 Windows Small Bus CAL Ste 2008 Sngl OLP NL AE User CAL
Friday, 14 November 2008
Single CALs? Great. But Where’s the Open License Option?
From a costs point of view one of the biggest changes with the new version of SBS is the availability of single CALs. With SBS 2003 the minimum purchase was five, so if you had a customer with six users they would have to buy ten CALs. For budget conscious customers this wasn’t the greatest piece of news when discussing implementing SBS.
The initial minimum purchase is still the five CALs that ship with SBS Standard or Premium, but after that you can switch to purchasing single CALs. When drawing up a reference spreadsheet of the various part numbers for SBS 2008 and CAL options, I stumbled across a missing piece. I found the part numbers for single CALs in Open Value License (OVL), FPP and OEM, but not Open License (OL).
Previously we’ve almost always sold OEM, but we’re now shifting towards Open Licenses to enable transfer rights, which in turn also allows our new DR plan to work. OVL is one option but has the added cost of Software Assurance (SA) which I don’t see the value in as SBS 2008 isn’t going to be replaced in the next 3 years. Saying that there is one good reason to sell OVL and that’s the split payment option – a customer can pay for the licenses over 3 years, instead of up front and there’s no added cost, in effect 0% APR.
So unless a customer wants to split their payments, we’re going to be offering OL, but now we run into the problem that there doesn’t seem to be a single CAL license option… Surely this is just an oversight on MS’s part, but so far my questions to them about it via Eric Ligman and Emily Lambert remain unanswered…
I’ll keep looking and add an update here if I find anything, but if anyone else already knows the answer I’d love to hear it.
Wednesday, 12 November 2008
Time to Migrate to SBS 2008
Today is the official launch of Windows Essential Server Solutions, which to you and me really means Small Business Server 2008. Here at Sirona Solutions we’ve been running the beta for some time, but not as our production server. We’re now recommending SBS 2008 to potential new customers, so it’s definitely time to start using it on a daily basis. So what’s holding us back? Lack of disk space and memory…
We run our production servers on a Dell PE2950 running VMWare ESX 3.5 and it’s been an excellent solution. Unfortunately what was a very decent spec just over a year ago, is now not enough to add a fourth virtual server. All eight memory slots are full (8 x 1Gb) and to upgrade it you have to remove the lot. Eight lots of 2Gb is expensive enough, but looking forward perhaps the even more expensive option of 4 x 4Gb would be better, leaving four slots free for further expansion. As for the disk space, I’m hoping VMWare support are going to be able to help me clear up some files to enough room.
Once we get past the problem of upgrading the server, the business of actually migrating comes up. Microsoft have released the official migration document and Jamie Burgess has a few useful pointers on his blog too. VMWare has the great feature of Snapshots which allow you to take a point-in-time image which you can revert back to in seconds. I’ve used this in previous major software changes and it’s like having the undo feature in Word and the value is even greater in a migration scenario.
Vijay has posted some good notes on his experience of upgrading and I’ll be sure to do the same when we move over. Has anyone else already done the deed?
Friday, 7 November 2008
Symantec Backup Exec Road Show
I’m sat in Birmingham New Street station waiting for my train back to Stockport to leave. I travelled down this morning for Symantec’s Backup Exec Road Show and it was certainly worth the trip. I haven’t used Backup Exec since my corporate days, but recent research has shown it’s still considered the backup software to use and we’re preparing a new backup strategy to offer to our customers. Alongside this strategy is a disaster recovery option and that was my main reason for attending the road show today.
Backup Exec System Recovery (BESR) is a very impressive piece of software for, surprisingly enough, recovering your system. It’s basically an imaging solution with support for incremental backups. So you do one big image of your system to an internal drive, USB device, NAS box or even an FTP server (really needs to be local). Once that big image is done you can then schedule incrementals, which means your image is kept up to date while the backup times are kept to a minimum. In the event of a disaster rendering your server inoperable you boot your standby server from a PE boot CD, point at the image and within an hour your standby server is running just like your original.
Recovery to dissimilar hardware as above is one option, but what if you don’t even want to wait an hour? BESR also gives you the option to create virtual images of your production server, giving you a VMDK file for VMWare or the Hyper-V equivalent (note to self, must read up on Hyper-V). Incrementals are supported again, so you do that one big backup and then just run an incremental each night/hour/minute, whatever your preference. Then in the event of a disaster you turn up to site with your loan server already running VMWare/Hyper-V, copy over the virtual image file and have the server up and running in ten or fifteen minutes!
Finally another great use for BESR is one that Mr Richard Tubb of Netlink-IT highlighted. He recently migrated a customer to a new server and instead of following MS’s published and painful documentation (I have first hand experience of the pain) or even a swing migration, Ric just used BESR. Using the first scenario I outlined, he booted from the PE disk and loaded up the image, less than an hour later the customer was migrated! Compare that to the two days I spent migrating a customer using MS’s method, I know which I’ll do in the future.
Now, lets see if I can publish this while sat at Wolverhampton station!
Sunday, 24 August 2008
Peer Groups
Something that surprised me when we started Sirona was the open nature of other businesses. This first started with my good friend Jason Stephanides of Onsite Solutions. Jason was a massive help in getting Sirona going, giving us loads of great support and advice.
Soon after starting Sirona I discovered this open nature extended well beyond personal friends. I've discovered various small business communities focused on the delivery of IT services, specifically in the Microsoft arena. The first of these was the Yahoo Group UKSBSG, there's a great bunch of people there who are always very quick to respond to technical or business related questions. There are a number of other groups offering similar communities, but not focused on the UK market:
Another slightly different group is SMBManagedServices, this has been a fantastic resource for developing our business in the Managed Services sector.
Offline, another great group has been the Manchester SBS Group. SBS Groups are found worldwide and are generally focused around Microsoft Small Business Server (SBS). The Manchester group had gone quiet for a while and in March 2008 a couple of Microsoft employees started to rally the troops to get it going again. Chris Parkes, Partner Technology Specialist and Danny Ovens, Northwest Regional Development Manager were both fundamental in getting the group going again. Chris and Danny were originally running the group, but felt it would be better to have one of the community running it. Last week Simon Belt of Simply Better IT took the reins and quickly put up a website dedicated to the group. I'm sure Simon will do a great job going forward.
Our SBS group meets once a month, generally on the third Thursday. Last week our usual host wasn't available and I'm happy to say Sirona was able to stand in and provide a room at Sirona House. We also had guests, Gareth Hall, Microsoft Windows Server Product Manager, Emily Lambert, Microsoft SBSC Programme Lead and Vijay Singh Riyait from iQubed.
I look forward to our SBS meeting every month and always find it a very rewarding evening. I should be bringing two guests to next months meeting - details in a future post - and in October we're having a launch event for SBS 2008.
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