Oracle on Microsoft? Can it be?

Microsoft and Oracle announced a partnership allowing full support of Oracle products on Hyper-V and Azure. You can read the full announcement here http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/Press/2013/Jun13/06-24WSNewsPR.aspx. It will be interesting to see how this affects the adoption of Hyper-V and Azure as the platform for these enterprise workloads. This is good news for Oracle users and it shows a commitment from Oracle to support your infrastructure decisions and seems to be a much warmer embrace of virtualization than we have seen in the past. So the real question, will you be testing Oracle on Hyper-V or Azure soon?

Windows Phone 8 - Almost There

I switched to Windows Phone 8 a few months ago, and so far it has been an OK experience. There are definitely things I love about the phone, but there are some issues with a few key, simple tasks that can make for a very frustrating experience, especially when you spend half of every day using the device.

First, the things I love. As silly as this sounds, being able to pin a live tile of my wife is great. I can see all the updates she shares, get a glimpse of how her day is going and have a bit of involvement in my kids lives through this simple connection. Could I live without this? Sure, but it is a definite feature that makes this device great. Alright, so not everyone wants to see status updates from a favorite friend, so what else is there?
Office. Yes, Office as in Microsoft Office. I can view and edit Word, Excel, PowerPoint, SharePoint, etc all from my phone. Since I don't have a tethering plan, nor a hotspot, this makes sending data to colleagues and customers very easy while on the go. Also, this means I don't have to jump through hokey hoops of using half featured apps that I think find obscure ways to synchronize into the apps I use everyday to get real work done. I just open Word and there is my list of recent documents ready to go. Did I mention Lync 2013 for the Phone? Single button to launch a conference and share data, presentations, chat, conference calls, etc?!!! Saweeeet!
Voice recognition. Microsoft simply kicks butt when it comes to voice recognition. I remember my old Windows Mobile device had a voice search feature that worked flawlessly. When I switched to the iPhone and it couldn't do this I found myself missing it every day. Along came Siri and I thought Apple had finally figured out how to do search. Boy was I wrong. Siri was about as useful as talking to a cat. She would politely tell me she was useless and couldn't find what I was looking for, or wasn't able to take requests right now. Microsoft got this right and I can simply tell my phone what I want and up it comes, the first time.

Ok, now second for the bad. While voice recognition is great, search leaves me scratching my head. When I hit the search button that is conveniently built into the bottom right side of the phone, it searches the web, but totally ignores all of the contacts, documents, music, etc that I have stored locally on the device. So how do I search those things? Oh, I have to open the individual application, say Music, and then click a different search button that appears on the screen to search my library. Wait?! You sent it out like this? I'm sorry but even Apple got this right (even if the results are useless) they at least search the device.
Then there is the lack of support for comma's in phone numbers. This kills me. Nine times out of ten, I am in my car when making calls. This means I need to be able to click a number that shows up in those terribly long conference invites and just let the phone do the dialing. If I have to switch back to the invite, try to memorize the ever increasing number of digits for the conference ID, hit #, *, and whatever else these conference systems make you do, I am going to crash. And yes, Microsoft, if the number is in the location field it is still a phone number, so you can't just ignore it because it doesn't look like an address. This has to be a simple fix since they can detect numbers, so please add support for commas, and the location field (like Microsoft is going to read this).
This leads to my final issue, although unfortunately there are more but this covers the big ones. When I am in a call and switch to another app, the screen goes black and then locks the phone. Yes, I did update to the latest firmware, apps, etc and the issue persists. Not as bad as it was, but it still goes black and takes a second or two to let me unlock the phone and go back to the app.

SCOM 2007 R2 Demo

Whipped a demo lab together of SCOM 2007 R2 with Veeam Management Pack for VMware. Check out the pic below. If I get some time I will post more about the install process.

All told it took about 3 hours start to finish to get this running. I still have a bunch more to do to make it production ready, but for demo purposes this will do.

Here is a quick run down of the procedure:

1. Install SCOM 2007 R2 (for the demo i put everything on the same machine. Vmware VM, 1 vCPU, 4GB mem)
2. Install Veeam Enterprise Management Server (used the same VM as SCOM). Run the executable as Administrator on 2008 R2 or it will yell at you.
3. Install Veeam Enterprise UI (a web GUI for their EMS. should be the same install if you ask me, but...)
4. Run some SCOM agent commands to get all of the Veeam stuff registered. The MP uses the agent to make some registry changes to the server.
5. After all that I threw in an old fashioned reboot just for good measure. Non of this asked for a reboot, but I threw one in here because the agent takes a while to catch up with the registry changes it makes and I am impatient.
6. After the reboot all of the components showed up without issue. Several hours later I checked back in and took the picture above.

Exchange 2010 and VMware HA

Ok, so I have seen multiple different places confirming that Microsoft is not supporting VMware High Availability for Exchange 2010 DAG clusters. What I want to know is why? I don't see how HA is going to affect the cluster or servers functionality.

HA doesn't do anything to the running VM or change it in any way. It simply reboots the machine if the hosting server sustains a hardware failure (Or, if VM monitoring is turned on and the heartbeat fails). So, question is how is this any different than rebooting a physical server that is part of a DAG after it sustains a blue screen or hardware issue? Granted the VM will boot faster than a physical server, but what will go wrong if anything?

DAC will keep the server from mounting its databases if the owning server cannot be contacted. PAM and SAM should also keep the server from trying to become the active owner of the database after it reboots.

Anyone have insight on this? Also, I have seen others stating that VMotion/DRS will also not be supported. Same question there, this does not change the server, however there is the possiblity of a slight network blip during the move. Thoughts or knowledge of why this is their stance?

It is easy enough to turn these features off, but why lose these awesome features if you don't have to. I will most likely leave them on, and use them, unless I see them really break something.

How to Clean Up Your Mailbox

Search for large email messages.

• In Outlook, scroll down to Search Folders on the left side.
• Expand the Search Folders and you will see the default Large Mail folder.
• This will search your mailbox for items that are larger than 100KB and display them
• If you need to save the attachments from these messages, open the item(s) and save the attachment
• Delete the items that you no longer need and this will significantly reduce the size of your mailbox

 

Create Custom Search Folders

 
Like the Large Mail folder you can create additional search folders. A search folder that displays messages older than 120 days can be useful for finding those items that are no longer necessary to keep in your mailbox.

1. 
   
   Create a New Search Folder
   1. Right click the Search Folders item in Outlook and choose New Search Folder

1. 
   
   Create a folder that will find items older than 120 days
   1. 
      
      Scroll to the Organizing Mail section and choose Old Mail
      
      
   2. Click the Choose button to change the range of what will be included
      
   3. Show mail older than 4 months will give us anything older than our target of 120 days.
   4. Click OK on the Old Mail dialog box, and then OK again on the New Search Folder dialog.
   5. Review the items returned in this list and delete any items that you no longer need.

Configure AutoArchiving

 

1. To configure AutoArchiving in Outlook 2007, go to Tools | Options and open the Other Tab. To configure Outlook 2010 click on File | Options | Advanced and click the AutoArchive Settings button.
   
2. The default settings for AutoArchive are to run every 14 days and move old item to an archive file that will be stored on your computer
3. Do NOT archive items to your computer. These will not be backed up and if you need to access this data there is no guarantee that this file will be available when you need it.
4. Set the Clean out item older than to 24 months or greater. This will be the default setting for every folder.
5. For each folder in your mailbox, including the calendar, right click and choose properties
   
6. Click on the AutoArchive tab and set the policy for this folder
   
7. Set each folders policy as needed. Careful planning should be used when configuring AutoArchive to ensure needed data is not archived to a local drive or permanently deleted.

 

Example AutoArchive Settings

 
I have all folders by default set to "Do not archive items in this folder". I use mailbox rules to sort mail as it arrives, so messages that go to groups like alert messages are moved to individual folders. On these individual folders I then set "Archive this folder using these settings" and choose "Permanently delete old items", after specifying an appropriate period of time for these to expire. This combined with Search Folders allows me to easily manage my mailbox size.