Saturday 31 August 2013

Windows Server 2012 Essentials Error: DHCP Failed To Install 0x800F0922

We are running a greenfield Windows Server 2012 Essentials with Exchange on-premises setup this weekend.

After setting the server’s IP to static we ran the DHCP Role install and hit:

image

Feature Installation

The request to add or remove features on the specified server failed.

Installation of one or more roles, role services, or features failed. Error: 0x800F0922

This particular setup is being done in our shop. So, we are using one of our own Cisco units to provide gateway services.

In the end it turned out that when we configured the Cisco ISA520 for the network’s subnet we had left DHCP on!

So, when that error happens make sure there are no DHCP services running on the network. Once we turned the Cisco DHCP service off we were able to install the DHCP Role, Authorize it, and set up our scope.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

Chef de partie in the SMBKitchen
Find out more at
www.thirdtier.net/enterprise-solutions-for-small-business/

Windows Live Writer

Friday 30 August 2013

Labour Day Long Weekend!

We won’t be taking too much of a break this weekend due to a lot of projects on the go.

But, there may be a day or two that we can take aside and enjoy some peace and quiet and maybe a cold one. :)

Hopefully you will be able to take some time off and enjoy the fruits of your labours!

Have a great and safe long weekend everyone.

Thanks for reading!

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

Chef de partie in the SMBKitchen
Find out more at
www.thirdtier.net/enterprise-solutions-for-small-business/

Windows Live Writer

Thursday 29 August 2013

Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack - Crash Dump Analyzer

This is probably one of the best tools, next to Lock Smith, in the Diagnostics and Recovery Toolset:

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We are in the process of analyzing a bunch of MiniDump files from a system we just swapped an Asus motherboard in.

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After each analysis it has become quite apparent that perhaps there is a bad memory stick in the system. ;)

Since our clients are on Desktop Operating System Software Assurance with the MDOP add-on for their systems we have access to this tool. It is a lot simpler to set up and get going than any other method out there.

Besides the DaRT one also receives some key virtualization rights for desktop operating systems! Software Assurance + MDOP for desktop OS is worth checking out.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

Chef de partie in the SMBKitchen
Find out more at
www.thirdtier.net/enterprise-solutions-for-small-business/

Windows Live Writer

Wednesday 28 August 2013

Some Thoughts on Microsoft in the SMB Space

If one approaches this post from an emotional level, that is built on all of the angst, struggles, and pain born of the Cloud drums out of Microsoft, that is their message but also the many products and services cancellations, over these last three or so years then it would not be hard to go down a very not-so-happy path.

So many bridges between Microsoft and us IT Solution Providers that work on the front lines of the SMB IT space (by our definition SMB is 1-75 seats or so) have been burned or even out-right blown up.

Many of us have struggled with the angst over where we were going to take our business and what kind of business model we would have two, five, and even ten years down the road. After all, we are in it for the long-haul right?

Why We Do IT

This post is more a reflection of the SMB IT Provider that is in the business out of passion for the products and services we get to work with. But, most especially for the joy it brings us to have a set of very happy clients on the other end of our IT practices.

That is our greatest reward. That is clients whose businesses are in the business to make money and do so as efficiently as possible on their IT because of what we do for them.

For us, the reality has come home to roost that Microsoft is much less a partner today than a competitor.

Yes, we are still building our solutions on the Microsoft stack and will continue to do so. Our solutions absolutely rock utilizing the products we do. We will continue building solutions that our competitors, like Microsoft and other large IT Solutions providers, could hardly hope to develop for their clients.

Why?

Because we as small business IT Solutions Providers live, breath, and work in the SMB Trenches. We understand small business in a way that a Gartner Survey or any other such knowledge peddlers could never hope to. This is because we _are_ a small business.

We small businesses are _not_ consumers, pro-sumers, or any other such "consumer" of goods and services.

We _produce_ products and services for others to consume. Or, we develop and sell products and services for other businesses to utilize in their _production_ of goods and services (Business to Business).

Microsoft's Value in SMB

So, what value do we see in Microsoft in today's SMB IT marketplace?

  • Products/Features
    • Hyper-V
      • Virtualization solutions have become affordable, both on VMware and Hyper-V, as a result of the competition between the two.
        • All one needs to do is watch VMware's stock and current restructuring efforts to see the impact Hyper-V has had on their margins.
      • Stack builds on a single box save our clients a lot on hardware, power consumption, cooling, and noise.
      • Clusters are very affordable for our clients when truly commodity based hardware (Intel Server Systems) are utilized over Tier 1.
    • Windows Server Essentials Experience Role
      • Finally, the Remote Web Access portal, RD Gateway, and other SBS-Like goodies can be dropped into a Windows Server Standard server setup.
    • Storage Spaces
      • Still new, but with lots of potential to impact how we do things for our clients with larger data sets.
    • Exchange
      • Despite the poor start to the product at what was probably Early Preview bits branded as RTM, Exchange Server 2013 is an awesome product with great potential for on-premises mail and BYOD management.
  • Partner Program
    • Loss of the Small Business Specialist program.
      • This is probably the "nail in the coffin" as far as the Cloud message to SMB IT Providers.
    • Competency Program structures drive us to expand or further distance ourselves from the Partner Program
      • Some of us are not comfortable with the idea of hiring on.
      • Plus, there are any number of other reasons for us to remain where we are at for now.
      • There are opportunities though. We just need the vision, time, and energy to pick them out and develop them.
    • Cloud, Cloud, Cloud, Cloud (Monty Python-esque theme here :) )
      • The drums are still beating.
      • The message is becoming all the clearer: Folks in SMB do not require any outside IT help. You can do it all yourself!
    • Cloud Essentials Program
      • Better get on board and start playing around with the freebie credit for Azure as this is one spot where we can develop some business opportunities.
  • TechNet
    • Now, keep in mind that folks that are Open Licensed will continue on with their TechNet subscriptions that are a Software Assurance benefit.
    • The loss of TechNet for lab use is most certainly of concern, but one has to wonder why it was terminated.
      • IMNSHO, we are at a point where the passionate SMB IT Provider, and Microsoft, have received yet another black eye due to the unscrupulous folks that abuse the system.

We are of the opinion that the current wave of Microsoft products, with the exception of Office 2013, are probably some of the best that we've seen in years.

Yes, mousers cried foul over the loss of the Start Button in Windows 8. But keyboarders never missed it. :) And yeah, there is a bit of a training struggle for folks to understand that there are two "rooms" if you will in Windows 8.

Microsoft "Partner"

With all of the changes that we've seen in Microsoft over these last two to three years we really have to wonder where they are going to be in two, three, or even five years.

Sadly the reality that the desktop PC is not really going to disappear in a business setting does not seem to phase anyone in stratosphere management at large corporations like Microsoft. :(

To top it all off, IMNSHO, the server is _not_ going to disappear in the SMB space.  Nor will the need for on-premises mail.

However, with the advent of so many failed/bad Microsoft product updates lately on so many products, some bringing down Hyper-V Failover Clusters, one really has to wonder how far off the vision has gone from providing a rock solid on-premises product experience from RTM to retirement?

Hopefully the bad patching situation that has been happening lately is only temporary and Microsoft moves some development back into actually testing those updates before deploying them to the world.

After all, being in business is about the products and services right? It's about providing the best possible value to the end-customer/client isn't it?

Can folks _really trust_ a company to provide a great Cloud experience when it seems like the on-premises products and services may be on their death-beds? Why develop patches and _test_ them if there is no will to keep the on-premises products alive?

And that begs this question: Can we SMB IT Solution Providers trust a company that has not come right out and said it, but has essentially drummed the message all the more clearly in these last 12-18 months that the "end is nigh" for the SMB IT Solution Provider? SMB belongs in the Cloud after all. Right?

Be straight with us. Be clear with us. If we knew where we truly stood as a "Partner" of Microsoft we would be better able to make decisions about where we are and where we need to go in the new era of competition _with_ Microsoft.

Trust is based on honesty between the parties. The messages out of Microsoft have been so mixed, and sometimes outright confusing, these last few years that one is never sure where we stand anymore.

Most certainly we need to be very aware, and wary, of what is happening both within the companies that produce the products we utilize and then within the product groups themselves.

Business Opportunities

On the flip-side the current state of SMB IT can provide an awesome opportunity for us to advance our on-premises and hybrid solution sets and skillsets. While it may seem daunting at first, we can indeed continue to build our SMB IT practice and triumph despite the naysayer's constant messages!

And, perhaps in the midst of all of this we could end up growing our businesses into that Microsoft Partner Competency holder that would get noticed and direct Partner support (note the absence of the quotes).

In the end, we may not reach those competency levels and/or even get noticed.

But, we can go home at the end of the day, maybe work a bit in the evening for our clients, knowing full well that there is a great group of folks, our clients, on the receiving end of our products and services that are very happy with us and what we do.

And that my friends is why, for the most part, we can sleep well at night eh? ;)

Well, maybe most nights. We are, after all, small business owners so the occasional sleepless night is a prerequisite! :D

Thanks for reading.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

Chef de partie in the SMBKitchen
Find out more at
www.thirdtier.net/enterprise-solutions-for-small-business/

Windows Live Writer

Tuesday 27 August 2013

Our Value to Our Clients is in Our Knowledge and Experience

(Posted to the SBS2K Yahoo Group)

When we look at SBS 2003 and the growth in product and features over its lifespan we have an idea of how the single box will perform.

SBS 2008 and Exchange 2007 we encountered an exponential growth in the need for disk I/O due to Exchange and RAM due to both Windows Server (Vista code) and Exchange.

Move to SBS 2010 and Exchange 2010 and if we were keeping an eye on the various product groups and their direction for the product we would have seen _before_ SBS 2011 STD ever RTMd that Exchange 2010 was designed to run on one SATA hard disk with everything in RAM. We would have then planned our deployments, both physical and then virtual as that became much more common, around the server products built-in.

The key to any single host design or cluster design is in what will be running on top of them. Obviously, but maybe not?

Here, our experience comes into play if we have been taking the SBS product and tearing it apart for the last ten years and three major product iterations. The inner-workings of SBS, Exchange, Active Directory, Group Policy, SharePoint, and so many other server feature sets were there for us to explore. Not only that, Microsoft gave us a really solid template to carry forward into our now stacked solution sets.

  • VM0: AD, DNS, DHCP
  • VM1: Exchange or LoB
  • VM2: SQL or LoB
  • VM3: RDS

Provisioning the above has not changed in a sense. We need to augment our host configuration for the extra 15GB of OS space per VM perhaps. But, for the most part our physical hardware will be similar in nature to what we would deploy for previous versions of SBS Standard _given the products running in the suite_.

The key in all of this is knowing how the various server products will behave given certain workloads.

SQL has an I/O tester. Exchange has a load tester called Jetstress. Those two utilities can help us understand what our small, medium, and large clients can expect for a given server topology. They can also help us to deliver a solution tailored to their specific needs.

Having a lab is key to getting to know the products and how to put them together.

Testing _every_ solution that goes out the door before actually setting up the client’s own solution set is also critical.

Knowledge is key to our value to our clients. Lose that and we’ve pretty much lost the game.

It takes lots of time. It can take a lot of money. But, in the end training and grinding away at configurations in a lab is key to our client’s success and to ours as well.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

Chef de partie in the SMBKitchen
Find out more at
www.thirdtier.net/enterprise-solutions-for-small-business/

Windows Live Writer

Exchange Error: Edit E-mail Address Policy – Address List Service Cannot Be Found

We were attempting to update the E-mail Address Policy (EAP) on an Exchange server and hit this error:

image

Edit E-mail Address Policy

The wizard could not complete.

Error:

An Exchange 2007 server on which an address list service is active cannot be found.

This particular SBS 2008 with Exchange 2007 was being tweaked as it is a restore into our lab cluster setup.

A quick search pointed to the Exchange System Attendant service not being online and sure enough it was not.

After starting the server we had a successful EAP change:

image

We could then move on to our next tasks at hand for this project.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

Chef de partie in the SMBKitchen
Find out more at
www.thirdtier.net/enterprise-solutions-for-small-business/

Windows Live Writer

Monday 26 August 2013

Domain Join Error: Cannot Complete This Function

In our newly recovered SBS 2008 environment we have not restored our client's Windows Server 2012 DC.

When attempting to join a freshly installed Windows 7 VM via http://connect we hit the following error:

13-08-26 BIO-Recovery - 02 Cannot complete this function ERROR

Connect Computer Error Details

ERROR: Connecting to the network

Cannot complete this function

Now, we then went and tried to join the VM manually and this is what we hit:

image

Computer Name/Domain Changes

The following error occurred attempting to join the domain "domain.local":

Cannot complete this function.

After verifying that DHCP was only handing out the recovered SBS as the only DNS server we went on to clean out DSSite.msc of the secondary DC and then on to DNS to clean up domain.local and _msdcs.domain.local.

Once we cleaned out the references to the now absent DC we had a successful domain join.

Moral of the story: If a now defunct DC still exists in Active Directory Sites and Services and/or DNS then clean-up including metadata clean-up (KB216498) may be required.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

Chef de partie in the SMBKitchen
Find out more at
www.thirdtier.net/enterprise-solutions-for-small-business/

Windows Live Writer

Xbox Music Error: Can’t Play 0xc00d11cd (0x80004002)

This is pretty strange.

One of our workbench systems is tied into our Xbox Music Pass and happily sends tunes into the shop while working.

Wanting to start some tunes while remotely connected from the front office via RDP produced the following error:

image

Can’t play.

Please try again. If the problem continues, visit www.xbox.com/support to check for guidance.

0xc00d11cd (0x80004002)

Okay, tunes were working just fine yesterday evening while working in the shop so what gives?

We logged into the physical machine and attempted to play the tunes again. Sure enough, after logging in and hitting play on one of our playlists we heard tunes.

image

We now have 500 watts of THX certified sound happening! :D

Have finicky ears? Then check out the Logitech Speaker System Z906 THX certified speakers. They sound absolutely phenomenal.

The moral of the story? Xbox Music will _not_ work when connected via RDP session.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

Chef de partie in the SMBKitchen
Find out more at
www.thirdtier.net/enterprise-solutions-for-small-business/

Windows Live Writer

Friday 23 August 2013

Dealing with an Emergency

Some days are a bit tougher than others.

image

Apparently the big gap the kitten used to get into the back side of the box holding up the garage heating system’s water tank was not the way he ultimately decided to exit.

One of the major lessons learned over the years when it comes to confronting a serious problem is first to _not_ panic.

If the situation was dire, then there may be a need to put the back against the wall and squat down all the while doing controlled breathing exercises to gain a hold on the rush of adrenalin, fears, and angst that is surely to be happening.

Taking that first step to be somewhat calm in the midst of what could be utter chaos is critical.

From there, we need to walk through and discover as many steps as we can that led to the problem we are facing. Finding out as much information about the circumstances prior to the emergency can be very helpful in figuring out a diagnosis and the next steps to get out of the situation.

Yes, folks may be hovering over and repeatedly interrupting us as we try and work our way back into a functioning system. A gentle, “We are working on the situation, we will update you as soon as there are any changes” will go a long way towards reducing those interruptions that can actually pose a grave threat to a successful completion of the task(s) at hand.

Make sure to have paper and pens/pencils in hand. Write everything down.

We should have our own laptop/ultrabook/tablet and a cell modem set up. Also, we need to have the client’s network audit notes open and available for immediate perusal. Using our own equipment would help keep things calm and on the level due to being familiar with our own equipment.

In other words, in as much as we possibly can, be prepared.

Oh, and use caution if a drive will be required to get to the client site!

image

Needless to say he was stuck in there for quite a while before yours truly rescued him by getting him out the same way he got into that hole that was _just_ enough for his head to fit through!

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

Chef de partie in the SMBKitchen
Find out more at
www.thirdtier.net/enterprise-solutions-for-small-business/

Windows Live Writer

Thursday 22 August 2013

SMB Kitchen – Presenting at the SMB TechFest in Orange County, CA October 19th!

I’m excited to announce that I will be doing some presenting at the upcoming TechFest in Orange County, California! :)

Amy Babinchak will be delving into the changes we are seeing in our industry and how she is working those changes into her own IT practice Harbor Computer Services.

Boon Tee will be looking at Hyper-V Replica and how it can be deployed in all manner of businesses.

Susan Bradley is going to present on a wide variety of security issues that SMB faces today and some of the tools that can be used to address them.

I will be delving into the materials I have already posted to the SMB Kitchen on Hyper-V, clustering with Hyper-V, with a special focus on selling Hyper-V clusters into SMB starting at the 15 seat level and above.

We will also have a Q&A session at the end where folks will be able to ask us questions.

And, of course, we will have lots of time to kibitz throughout the event!

image

If you can please join Amy Babinchak, Boon Tee, Susan Bradley, and myself for an excellent business and technical focused non-marketing fluff day. I can guarantee you there will be pearls to be had! :D

Oh, and we will have whiteboards for discussion times! W00t!

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

Chef de partie in the SMB Kitchen
Find out more at
www.thirdtier.net/enterprise-solutions-for-small-business/

Windows Live Writer

Wednesday 21 August 2013

Kiss-o'-Death Packet - Time Then and Now

In the days where CMOS and on board clocks ruled the roost time was rock solid. Between atomic clocks that became common place on the Internet and CMOS one never really had to worry too much about it. If there was a bit of a difference the OS would shift the CMOS clock back into alignment. Case closed.

The difference with virtualization is the separation between the OS and the hardware.

Now, one would think that all we really need to do is enable the sync between host and guest via their guest utilities. But a DC cannot be dependent on the host because the guest is not allowed to adjust the time _on_ the host if it is out of sync. If the host carries the DC way out of sync with the rest of the network toast is made.

We’ve seen clusters go down because of time being out of whack.

Our timing post has a registry edit in it that we used to do on 2008 RTM that allowed the guest to ping the host for time but once the OS was up and running it would pick up from ntp.org or whatever.

That registry edit is now there by default from what we have seen.

The time structures were never intended to compensate for today’s virtualization environment since no one could have envisioned the setup in the first place back then.

Now, look up “Kiss-o’-Death Packet” (NTP.ORG site). And we see why we need to be _very_ careful around the time setup on our virtualization platforms.

This packet is the primary reason we make sure we have a physical box set up on the local network to poll for the correct time within the virtualization environment. That box polls ntp.org. The virtualized DC polls that box as it will not stop answering like ntp.org would if polls are more frequent.

Imagine a high load VM setup where the PDC is set to poll ntp.org but the admin set up a script to run the poll a lot more frequently. After exhausting the ntp.org servers in its list due to Kiss-o'-Death Packets it would be hooped and time would go awry on that network.

Since we don’t work with VMware we personally am not aware of how that server setup can work as an NTP server.

We do, however, highly suggest making sure being aware of the perils of time when virtualized.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

Chef de partie in the SMBKitchen
Find out more at
www.thirdtier.net/enterprise-solutions-for-small-business/

Windows Live Writer

Tuesday 20 August 2013

Intel Modular Server – Setting up Untagged VLANs for Dedicated Compute NIC Port to External Port Must Do

We followed these instructions to set up a dedicated external port for each Compute Module NIC as we have several physical networks to work with (lab and management).

image

The catch was after completing the settings on Switch 1 everything kept working but once Switch 2’s Save Settings button was clicked on packets stopped flowing in and out of the IMS switches.

We did not, however, figure out exactly what was going on until we ran through the setup process a number of times as it turned out that one of the mezzanine network adapters has a faulty port thus contributing to the confusion.

After running through the setup process a few times we were able to replicate the problem consistently.

A call into Intel Channel Support and about 45 minutes with Christian and we had the answer:

image

Disable Span Tree for the external ports.

  1. Click on Configure Ports
  2. Change the Spanning Tree setting for the VLAN dedicated external ports
    • image
  3. Click Apply
  4. Click on Switch 2
  5. Repeat

Once we had the above two steps complete:

image

All four NICs showed green and our setup went live without a hitch.

We have one Compute Module running as DC and two others as Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V nodes for a 2012 failover cluster.

We then have two Intel Server System SR1695GPRX2AC 1U single socket servers tied to a Promise VTrak E610sD that are running Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 set up as Hyper-V nodes for a 2008 R2 cluster.

Now that we have this networking problem figured out we can move on to our work!

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

Chef de partie in the SMBKitchen
Find out more at
www.thirdtier.net/enterprise-solutions-for-small-business/

Windows Live Writer

Monday 19 August 2013

Server 2012–Unidentified Network with Team Set As Public

This is a bit of a frustrating problem:

image

After setting up the team things were fine.

However, after a reboot the server has disappeared on the network.

After logging in we see that the team is active but the network is unidentified and the firewall is on Public:

image

Restart the Network Location Awareness service:

image

Then hit refresh in the Firewall MMC:

image

And refresh in NCPA.CPL (Network Connections):

image

It turns out that in situations where a Windows Server 2012 native NIC team is set up the Network Location Awareness service should be set to Automatic (Delayed Start) to give the team time to start!

image

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

Chef de partie in the SMBKitchen
Find out more at
www.thirdtier.net/enterprise-solutions-for-small-business/

Windows Live Writer

Wednesday 14 August 2013

Microsoft Slaughtering It’s Own Cash Cow?

We in SMB IT have been hearing the Microsoft Cloud Drums for quite a few years now.

In the first year or two the call was along the lines of how great Microsoft’s new Cloud was to be and how we were all going to do well selling it.

Well, in SMB IT that pretty much fell flat on its face once it became apparent the SMB IT Provider was not be be billing the customer Microsoft was.

Plus, where was the SMB IT Provider supposed to fit in to the picture anyway?

The drums kept beating but the SMB IT Solution Provider did not listen.

Microsoft made some changes in their sales model for the Microsoft Cloud product line that allowed the SMB IT Provider to bill their clients, but uptake was probably very slow if at all.

Off to conferences and Webinars we go where “Partners” trumpet their great success selling Microsoft and other Cloud Vendor’s wares. How great their success was they were proclaiming but in the end we received a lot of fluff with little substance.

The drums are still beating today. However, they no longer beat for us to take up the call and sell Microsoft Cloud.

IMNSHO, they now beat the message to the end customer to avoid working with us altogether.

You don’t need the SMB IT Provider! You can do it all yourself! We’re making it really easy for you!

To be fair, Microsoft pushed really hard to get the SMB IT Provider on board with training and certification. They spent hundreds of thousands if not millions on getting us to on-board with the Small Business Specialist Community and the certification structures it required.

Those of us that took up to that beat, that is the SBSC and all it entailed, did really well and Microsoft took great pains to support us.

Unfortunately, in the end, the folks that drove Microsoft to create the SBSC and make efforts to bring things up to par kept on doing what they were doing: Giving Microsoft and other legitimate SMB IT Providers a black eye.

As much as the “Trusted Advisor” role has been poo poo’d by many behind the Cloud drum beating we are the ones that the SMB Business Owner will listen to over commercials, surveys, and Consumer Reports.

Yes, the ones responsible for the black eyes for both Microsoft and those SMB IT Providers doing the right thing will be the ones most hurt by their customers bailing away from the pain they’ve been in for however many years by adopting the Cloud over on-premises.

Why would those customers, that is the ones that have been repeatedly burned, trust us anyway? And why would they trust Microsoft to provide a Cloud service that say Google or Amazon may be able to do just as well if not better?

While we and our client population may not be in the majority as far as SMB IT, we do represent a substantial number of small to medium businesses and the directions they take with the IT infrastructure.

A sales driver within SMB is the excited Geek coming in with a new product that perfectly fits in to their client’s business model. In fact, the Geek would have a demo prepared that directly relates to _that specific client_ without even thinking about it.

That situation translates into sales. _Lots_ of sales. And business owners talk.

Perhaps I’m overestimating our worth here? Maybe I am but then again, maybe I am not.

The drums today are beating “You SMB Business go Cloud. Period.”

We are cautioning our clients that a hybrid approach may be a better rule of thumb for so many reasons. Think PRISM for one and the Patriot Act for another.

Now, given the Microsoft’s position for us is all-in for the Cloud one has to wonder how long it will be before Microsoft removes the “choice” in SME and Enterprise environments?

Meaning, how long before Microsoft makes on-premises a lot more expensive than their Cloud offerings to in effect remove that option?

Certainly the restructuring that has happened around a services model this new Microsoft fiscal year may indicate such.

Most certainly Microsoft is at a crossroads.

Depending on the tact they take over the next 12 to 24 months we could see a vastly different company down the road that may in fact be more like Apple was before it was bailed out or like RIM is today.

Drum beating the message and forcing us in SMB into a direction because as single units we are essentially powerless against them is one thing (though we’ve been seeing that we are not so powerless after all over this last year or so).

However, trying the same tact with SME and Enterprise businesses may well fall flat on its face.

No one person or business has ever liked being shoe-horned into an option.

If given no option by a vendor, then it is more likely that another will be found, or much to the possible surprise of Microsoft, and others before them, the business may carry on and/or build what is needed from within.

Most certainly changes are afoot and we need to be very aware of what is happening around us!

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

Chef de partie in the SMBKitchen
Find out more at
www.thirdtier.net/enterprise-solutions-for-small-business/

Windows Live Writer

Friday 2 August 2013

A Really Good Read on the State of IT and Cloud Outsourcing

It seems that Aidan Finn and I are somewhat on the same page as far as how the Cloud has been significantly strong due to the “Bad IT Pro”.

Indeed, if we in the SMB community especially had a majority of IT Pros that fit into the “Good IT Pro” category as defined by Aidan the Cloud would probably have little place in the small to medium business.

Now, have a listen to my interview podcast with Robert Crane of CIAOPS in Australia that was done in December of 2012:

Robert and I have a pretty good parlay around the Cloud versus on-premises situation in SMB IT with my touching on the need to be trained, keep up on the tech, and work hard at IT!

Ultimately, it is our responsibility to make sure our skill-set is up to the task of providing the best IT Solutions for our clients. This task costs in both time and money with the investment, yes it _is_ an investment to get trained, paying off in ways we sometimes are not able to anticipate!

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

Chef de partie in the SMBKitchen
Find out more at
www.thirdtier.net/enterprise-solutions-for-small-business/

Windows Live Writer

Exchange Transport TLS Certificate Expiry Warnings and/or Errors

For those that have been supporting SBS Standard for a number of years now will be finding that Exchange Self-Issued certificates are expiring.

One self-issued certificate, and note that it seems to be independent of the SBS Third Party Trusted Certificates Wizard, is used for Transport Layer Security (TLS).

    MSExchangeTransport

    Event Details:   

    There is no valid SMTP Transport Layer Security (TLS) certificate for the FQDN of SBS.DOMAIN.local. The existing certificate for that FQDN has expired. The continued use of that FQDN will cause mail flow problems. A new certificate that contains the FQDN of SBS.DOMAIN.local should be installed on this server as soon as possible. You can create a new certificate by using the New-ExchangeCertificate task.

The domain listed in the error is the key to figuring out which Thumbprint we need.

  • Open Exchange PowerShell (Run As Admin)
  • Get-ExchangeCertificate | Select CertificateDomains,Thumbprint,Status,Services | fl

The resulting list will post all certificates installed in the Personal Store on that server. Note the certificate with an INVALID status that points to SERVER.DOMAIN.LOCAL.

Copy the GUID and paste it into the following command:

  • Get-ExchangeCertificate –Thumbprint GUIDHere | New-ExchangeCertificate

At the prompt to replace the existing certificate answer Yes.

The expired certificate should now be replaced and Exchange Transport will continue on.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

Chef de partie in the SMBKitchen
Find out more at
www.thirdtier.net/enterprise-solutions-for-small-business/

Windows Live Writer