Monday, April 30, 2012

DPM 2010 Server Processor running at 100%




I recently fixed a problem for a customer whereby their DPM2010 server was very slow to do anything. Even opening up the GUI was taking a long time.

The server in question was a HP Proliant DL380G5.

So to fix it I needed to do 2 things.

  1. Update the storage controller's firmware and driver.

  2. As per the image above , login to the msdpm2010 instance and change the value in the red circle to 300 and reboot server.
Problem solved :)

Monday, April 23, 2012

Broken Hyper-V AVHD Chain recovery

I have been helping people around the world recover data from Hyper-V avhd chain disasters since 2009. I have helped people in a lot of countries and cities , some of which include.

Newyork
California
Seattle
New Hampshire
New Orleans
Germany
Paris
London
Sweden
Belgium
Netherlands
Australia
Singapore
Korea
Russia

People find me for help via the following forum posts.


  1. Snapshots are not for production servers. They are not backups.
  2. Never delete a snapshot in a chain.
  3. If you delete a snapshot via hyper-v console , wait for it to merge back into it's parent.
  4. Use Microsoft DPM 2012 and hardware vss writers where possible.
  5. Never increase the capacity of a base vhd when it has a broken avhd chain.
  6. Some recommendations on vhd recovery are visible on my linkedin profile
  7. Windows Server 2012 will make it easier to recover from broken snaphot chains.

Monday, April 16, 2012

Exchange 2010 SP2 RU1 & RU2 breaks OWA




Exchange 2010 Service Pack 2 Rollup 1 has broken some cas servers. I know it sounds crazy that an update direct from Microsoft would do this.

I have been working on a number of Exchange 2010 projects recently and both projects were using hardware load balancers. So i started to test the internal owa url on all of my cas servers and on some of the servers - the internal owa url wasn't working. So if that isn't working then OWA definitely wont work on that server. So to fix it is quite simple.

On the server that is having a problem. Delete the themes folder from both of these locations.

C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\V14\ClientAccess\Owa\14.2.283.3
C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\V14\ClientAccess\Owa\14.2.247.5

Once they are deleted then copy and paste themes folders from a healthy cas server back where they should go on the problematic server.

If the above steps dont work. Go to a server that is working ok and export the following regkeys and then add them to the server that had the problem and re-apply the rollup and problem will be solved.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\PowerShell\1\PowerShellSnapIns\Microsoft.Exchange.Management.PowerShell.E2010]

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\PowerShell\1\PowerShellSnapIns\Microsoft.Exchange.Management.PowerShell.Setup]

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\PowerShell\1\PowerShellSnapIns\Microsoft.Exchange.Management.Powershell.Support]