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Last tuesday, October 14th 2008, Getronics delivered an impromptu musical to commuters in the main central trainstation Utrecht CS in The Netherlands. Travelers were astonished, then positively surprised with this latest marketing stunt from the newly revitalized IT company.
Watch the video on YouTube
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In an act of “endeavoring to deliver a release with support [that] customers deem important” VMware accidentally left a licensing timebomb enabled in the build that it shipped to customers about three weeks ago. The timebomb causes all installed licenses for ESX to be regarded as invalid on August 12, 2008. This in turn causes virtual machines to not be allowed to start from a powerdown or suspended state or allow virtual machines to be VMotioned to another ESX host.
VMware provides one way to prevent encountering the problem and one temporary workaround until they can provide a patch: VMware has released express patches to remedy the problem.
Full repeat of VMware’s latest e-mail advisory:
Dear VMware Customers,
We have released the express patches for the product expiration issue. Please go to http://www.vmware.com/go/esxexpresspatches for download and KB articles. Since our last customer email we have completed our verification tests that the express patches we’ve released are fully compatible with the VMware Update Manager. Please see the KB articles for deployment information regarding Update Manager.
The KB articles are kept up-to-date. Please refer to the KB articles for information and updates.
In our last update, we referred to an initiative by our support and engineering teams to find an option to apply the patch without the necessity of entering maintenance mode and VMotion of VM’s to other servers, or VM power-off and re-power-on. Our earlier tests have not found a consistently successful way to address this. We continue to investigate this possibility, as we know that it would reduce the maintenance burden on our customers who may not have a patched server available for VMotion.
We are on target to release updated versions of the ESX/ESXi 3.5 Update 2 patch at 6 PM PST today. This is for customers who have not already upgraded to the previously released version of ESX/ESXi 3.5 Update 2
Thank you,
The VMware ESX Product Team
Problem:
An issue has been discovered by many VMware customers and partners with ESX Update 2 (build number 103909) and ESXi 3.5 Update 2 (build number 103908) where Virtual Machines fail to power on or VMotion successfully. This problem began to occur on August 12, 2008 for customers that had upgraded to ESX 3.5 Update 2. The problem is caused by a build timeout that was mistakenly left enabled for the release build.
The following message is displayed in the vmware.log file for the virtual machine:
This product has expired. Be sure that your host machine’s date and time are set correctly.
There is a more recent version available at the VMware web site: http://www.vmware.com/info?id=4.
————–
Module License Power on failed.
Affected Products:
- VMware ESX 3.5 Update 2 & ESXi 3.5 Update 2. Thank you, The VMware ESX Product Team
- The problem will be seen if ESX350-200806201-UG is applied to a system.
- No other VMware products are affected.
Resolution:
VMware Engineering has produced express patches for impacted customers to resolve the issue
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I have had a love/hate relationship with the VMWare Server 2 beta for the last couple of months and today, I’m sorry to say we have parted ways. First up, my quarrel is not with VMWare products as a whole (I still love Workstation and ESX) but frankly with the poor interaction you get with VMWare in their own beta programs. It really is a far, far cry from the type of interaction and feedback you get in the Microsoft beta programs…
I would have been able to live with the lack of interaction if I weren’t having any major problems with the product. But as such things go, I ran into one showstopping problem… It turns out that on my hardware (which is a big, tricked out server that cost a small fortune and which I am not replacing) VMWare Server 2 had major issues correctly virtualizing Windows Server 2008 x64. Just that one OS. Everything else worked fine: Windows 2003 x86 & x64, even Windows 2008 x86 ran without a hitch. It has to be said that this is not a generic problem, since most others either don’t run into the problem (on a HP nx6325 laptop I also have no issues whatsoever), or they just don’t understand why things are breaking. But I’m certainly not the only one, judging from the replies and the 300+ views on the thread I posted in the VMWare Server 2 beta 2 community.
Now, I could manage without Windows 2008 x64 servers for a good while, since Exchange 2007 also runs on Windows 2003 (or if you’re really nuts like me, you can hack the x86 version on Windows 2008 into production  ). But now that I’m participating in the Exchange ‘14’ TAP, I just have to have a Windows 2008 x64 machine. Either that or just don’t bother at all.
In my experience with Microsoft Technology Adoption Programs, Microsoft usually goes above and beyond to help their customers if they run into a blocking problem with the product, even if you are the only customer experiencing the problem. The experience with VMWare was pretty much the opposite, unfortunately. I have filed not one but two Support Requests and never have gotten more interaction than the support engineer asking me to run their support-info-gathering script (vm-support.vbs) and attaching the output to the Support Request. After that, either the support engineers go deaf or they just can’t help me anymore 
So now I have grown tired of waiting for information that won’t come and I have decided to uninstall VMWare Server 2 and install VMWare Workstation 6 instead. I would’ve installed Hyper-V, but alas my 1st gen AMD Opterons don’t support the CPU Virtualization extensions needed for Hyper-V…
I’m actually quite sad to see VMWare Server 2 go, because I really liked the way you could manage VMWare Server 2 via the standard VMWare Virtual Infrastructure Client, even over the internet. I liked where VMWare Server 2 was going but it seems it was just to immature for my bleeding-edge needs…
Anyway, Workstation 6 has taken over now and my first Exchange ‘14’ server is (virtually) buzzing with a large grin
That’s a dozen more mailboxes to add to the running-Exchange-‘14’-in-production-count, DavidEsp!
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I ran into a problem today (Feb 29th 2008) while installing a second Exchange 2007 server. The issue first became evident when noticed that I couldn’t move mailboxes from one MBX server to another. The error message I was getting everytime was “The Exchange server address list service is not running on SERVERX”…etc. I tried to find more info on the web and noticed that more people all around the world were experiencing similar issues, always with the Address List Service not running as the root problem. Me (and many others) were thinking that this could have something to do with the Exchange Rollup 1 patch for Exchange 2007 SP1, but even after removing it from all my Exchange servers the issue remained. Now finally, the root cause has been found: Exchange chokes on todays date!
It turns out an actual leap year bug has found its way into the Exchange 2007 product, causing problems all around the world. Changing the date has been confirmed both by Microsoft PSS and from people in the field to fix the problem. For everyone who can’t or won’t temporarily change the date of their entire system, you will have to wait until after midnight before you get everything back to normal (I sure don’t blame you, I have to wait as well). I do recommend rebooting your Exchange servers after midnight because I don’t think the Address List Service will come back online on its own.
A leap year bug….sheesh!
Read more about it here: http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/ShowPost.aspx?PageIndex=1&SiteID=17&PageID=1&PostID=2928121
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I run Exchange 2007 SP1 on Windows Server 2008 RC1 and have run different beta’s of both products for some time now. In every case, I ran into the following problem: Outlook Anywhere (aka RPC over HTTP) would not work if the RPC-over-HTTP Proxy and the Exchange mailbox were on the same Windows 2008 server. Outlook would fail to connect to the server over the internet with some generic error message. When I was running the same configuration on a Windows 2003 server however, the problem did not occur. Also, if I put the RPC-over-HTTP Proxy on a seperate Windows 2003 server and the mailbox on a Exchange 2007 SP1 on Windows 2008 server, Outlook Anywhere worked just fine. I always thought it was a bug in either Exchange or Windows 2008, but I became convinced the problem was more serious when I still had problems with the official Exchange 2007 SP1 release on Windows 2008 RC1…
Meanwhile, I had already accepted the fact that I had to run the RPC-over-HTTP Proxy on a Windows 2003 machine for now, so that was how my environment was set up. However, when troubleshooting a different problem with Exchange, I stumbled upon the rootcause of the Outlook Anywhere problem! It turns out that the problem is in IPv6 and the way that Windows 2008 (and Vista btw) handles IPv6 as a preferred protocol over IPv4: When I did a “netstat -a -n” on my Windows 2008 machine, I noticed that Exchange was listening on the usual ports 6001, 6002 and 6004 on its IPv4 address, but only on ports 6001 and 6002 on its IPv6 address. The DSProxy service (port 6004) is NOT listening on the IPv6 stack!!! This now explains the behaviour that I was experiencing:
- Because Windows 2008 prefers IPv6 over IPv4, it talks to itself over IPv6. So when the RPC-over-HTTP Proxy tries to connect a user session to port 6004 on the same server, it tries to connect to :::1:6004 and NOT to 127.0.0.1:6004. Because the server is not listening to port 6004 on the IPv6 stack, the connection fails.
- If you put the RPC-over-HTTP proxy on a Windows 2003 server, the problem disappears because the Windows 2003 server only uses IPv4 to talk to Exchange on the Windows 2008 server.
So while this may not be a huge problem right now, it will be in the future for:
- Native Windows 2008 environments where all Exchange servers are Windows 2008 and the RPC-over-HTTP proxy is on either one of the Exchange servers or on a seperate Windows 2008 server.
- Single server deployments (e.g. Small Business Server) where everything is condensed to a single Windows 2008 server.
The next step is: how to solve the problem in the meanwhile? Fortunately I found a workaround, although it might not be what you expect! The workaround is to disable IPv6 (duh!), however this proves rather difficult for Windows 2008 (and Vista): you can’t fully disable IPv6 in these products!
- If you’re in a multi-server scenario where the RPC-over-HTTP Proxy is not on the same server as Exchange 2007, than you can simply unselect IPv6 from the properties of your NIC (on the RPC-over-HTTP Proxy machine); that will force the RPC-over-HTTP Proxy to use IPv4 to talk to Exchange and everything will be fine.
- If you’re in a single-server scenario than you can’t disable IPv6 because whatever you do (including the “DisabledComponents” registry setting to disable even more IPv6 components), the loopback interface still uses IPv6.
So it seems that in the latter case, you’re screwed… Not so, because we fortunately still have good old ‘name resolution’ to help us out. Simply open up your hosts file and make the following changes:
- Comment out the line “:::1 localhost”
- Add the following two lines:
<IPv4 address> <hostname of the computer>
<IPv4 address> <FQDN of the computer>
This will resolve all queries for your computer’s name to its IPv4 address, effectively disabling the use of IPv6 for self-communication. You can confirm that this works by doing a “telnet localhost 6004″.
I will pass this issue on to Microsoft when I attend the Exchange ‘14′ Summit next week, so hopefully they can fix it soon.
Kevin Reeuwijk
UPDATE: Microsoft has told me that they will put this on the QFE list for SP2…
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 At the end of Steve Job’s keynote at WWDC07 last monday, Steve announced that Apple wants to increase the market share of it’s webbrowser Safari. Because Apple’s marketshare won’t allow for a fast enough increase of Safari’s marketshare, Apple decided to make Safari available for the Windows platform! I always loved this browser, particularly for it’s stop/resume downloads feature. Now everyone can run it! Get the Safari 3.0 beta here: http://www.apple.com/safari/download/
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 I’m running Windows Server 2008 Beta 3 for a few weeks now and I generally love it. And because it’s based on the same codebase as Windows Vista, you can actually run it pretty much as you would with Vista - though the license would be pretty steep for a desktop OS ;-). Compared to Vista I have found only 3 features missing:
- Support for Infrared and Bluetooth adapters. There is no support for these technologies in the system.
- Media playback optimizations. Vista contains additional improvements to make sure your audio and/or video runs smoothly, even when there’s load on the system. Not so with Windows Server 2008.
- Windows Mobile Device Center.
So I thought, could you install this new WMDC update on Windows Server 2008? Yes you can! I love common codebases!
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 I got Windows Server 2008 Beta 3 running natively on my Dell laptop! Based on my experience so far, I like this OS even more than Windows Vista! It’s stable, fast and fixing quite a lot of annoying bugs from Vista RTM. Vista SP1 will bring most of these improvements to Vista as well, fortunately. But until then, Windows Server 2008 is my new favorite OS!
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ExMerge has always been a vital tool for administrators that needed to migrate large amounts of mailboxes to new Exchange hardware or new Exchange software but somehow, Microsoft decided it needed to be killed off in Exchange 2007. Many complaints followed from the Exchange community and it seems Microsoft has been listening because in the feature list for Exchange 2007 SP1 I found this tidbit:
Move Mailbox
This vital administrator tool has been beefed up to include import and export to a .pst
Even though Microsoft somehow now calls ‘Move Mailbox’ a ‘vital administrator tool’ (though it should be ‘move-mailbox’ since only the powershell cmdlet is actually quite powerful), it still means that import/export to .pst functionality will be back before the end of the year! I think that when SP1 is released, the Exchange community will make it a new worldwide holiday!
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 If you are like me and you like to use a smaller, dedicated partition for Windows and the remaining space as a separate data partition, you’ll have a problem with the way Microsoft Office Groove 2007 stores it files. In the previous version (Groove 3.1), you could specify the data directory for Groove’s user and system files during installation. I always changed the location to a different location, because I didn’t want all my workspaces to be stored somewhere under C:\Program Files, so I would set it to something like D:\GrooveData. If I needed to reinstall my laptop later (something that happened a lot during the Vista beta timeframe), I could just format C: and still have my workspaces.
However in Microsoft Office Groove 2007, the location of the files has changed to the local (non-roaming) part of your user profile. Now I already don’t like large profiles, so adding another few gigabytes of Groove 2007 data doesn’t sound appealing to me… So since day 1 of installing Groove 2007 I have been looking for a good way to relocate back to something like D:\GrooveData. Here’s how you can do it:
Important note: you will need Windows Vista for this, because full support for symbolic links exists only in Windows Vista.
The Groove 2007 files are located at this location in your user profile in Vista: C:\Users\<username>\Appdata\Local\Microsoft\Office\Groove
You will need to redirect this folder to another location using a symbolic link. Windows Vista supports creating symbolic links from the commandline, using the mklink command. First however, you will need to move your Groove files to the new location; follow this procedure to do that:
- Shutdown Groove! I can’t stress this point enough: don’t try the move the files while Groove is still running because it will corrupt the files and you will lose access to your workspaces. It happened to me and it’s quite frustrating. Exit the Groove application and open Task Manager. GROOVE.EXE should not be in the list; if it still is then kill it by clicking ‘End Process’. If you see GrooveMonitor.exe in the list, end that process as well.
- Create a new folder on the disk you want the files to move to. I created a folder called GrooveData on my D: drive
- Open Windows Explorer and navigate to C:\Users\<username>\Appdata\Local\Microsoft\Office\Groove
- Select the ‘System’ and ‘User’ folder and move them to the directory on the other disk that you created in step 2.
- After the files have moved, delete the C:\Users\<username>\Appdata\Local\Microsoft\Office\Groove folder.
Now, open a commandprompt and enter the command:
Mklink /D C:\Users\<username>\Appdata\Local\Microsoft\Office\Groove D:\GrooveData
Replace <username> with your own username and replace D:\GrooveData with the location you use in step 2. Now in Windows Explorer, you should see a Groove folder again under C:\Users\<username>\Appdata\Local\Microsoft\Office. This time however, the folder has a shortcut icon on it, to show it is a redirected folder. The resulting folder should look like the screenshot. You should also see the Groove files again that you moved to the location from step 2.
There’s one caveat: Windows will not apply the parent NTFS permissions to the files and folders that are behind the symbolic link; those files and folders will inherit the permissions from their own parent, which is D:\ in my case. So make sure you explicitly give yourself (or the local ‘Users’ group) full control on D:\GrooveData folder, otherwise Windows User Account Control might prevent you from modifying the contents and Groove 2007 will have a problem with the files.
Now you can start up Groove 2007 again, and it will happily use the files from the redirected location!
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