Kenneth is Speaking at BriForum Denver

I sat down with one of Lewan’s Solution Architects, Kenneth Fingerlos, to discuss his upcoming speaking engagement at the BriForum conference on July 20th.  Our brief conversation covered the details of his session, “vSGA, vDGA, vGPU, and Software – When and Why“, his background in the industry, and what gets him excited in the technology space right now.

Me: Kenneth, can you tell me a little bit about your industry experience?

Kenneth: So, after college I took a left turn in my career path and went into corporate IT for ten years.  Various positions: desktop management, server management, data center.  Various kinds of things.  After ten years of that I decided I didn’t care for IT management and tried to correct the course change and landed in consulting.  I’ve been doing IT consulting for about the last ten years around storage, data management, virtualization of various types, and building up my skill sets trying to help customers solve problems.

Me: Great, great.  So have you been to BriForum before?

Kenneth: I have not been to BriForum.  This will be my first year.

Me: What attracted you to BriForum?

Kenneth: I’m excited.  The whole idea of a conference that has some size to it and is established that is not tied to a specific vendor is just exciting, right?  You go to a Cisco conference and it is all about what is the latest widget from Cisco.  Cisco can do no wrong.  You find the same thing if you go to, you know, Dell World.  Dell is perfect.  Whatever Dell has got going is awesome and whatever everyone else has is garbage.  BriForum excites me because it is everybody. It is a marketing company–a media company that puts on the conference as opposed to a product manufacturer.

Me: So what will you be discussing at BriForum?

Kenneth: I’m discussing a topic that is near and dear to my heart which is the idea of virtualized graphics.  Taking things we do everyday in the physical world with physical PCs and trying to bring this into this virtualized environment.  Things like disaster recovery, security, flexibility.  You know, the physical world is pretty restricted.  Graphics have always been one of these things that is hard and is difficult.  Technology is evolving and has advanced dramatically over the last couple of years in terms of what we can do.  But there is also a lot of complexity and a lot of information and I find my customers have a lot of confusion about what they can and can’t do.  What works, what doesn’t work.  My session is all about trying to bring some clarity to that area.

Me: Ok, so I am going to open this up a little bit and say maybe don’t limit this to just the enterprise world but what is the technology you are most excited about right now?

Kenneth: The technology I am most excited about right now….I think the stuff that is most exciting is really this idea of graphics virtualization.  I mean, so many things go into a user experience, right?  And all of the traditional things that you think about: servers, storage, memory, CPUs–graphics is part of that.  Remoting protocols, right?  What’s going on with actually getting that content delivered to a user.  Networking, right? 3G, 4G networks and starting to think about what’s next, what’s beyond 4G.  These are huge enablers to let people consume and develop content in ways that have never been envisioned before.  Letting you take that stuff to the cloud, to the remote data center, and access it from anywhere.  I’ve been sitting on top of a mountain in my 4×4 holding a virtual desktop, just because I’m a geek and into this stuff, but yes–I can access that app, whatever it is, from a mountain top in the middle of nowhere.  That’s cool stuff. And it’s all about enabling people to work and function in ways they’ve never been able to before.  That excites me.

Me: Very cool.  Well, looking forward to seeing your session at BriForum!  Until next time.

As I wrote about earlier, BriForum Comes to Denver, and I am excited to have such a great event in my backyard.  If you are going to be at BriForum or just have general questions about Denver, reach out to either @kfingerlos or myself (@sagelikebrian) and let’s catch up.

Brian @sagelikebrian

Creating a Recurring Email in Windows Server 2008 Using Exchange 2010

On occasion, an organization may have a need to send a recurring email. In the case of one of our customers, there was a need to send a weekly notice to users that patches would be applied to the terminal servers overnight with a friendly reminder to save any work. To set this up is really quite simple. Here is how:

First, open the Task Schedule and choose Create Task. This will open the Task Properties window.

On the General tab of the Task Properties window, fill in a Description. Choose the user account from which you would like to send the email. Finally, choose “Run whether user is logged on or not” and “Run with highest privileges.

On the Triggers tab, click New. Make selections as appropriate for the frequency and be sure to check Enabled.

On the Actions tab, choose “Send an e-mail” from the Action drop-down menu. Fill out the From, Subject, and Text of the message. Add any appropriate attachment and fill in the SMTP server address. If the Scheduled Task is being configured on your Exchange server, you can simply enter 127.0.0.1 for the SMTP server. Click OK to return to the Task Properties window.

On the Conditions tab, specify the conditions under which the task should run.

On the Settings tab, you should choose  “Allow task to be run on demand”.

After clicking OK to close all the Windows, right-click the task, and click Run to test. Ensure that the test email is received by the intended recipient(s).

In some instances, you may need to configure a Receive Connector on your Exchange server which allows anonymous relay. You can find a instructions for doing that on Microsoft’s website here.

Fixing a Corrupted Nickname Entry in Microsoft Outlook

Microsoft Outlook maintains a list of formerly used email addresses which is used for the automatic completion feature. If one of these “nicknames” becomes corrupted it can cause any emails to that address to bounce. If this happens, the proper way to fix itis is to delete the corrupted entry and retype the email address in the To… field.

How to remove a corrupted nickname cache entry

1. Open a new email message.
2. Type the first few characters of the nickname cache entry that you want to remove from the cache.
3. When the entry appears in the list of suggested names, use the Up and Down arrow keys on your keyboard to move the highlight to the entry you want to remove.
4. Hit the Delete key on your keyboard to remove it from the list.

Exchange Infostore will not start because of Vmhost time setting?

We recently had several clients whose exchange servers went offline for seemingly no apparent reason.  The servers were up and there were no connection or permissions issues, but we kept getting a strange error in the logs.

Error: Unable to initialize the Information Store service because  the clocks on the client and server are skewed.   This may be caused by a time change either in the client or the server,  and may require a reboot of that computer.   Verify that your domain is properly configured and  is currently online.

After investigation, we found that the Vmhost running the exchange server did not have the correct time set up.  We changed the time on the host (we actually enabled NTP to match the domain controller), and rebooted the exchange server.  The exchange server came up and the infostore started without error.  Everything was then fine in the world again.

Related articles

• PowerShell: Identify the number of users connected to a Exchange 2010 CAS Server (oxfordsbsguy.com)
• Check you Vmware load (b3itonms.wordpress.com)

Microsoft Slashes Prices for Office 365

According to The Register, Microsoft is slashing their prices for Office 365, which in my opinion was already very competitively priced. For full details, check out the article here:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/03/15/microsoft_office_365_price_cut/ 

Here’s the table in the article outlining the old and new prices for each Office 365 package.

 

 

 

 

 

 
Lewan is a Microsoft Gold Partner and offers Office 365 to our clients at the same prices listed above. Feel free to talk with your account representative for additional details or for a demonstration.

Solid color as desktop background slows logon

When the background is set to a solid color the Welcome screen may be displayed for 30 seconds during the logon process….

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/977346

Wow, neat bug huh?  I know I have personally seen a Windows 7 box that is experiencing this…and I always wondered why it was so slow to logon.  Well, I best go get this patch!

Microsoft DFS reference page

I get quite a few questions about how to build highly available Windows file servers and regardless of the storage and server infrastructure you implement I feel strongly that DFS is a component of a highly available file server infrastructure. 

If you aren’t using DFS in your organization you should be, it doesn’t matter if you support 10 users or 10,000, its silly to spend time worrying about file shares that map to servers when we’ve had a feature like DFS for years.

If you aren’t familiar with DFS read this article then implement it in your organization, sure you’ll have to remap your users, but it will be for the last time, and you’re going to have to do it sooner or later.  If you don’t want to read the article feel free to call us and we’ll implement it for you 🙂

http://blogs.technet.com/josebda/archive/2009/12/30/windows-server-dfs-namespaces-reference.aspx