Windows Live Audio/video Federation with Lync

was aware that we can federate with windows live for instant messaging integration but was not sure about Audio/Video. After some research i found following blog post which is confirming this type of federation;

http://www.confusedamused.com/notebook/lync-to-windows-live-av-federation/

Please be aware that in order to federate with windows live you have to change Lync encryption settings

Lync 2010 Mobility in Split-brain DNS setup

After reading Mobility guide from Microsoft, it is not very clear that how users will connect to Lync auto discover service externally and internally in split brain DNS Setup and it requires reading again and again and troubleshooting again and again to find out the correct setup, in summary following should be the DNS configuration in split-brain DNs setup (Note: Split-brain DNS refers to the DNS setup where your DNS zone is split between your Internal Network and your external network for example Contoso.com zone is also present in internal AD forest DNS servers and also published outside publish DNS servers);

1. Lync Auto discover URL should be in external and internal DNS servers pointing to Lync external web services URL.

2. Lync Auto discover internal URL should be present in your internal DNS server pointing to Lync internal web services URL.

3. There should be a entry for Lync external web services URL in your internal DNS servers pointing to lync external web services IP for “Hair-pining” Lync mobile traffic to Reverse proxy servers.

4. Reverse proxy Rule for lync auto discover service should have lync discover internal URL added for mobile clients connecting from internal network through lync external web service public IP.

Lync 2010 Blogging

I have recently implemented Lync services in our organization and came across lots of problems mainly due to the guides which Microsoft has published is not clear and have lots of questions unanswered. The only way to do a correct configuration is to to a trial and error and then check if the problem is solved or not or engage Microsoft professional services.

I will be blogging on some of the issues I have faced and resolved for the benefits of other implementers.

Exchange 2007 unable to mount database

Recently we had a power failure which caused an improper shutdown to our exchange servers. After recovered from power failure we restarted all servers and fixed some cluster issues but there is one database which is showing failed in cluster manager. I had tried to mount the database but it was not successful and showing that there are some log files missing due to which database cannot mount.

For checking what log files are missing I ran following commands against the database which was not mounting. For running this command we have to go to the log drive of the database first and then run this command.

eseutil /mh

The output of this command is showing that the database is in dirty shutdown state and also showing that what log files are missing. I have checked these log files and luckily I have all log files present in the log drives folder.

Now recovery is easy, I have just renamed the check point file to any other name and try to mount it again and this time it mounts successfully without any issues and new checkpoint file is created.

MOSS "trial period for this product has expired"

Recently I faced an strange issue related to MOSS. One of my content admin is complaining that he is unable to add any link or page in his site anymore. whenever he is trying to create any page he is getting this error

"trial period for this product has expired"

Our MOSS farm has correct license and we haven't upgraded MOSS from trial version. After thorough analysis and research, I found that there is a bug in MOSS SP2 which reinitializes the license file and turns MOSS normal license to 180 days trial  license.

For fixing this issue, you can go to MOSS central admin->operations->Convert license type->Enter product key and add the key again or apply the hotfix mentioned in the below KB article.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/971620

Renewing Edge Synchronization

If you have added any domain on HUB server and you are not able to see this domain on Edge server then might be your synchronization between your hub and edge servers are not working. To test this you can run following command;

Test-EdgeSynchronization

If the connection result is showing failed then you need to do edge subscription again for this edge server. Following are the steps for this

1. On the edge server which is not synchronizing run following command;

New-EdgeSubscription -filename "C:\temp\edgesub.xml"

now copy this .xml file to hub server and run following command

New-EdgeSubscription -filename "C:\temp\edgesub.xml" –site London

Please note the site parameter is required to bind this edge server to a specific AD site.

Now run following command

Start-EdgeSynchronization

You will notice that now the edge server is synchronizing data with HUB server.

For verification you can run test command again and this time it should show you the success message

Test-EdgeSynchronization

Enabling SCR on WAN

SCR is an Exchange 2007 DR solution available from Exchange 2007 SP1 onwards.  You can enable SCR on LAN and also on high latency networks. SCR also gives you benefit to recover from a Datacenter failover scenario. Since last month i was working to enable SCR between our DCs connected via MPLS. After a thorough analysis and lots of try and error i have compiled following results;

SCR Enabling Steps:

1. Seeding of .Edb File.

2. Enable Replication.

3. Monitor Replication

 

Step 1: Seeding:

Seeding is a prerequisite for enabling SCR, we can enable seeding by automatic way and manual way, because i have to seed .edb file on MPLS which is a high latency network i have to go for manual procedure. Following steps i have followed for manual seeding.

1. Take a snapshot of storage group on which i want to enable SCR (we are using snapshot based backup solution) you can also take the normal backup of the storage group. This will also truncate all the committed logs and we have less log files to copy from source to destination after enabling replication.

2. Run  below Command

Enable-StorageGroupCopy -Identity StorageGroup1 -StandbyMachine London1 -ReplayLagTime 0.1:0:0 –SeedingPostponed

The above command will enable SCR on storage group “StorageGroup1”. Standby machine (destination server) used is London and the replay lag time i have mentioned is 1 minute. seeding postponed is used because i don't want to enable seeding automatically i want to copy .edb file manually to destination server.

After running the above command, log files for this storage group will not truncate unless until we enable replication. This means that the drive space of log files folder should also be carefully planned because if the latency is high and the .edb file is taking days to copy then the log file drive space might going to be fill which will affect the production environment.

3. Take a snapshot on the storage group again or take a normal storage group backup again.

4. Ask the backup team to provide the .edb file from the last snapshot.

5. Use TeraCopy to copy .edb file from source to destination server. make sure the drive letters for log and data drive are same on standby server because it is one of the prerequisites of SCR.

2. Enabling Replication:

Replication will copy all logs files from source to destination. Replication is an ongoing process and whenever a log file is created on source it has to be shipped to destination for making both source and destination mailbox databases in same state.

Following is the command for enabling replication

Resume-StorageGroupCopy -Identity StorageGroup1 -StandbyMachine London1

after running the above command you will see that the log files started to copy from source to destination server. Standby server will replay these log files after 50 logs files has been copied. The first log file after you enable SCR should be present on destination otherwise replication will fail.

3. Monitoring Replication:

It is very important to check the status of storage group copy. The below command will show us the health of SCR and how many files in copy queue and replay queue.

get-storagegroupcopystatus StorageGroup1 -standbymachine London1

If you are seeing failed  in the summarycopystatus field then there is a possibility that the database you have seeded and the logs files copied are not at the same state (LSN number mismatch) or might be you don't have the first log file available to replay on the destination.

If you are seeing large number of files in copy queue length then bandwidth might be the possible cause.

You can also run following command on standby server for checking replication status;

Test-ReplicationHealth