Recently I had cause to configure iSCSI multipathing on a test ESXi server. The production environment servers use iSCSI HBAs to connect to the back end storage, so multipathing them is a straight-forward setup. It’s good practice to separate VMotion, virtual machine and iSCSI traffic, it also helps you manage those logical and physical connections. Connect to your ESXi server using the vSphere Client and select the host. Go to the configuration tab and click “Add Networking…”.

In this post I will be installing a TMG Array as a “back firewall” behind a hardware firewall. The Array will consist of two virtual servers, TMG01 and TMG02 which each have 3 NICs. One NIC will be dedicated to the LAN network, accessible internally. One NIC will be dedicated to the DMZ network, accessible to the outside world on a static mapped IP. The third NIC will be a dedicated intra-array communications NIC as per Microsoft’s recommendation.

vMA is available as a Virtual Appliance (OVF) from VMware. To install it on VMware Workstation 7, open Workstation and select Import or Export to import a new OVF, the URL for the latest OVF for vMA is on the vMA download page As per this article on virtualkenneth.com, you need to edit the VMX file to change the SCSI card and OS type, otherwise you’ll have a kernel panic on boot.

Wordle.net is a great little site that’s been around for ages – but it gives quite a unique insight into the content of your blog – just shove the RSS feed in and out comes a nice word cloud. I found it interesting to compare this to the Tag cloud generated from how I tagged my posts – for example Exchange is the predominant word in the Wordle.net cloud – but not in the tag cloud.

Hardly seems newsworthy any more, with the Automatic Upgrade option on WordPress 2.7+, but I’ve just upgraded to WordPress 3.0.1

With the release of Exchange 2010 SP1, administrators can now use separate Mailbox Databases to store the Personal Archives of users – this is particularly useful if you have some larger, slower (and probably by virtue, older) storage that’s not really up to the I/O of your Exchange Server (that old SAN/NAS sitting in the corner of the server room?). It’s also useful if you just don’t have the capacity on your main storage.

Exchange SP1 has now been released, so I thought I’d document the upgrade process for my small Exchange 2010 organisation, consisting of one CAS/Transport/Mailbox server, and an Edge Transport server. References The starting point is always working out if you *need* to upgrade – what’s the business argument. For that you need to look at what’s new in Exchange 2010 SP1, the release notes and prerequisites. Finally, the installation instructions for upgrading from Exchange 2010 RTM to SP1.

This should be a simple update of some hotfixes, but there were a few tripping points along the way that I had to stumble past. As reference I used the CU2 update page and I also a Kevin Holman technet article. So, I’m going to assume that a) you’re installing the update for a reason, like one of the bugs it fixes and b) you have taken a backup of your OpsManager databases.

The NT Testing TCP Tool is a handy little tool for testing the throughput between two servers – and it’s free! It’s available to download here: http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/network/TCP_tool.mspx First, you need to install the MSI on both ends – for the sake of this, say SERVER1 and SERVER2. Once you’ve installed it on the server, navigate to \Program Files\Microsoft Corporation\NT Testing TCP Tool, you should see a few copies of the tool for different architectures.

I am mid-migration, in a co-existence setup with Exchange 2010, 2007 and 2003. So far the roles installed for Exchange 2010 are CAS, Hub and Mailbox on a single server. Into this mix I need to introduce an Edge Server, with message hygiene in the form of Forefront Protection for Exchange (FPE) and Threat Management Gateway (TMG) as a reverse proxy to publish OWA, ActiveSync et-al. Since Edge, FPE and TMG can now all exist on a single 64-bit server, I will start with a clean installation of Windows Server 2008 R2, up to date with all the latest hot fixes.