Jollity

It is possible the situation has changed since I did my migration, but here's how it worked then. EasyMail stores sent mail in a folder called "outbox", this is copied to the "outbox" folder in Office 365 by the migration. However in Outlook/Exchange/Office 365, the "outbox" folder is a special folder used for items being sent to the mail server, and so it is hidden from view in the normal Office 365 mail web page. That is, all the email is there, just in a folder you cannot see! I expect the reason you are seeing the sent items in the inbox is because you have the conversation view turned on, which integrates your replies to an email conversation with the emails they sent regardless of which folder the emails are in. You can view the hidden "outbox" folder by viewing the "light" version of the outlook web page. Get to this by logging in then pasting the following link into your address bar: https://outlook.office365.com/owa/?layout=light You should see an outbox link in the list of folders on the left hand side. You can select any mail left there and move them into sent items. This may be rather laborious with a large number of accounts. I wrote a program that did this move automatically using EWS, but Microsoft changed things and broke the program, and I was not able to get it working again.

Will soon be getting a LearnPad for testing. I was impressed by the management features vs iPad in demos. The main important area I am unsure whether the iPad is stronger is in range of apps. Have LearnPad owners felt any deficiencies in that respect?

I know this is the case for the full CacheCade 2 read/write system, but do you know if it is the case for read-only CacheCade, as well? It is possible, but seems silly if it is. Good to hear that some people are using CacheCade out there. I have read your blog post and I thought you might say that. I see the benefits of your approach: it fits together and makes a fair amount of sense. But I do not have enough confidence in the approach or in my own judgement to step that far from the main stream. I am concerned about the durability of "consumer" SSDs in a server (though time may prove you right) and not having Dell/HP support due to using aftermarket disks. Though perhaps other server providers can offer more reasonably priced SSDs while still providing support. I was looking at those as well, but I was concerned about how well they would behave in a RAID array. It seemed potentially problematic to have the disks all trying to cache independently of the RAID controller, which was why I started looking at the RAID controller caching. But I suppose ordinary disks do their own caching normally.

I would be interested to hear what you find. I have read that the controllers look for Dell IDs on the drives and throw errors if they find 3rd party ones, but I am not sure to what extent they work regardless.

Yes you would. I only found them because it was mentioned on one of the previous threads in Edugeek. If I try to buy on the CrashPlan US site, I just get a big "Sorry, CrashPlan PRO is not available in your area. Please contact sales for alternatives to back up your important data."

A fair point, but not a problem I think. I should have been clearer that I am looking at CrashPlan's UK franchise CeeJay who have servers in Dublin and Manchester. It is not actually possible to purchase the US product here. Here is their page on security if anyone wants to pick holes in it. Edit: I should also note that I am looking at the CrashPlan PROe product rather than the consumer product, though I am not sure precisely how they differ.

The lack of response to this is useful information in itself. I am taking away that this is not widely used.

I am advising a small school that is considering moving main backup to an online backup service. I have been looking at Redstor and Oakford, but CrashPlan is considerably cheaper. I know we have some CrashPlan users on the Edugeek, but have also seen some say they use it just for key files rather than a full backup. I know it cannot do system state or SQL backup, but I was thinking I could back these up using Windows/SQL backup to a local drive then sync that with CrashPlan. The main limitation seems to be that CrashPlan will not ship data backups on disk. The volume of data we are talking about could be downloaded in about 14 hours, and if I start with the system state file that might be better than shipping data anyway. Is CrashPlan appropriate for a main backup? Is it reliable enough?

And 11 letters or less? I am reminded that I had problems with migrations where the password was 16 characters, possibly related to Office365 passwords needing to be 15 characters or less. However I know 11 characters should work as that is what I used. And they have not managed to do anything for 3 months? That is remarkably poor. While they might not be able to help with the migration, IMAP access is an important feature to just leave broken entirely. If you have been asking them to help you with the migrator, perhaps instead you could try setting up one of the problematic accounts in Outlook (RM instructions). It will fail if IMAP is not working. Then ring up RM and ask them why it is not working. They are probably right. It is coming back to me that it stopped working for us and we had to move over to IMAP.

I think the automatic migration does only work with IMAP, but if you could get POP access you might be able to do a manual one using Outlook. Are you able to contact RM directly about the problem or does SWGfL require that you go through them?

Yes that does make it seem unlikely it will work. Do you know whether POP access to the problematic accounts works or is that the same as IMAP?

Elsiegee40 asked me to have a look over this thread as SWGfL have apparently still not been able to fix the problem for Witch. I have migrated two EasyMail domains: one to Live@Edu (Office 365 predecessor) and one to Google Apps. I do not have much to add as Witch seems to have been well advised, but I do have one suggestion. We had issues (in 2010) setting up Outlook to access EasyMail through IMAP for some accounts. The cause was that password changes made in EasyMail did not change the password for IMAP access, as they were supposed to, so the accounts had two different passwords one for web access and one for IMAP. The fix was to reset the password through the admin console, as that did set both the web and IMAP passwords. So I would suggest Witch try resetting the password on one of the accounts that will not migrate through the admin web page. It could just be reset to the same password it should already have. Then try migrating that account again. I will provide instructions for resetting passwords if you would like them. By the way, my experience is that RM never actually deletes EasyMail domains. The two migrated domains are still there and apparently usable, even though for multiple years they have not been used or paid for. I have just reset all account passwords to random values so that no one can log in.

Has anyone had experience with using an SSD card with a RAID controller to act as a large fast cache in front of an array of conventional hard drives? I have been having a look at technologies like LSI CacheCade (used by Dell) or SmartCache from HP. The reports look rather promising. I was concerned that the SSD cache was a single point of failure, but I read at least for the read-only version of Cachecade (that Dell uses) failure does not cause data loss. This is step 2 of my ongoing quest to look for a way to SSD up our storage speeds without SSDing up the price.

I was going to set this up, but then it was decided it was not necessary, so I have not actually set it up. It looked like it was possible though. This may all be stuff you already know. But see this post where jamesbmarshall says it is possible on the up to date version of Office 365. Further detail in this blog post, and this Microsoft article.

Is anyone using Server 2012 storage spaces in production on a server? Or been experimenting with them? I was wondering about a way to bring some SSD goodness to our new file servers without the full enterprise SSD cost. I am not sure if this feature is mature enough for us to use yet though.

Maybe too late to be of use, but another idea for anyone else who see the thread. I bought a nook HD for my own use. I think the hardware is pretty decent: no camera, but a nice screen. The software is far from vanilla and a bit odd, but I am planning to replace it with Cyanogen Mod. They have stopped making them, so I think they are a bargain at the moment at £79, though not many places stock them any more.

I had also been interested in the reasons for needing a physical DC. Do you think it is necessary to keep the master roles (schema master, PDC emulator etc) on the physical DC or is it just a question of having a DC and DNS server so the main virtualised ones can get going? Edit: I had missed the last page. If I read correct, Seawolf is saying it is better to have the primary AD server on the virtual server for availability reasons. I was thinking that our VM hosts would just not be kept on the domain to reduce the risk of dependency loops. I want to use one of the old servers as a physical DC, but I do not think it will last more than a couple more years, but we can probably find something to use after that.

I am doing some more research on the backup software and am giving Veeam a better look. To use Veeam I would need to do the data storage as a virtual disk file rather than passthrough. Is there any other reason why Veeam would not work for the plan I laid out? Would I need a Veeam license for the backup server if it was not actually being backed up? Is there any good reason for considering a version other than Veeam Backup Essentials for an organisation of our size?

Does the "backup" server do anything most of the time or is it just there waiting for emergencies?

DFS does seem to divide the clients up between the servers, but I have never tested how well the balances the load. It is true that there is nothing to stop it putting all the heavy users on one server by chance. I suppose I am making an assumption that on average things will balance out well enough. On reflection this is wrong, because I am already talking about three copies of the data in total, one on each main server and one on the backup server. If the backup server acts as a file server in emergencies then we would only need two.

True enough on the downtime. If the host for your file server would not boot, would you host the file server VM on the backup server?

I will read over the links you have sent this evening. I have read about the inadequacy of RAID 5 as redundancy due to the significant risk of another drive failing before the array can be rebuilt, but I was thinking it would be okay if used in conjunction with DFSR. If the array does fail completely we can rereplicate from the other server. But if there are other concerns as well over RAID5 that might change that. I was going to go for the built in one + one extra. I am assuming they have two ports each, but will check. We might add in another NIC later, but there did not seem to be any point in putting any more at the moment as our network backbone is still only 1GBit. I was not clear. The AV Management server does updates as well. The other one is a fallback server that only does updates. Not totally sure that is necessary, or maybe I can combine it with another. I was leaving it for another post. But yes I was thinking RAID 5 of SATA drives. I am concerned about the RAID controller: I have been reading posts about issues with the Dell PERC H200 particularly with SATA.

It is a fair question, and I will think more about the alternative. A significant reason is perhaps that this is what we do currently. It has the advantage of also splitting the load, but I do not really know that this is necessary. It means no technician action is required if one server goes down, though there is a slowdown while the connections to the server that's down time out. Does the Veeam set up you are talking about do automatic failover? Though if we have the disks space available to store all the data files on the second server, it occurs to me it might as well act as a DFSR replica server. Though I suppose we could use slower, cheaper disks if it was only to be used in emergencies.

Let's see if I have learned anything. Any thoughts on the plan I have come up with would be valued. The omens suggest the finance gods are in fairly favourable mood, so I am pitching for a more Seawolf-solution, but I may fall back on a more Glenda-solution if things are looking dicey. I am going to try and sell getting two powerful main servers now as an alternative to replacing the current (rather underutilised) MIS database and web servers, and absorb their roles on the main servers. I plan to use the current web server as a backup server with Microsoft DPM and use one of current main servers as a dedicated physical DC (until it dies of old age at least). The main servers would be Hyper-V hosts, have identical specs and each should be able to run one of each of the essential virtual machines on its own. The files would be replicated between the two virtual file servers using DFSR as they are currently. I have divided the server roles up as follows: [table=width: 800] [tr] [td]Roles[/td] [td]Number needed[/td] [td]Essential?[/td] [td]Memory (GB)[/td] [td]System Disk Space (GB)[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]host operating system[/td] [td]2[/td] [td]TRUE[/td] [td]4[/td] [td]80[/td] [td][/td] [/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]File[/td] [td]2[/td] [td]TRUE[/td] [td]6[/td] [td]80[/td] [td]Separate RAID 5 array for files - passthrough to VM.[/td] [/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]DC, DHCP, DNS[/td] [td]2[/td] [td]TRUE[/td] [td]3[/td] [td]80[/td] [td][/td] [/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]Print[/td] [td]1[/td] [td]TRUE[/td] [td]4[/td] [td]100[/td] [td][/td] [/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]WSUS, internal web apps[/td] [td]1[/td] [td]TRUE[/td] [td]4[/td] [td]80[/td] [td]Additional dynamic VHD for update files on SATA disk[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]AV Management, Log Monitoring, Unifi Controller[/td] [td]1[/td] [td]TRUE[/td] [td]4[/td] [td]100[/td] [td][/td] [/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]AV Updates only[/td] [td]1[/td] [td]FALSE[/td] [td]2[/td] [td]100[/td] [td][/td] [/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]WDS[/td] [td]2[/td] [td]FALSE[/td] [td]6[/td] [td]160[/td] [td]Dynamic VHD[/td] [td][/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]Certificate Services[/td] [td]1[/td] [td]TRUE[/td] [td]2[/td] [td]40[/td] [td]Server Core[/td] [/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]3Sys Web Server[/td] [td]1[/td] [td]TRUE[/td] [td]6[/td] [td]80[/td] [td][/td] [/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]PASS Database server[/td] [td]1[/td] [td]TRUE[/td] [td]8[/td] [td]100[/td] [td][/td] [/td] [/tr] [/table] I have been playing with specifications for a PowerEdge T620 on the Dell website, but I will get an equivalent quote for an HP M350p. Two main servers something like: 2 x Intel® Xeon® E5-2620v2, 2.1GHz, 15M Cache, 7.2GT/s QPI, Turbo, HT, 6C, 80W, DDR3-1600MHz 14 x 4GB UDIMM, 1600 MHz, Low Volt, Dual Rank, x8 Data Width - total RAM: 56GB PERC H710 Adapter RAID Controller, 512MB NV Cache System Array (for host and guest images): RAID 1 - 2 x 1.2TB, SAS 6Gbps, 2.5in, 10K RPM Hard Drive (Hot-plug) Data Array (passthrough to the file server): RAID 5 - 3 x 600GB, SAS 6Gbps, 2.5in, 10K RPM Hard Drive (Hot-Plug) Extras Disk (80GB for WSUS files, rest for previous versions files): 500GB, SATA, 2.5in, 7.2K RPM Hard Drive (Hot-Plug) Dual, Hot-plug, Redundant Power Supply (1+1), 750W, Titanium Additional network card: Broadcom 5720 DP 1Gb Network Interface Card 5Yr ProSupport and Next Business Day On-Site Service Any suggestions? Would you divide up the roles differently? Anywhere you would you suggest increasing the specification? Anywhere I would be able to cut back if I have to? I have specified RAID 5 on the data disk as an additional layer of redundancy on top of replication to the other server by DFSR. Is this unnecessary? I have a colleague who is not keen on using RAID, so I will need to justify this.

This solution could be useful to us too, but Google advises against using it because the profile may be corrupted if opened in one version of Chrome and then in an older version. If Chrome is left to update itself, it seems to me a user could roam from a computer that happens to have updated to one that has not. Have you had any problems with corrupted profiles or does this not happen much in practice?