Maybe this is what you're wanting?
http://www.sqlskills.com/blogs/glenn/memory-error-recovery-in-sql-server-2012/

The best way to make sure you are protected in a power outage is to make sure your servers shut down gracefully. I've been through the corrupted DB exercise when things did not shut down gracefully, and it is no fun.

If I remember right, I thought in the Sonicwall world you actually wanted to enable SIP transformations. I specifically remember having to do that once for a NTG customer that was connecting to a cloud PBX and getting one-way audio otherwise. That was a little over 3 years ago, so perhaps the setting is no longer counter-intuitive now.

Here's just a regular ringer - http://www.cyberdata.net/products/voip/digitalanalog/officeringerv3/index.html.

I'd consider getting some of the SIP speakers for the shops so you can page people out in the loud shops. Those paging speakers are super loud - http://www.cyberdata.net/products/voip/digitalanalog/paging_endpoints.html.

I can see everyone's point who has commented here thus far. It makes me wonder, however, if there is some leagacy software on that network that is the supposed life blood of the organization which management decided not to pay to upgrade to a newer version. I'm not saying everything the old MSP did was what should have been done. It's just a general curiosity.

One thing you may want to add to your research is length of contract / if there is any kind of contract requirement at all. For POTS lines, there is often a contract term. It's similar with PRI (normally years on that one). There's no doubt a contract can come into play with SIP trunks or hosted VOIP, but as you know, many providers are strictly month-to-month. That contract length and potential termination fees play into the overall cost in my opinion.

We have a hosted Exchange server through Sherweb. At our Dallas office, we have around 35 employees and a 20/20 fiber connection (runs data and voice, QoS handled by ISP since hosted VOIP is through them).

I came from an environment that had an in-house Exchange server, so opening Outlook was rarely ever slow. But what I have noticed here is that for most people here in the Dallas office, it takes an extreme amount of time to open Outlook and to get "connected to Microsoft Exchange." Once you're "connected," things seem to work fine. But, there have been times when people will lose connectivity to the hosted Exchange server.

I'm not aware in any case that the choking point has been bandwidth. Sherweb is telling us all is well on their end. Ping times from us to the hosted Exchange server are normally less than 50ms. But if you do a tracert, that is an entirely different story:

Check out the latency on that 4th hop. At that point traffic goes across Level 3's network (supposedly still a server in Dallas). We brought this up with our provider (LightSpar), and they are telling us that despite the latency showing to be high on the tracert, it is not delaying the exchange of information between us and our hosted Exchange server. That kind of hop latency is not present if you do a tracert from another location to our hosted Exchange server, so I'm not sure what is happening here.

We're moving away from hosted Exchange to O365 in the next couple of months, but I wanted to try and get this cleared up either way if is indeed a problem with our ISP. In general, no one here has had issues connecting to the internet or calling it slow. The "slow" is always e-mail.

What am I missing here?

@coliver said in Installing Zimbra Email 8.6 on CentOS 7:

I always liked Zimbra and could never understand why people would use Exchange over it. The web interface was amazing in 2010 when I was running it personally.

Zimbra's web GUI is amazing. I remember when we looked at going Zimbra over Exchange 2010. I had built a test VM to give it a proof of concept with a different e-mail domain. Though people liked it, they couldn't accept the death of Outlook. I was shot down by management and forced to go to Exchange 2010. There's no doubt it was great experience rolling out Exchange 2010 for the organization, but I sometimes wonder how things would be different to this day had we gone with Zimbra.

I want to make sure I understand how Starwind works in a 2-node VMware configuration. Here's the overview on their site - https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-virtual-san-vmware. We would get 2 hosts on the vSphere HCL with enough internal spinning disks to get the capacity we need (roughly 10-12 TB), some SSDs for caching, and plenty of RAM. If I read that page correctly, in the VMware world, Starwind runs on a VM on each of the hosts and mirrors the storage between hosts for you (I assume presenting just one giant LUN to your ESXi hosts), and the hosts are connected to one another directly through a dedicated NIC for the mirroring and heartbeating.

I'm also assuming you are turning RAID off on each host so Starwind can provide RAIN for you (thus creating the storage pool). But if Starwind has to run on a VM on your hosts, wouldn't that mean you'd have to have some storage on your hosts that is setup as a datastore already so that Starwind's VM can actually run on it (i.e. two disks in a RAID 1 presented as a local datastore to each host on which you'd create the VMs for Starwind)?

If you look at page 8 of this comparison guide (https://www.starwindsoftware.com/whitepapers/free-vs-paid.pdf), the deployment scenarios say you can run this VM-less inside the hypervisor.

I saw some articles about having the compute and storage separated (https://www.starwindsoftware.com/technical_papers/StarWind_Virtual_SAN_Compute_and_Storage_Separated_2-Node_Cluster_iSCSI_VMware_vSphere.pdf), but in this case you would have 2 ESXi hosts and then two other hosts that ran Windows and Starwind to act as your VSAN pool.

@scottalanmiller said in Vendor Mistake - VMware Infrastructure Decisions:

@NetworkNerd said in Vendor Mistake - VMware Infrastructure Decisions:

I'm also assuming you are turning RAID off on each host so Starwind can provide RAIN for you (thus creating the storage pool).

No, you leave RAID on on the hosts and Starwind provides Network RAID. There is no RAIN here.

So you'd leave RAID on and then make a small local VMFS datastore for the Starwind VM to run on so that Starwind can use the rest of the unformatted storage on the host for its network RAID?

Here's an update for folks following this thread. I was told Dell found a 1.6 TB SED SSD certified with another Dell storage appliance which uses the same firmware and controllers as our PowerVault MD3820i. They think it may work with our configuration and have shipped us one to test. If that does not work correctly, we will continue to look at VSAN options (VMware or Starwind).

Does anyone have numbers on the performance hit that a computer on which Aetherstore is running (i.e. part of its storage is part of an Aetherstore pool) takes on average? I did not see that mentioned here and wondered if an end user might notice any kind of difference.

I'm wondering if this is why Citrix ShareFile is giving us fits today....

@WLS-ITGuy said in vMotion causing glitches on moved machines:

@travisdh1 Even though I may get slammed for asking this, How would I make a temp image, Clone to VM?

If you have vCenter, you should be able to right-click and clone the VM in question to a new VM or to a template. I cannot remember, however, if the VM must be powered off to clone to a new VM.

This is one of my favorite posts you have ever written because I have lived it. You are so right. Rather than the blame game of putting it on the last person there, we really should be questioning management and their decision making.

It's one thing to install TeamViewer but another to register with your TeamViewer account and enable unattended access, enforce policy, etc. I thought even if you downloaded the custom MSI you still had to make an API call back to TeamViewer to register the device with your TeamViewer account.

We had a fairly new laptop come back to HQ for repair and are going to re-issue it soon. This specific laptop came from a user who is a smoker. This is the first laptop I have received back that has smelled so much like an ash tray it might make someone's allergies go crazy.

Does anyone have some tips as to how I can get rid of that smell? I was going to wipe down the keyboard and exterior with some lens cleaner wipes to start, but that is not going to stop it from smelling. If I did not think it might ruin the laptop, I would submerge it in a bucket of coffee.

@scottalanmiller said in When You Think That You Need a Physical Server...:

@triple9 said in When You Think That You Need a Physical Server...:

the only reason I had not to virtualize were Asterisk servers using PRI/BRI/POTS cards.

I do a lot of SIP stuff and the normal answer there is that even if you have physical PBXs, you don't want line cards like that in the PBX, you want a separate gateway unit that does only that task and turns everything into VoIP anyway. So even back when we had POTS lines, circa 2004, we were able to have virtual PBXs because we abstracted the POTS lines earlier in the infrastructure.

I just saw an ad that said "Want to virtualize your phone system? Now you can." I'm pretty sure we were able to do just that before now. It was interesting nonetheless.

We recently moved from using AppRiver and a hosted Exchange 2007 platform to Office365 and its built-in spam filtering solution. Our Marketing department uses myemma.com to send e-mails about webinars, company events, and other communications, etc. to both clients and internal employees.

One of the pain points in times past has been having these messages get stuck in spam filters. Well, since myemma.com is sending messages on behalf of a specific domain, we tweaked our SPF record to include myemma.com per their online instructions. That should, from what I understand, tell other spam filters that this service is authorized to send e-mail messages from a specific domain that belongs to us.

These campaign e-mails are not sent from a [email protected] address but rather are sent out with a reply to address of someone on our internal team (depends on the nature of the communication as to who the communication will appear to be from).

I feel like we have the changes in place so that the messages from myemma.com should reach external recipients and not look like spoofed messages. But, when myemma.com is used to send a message from [email protected], for example, other users with e-mail addresses @domain.com either have the message either go straight to their Junk folder in Outlook / OWA or get stuck in the spam filter's quarantine. I can whitelist all e-mail addresses that might be used as reply-to addresses for myemma.com campaigns, but I don't want to have to do that.

Does anyone have suggestions on how I can get this working to reach both internal and external e-mail addresses? Am I thinking about it the right way? Any help is appreciated.

@scottalanmiller said in Deodorizing a Smelly PC:

@NetworkNerd said in Deodorizing a Smelly PC:

I went with the rubbing alcohol approach, which didn't do much for the smell as people stated. It turns out in addition to the smell this laptop has some sort of keyboard issue as well (keyboard will stop responding to any key press completely at times while using it, only fixed by a reboot / shut down) due to a soda spill onto the keyboard a few weeks ago. It is still under warranty and about to be sent back to Dell for repair. Hopefully they won't refuse to work on it due to the smell. And if we're lucky, they will send us a replacement.

Standard policy from all vendors is that cigarette smoke is an immediate violation of warranty.

Interestingly enough, when Dell received the laptop, the issue of smoke never came up. But, they did find evidence of liquid damage to the motherboard (which of course makes it an out of warranty repair). We were able to have the keyboard, logic board, and palm rest replaced for a small fee. If nothing else this will make it usable again, and it can be re-provisioned for the same user who turned it in to us originally.

I had heard about VDM a while back and see that they are about to begin Season 5. I would love to see someone from the community be a part of it. I started watching some of Season 4 and found it really interesting to hear people defend their designs.

Here's the link to sign up if you want to go for it - http://www.virtualdesignmaster.io/become-a-participant.html.

It looks like a really fun and challenging way to grow yourself. But the downside seems to be that this is a ton of work and comes with very tight deadlines.

Additionally, the designs from the show are publicly available if anyone wants to see them here - https://github.com/VirtualDesignMaster/vdm-season4.

So, are there any brave souls who think they can do it?