Exchange 2013 Management Pack Update

Microsoft has released an update to the Exchange 2013 Management Pack for SCOM. The update added nice Dashboards to give you a better overall view of the health of your environment.

It also added additional reports and views. The updated management pack version 15.0.652.19 can be downloaded here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=39039

For detailed information on how to update and use the management pack look here http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee758046(v=exchg.150).aspx

You can view additional screenshots on the SCOM blog page here http://blogs.technet.com/b/momteam/archive/2014/10/29/exchange-server-2013-management-pack-update.aspx

Get-MailboxQuarantine

I previously wrote about poison mailbox detection in Exchange 2010 and how to find mailboxes that have been quarantined. In Exchange 2013 there are 2 additional cmdlets to assist with troubleshooting mailboxes. The new cmdlets that were added were Enable-MailboxQuarantine and Disable-MailboxQuarantine. With Enable-MailboxQuarantine it gives you the ability to manually quarantine a mailbox at your discretion. This can be useful for testing the functionality of quarantining a mailbox or, more importantly, quarantining a mailbox that is causing issues issues on a server. 

As great as the new cmdlets are, there is still a hole that needs to be filled. There is no Get-MailboxQuarantine cmdlet to check/verify if a mailbox has been quarantined. We still have to resort to digging through event logs or registry keys. So I wrote a script to do just that. 

Currently version 1 of the script just searches the event logs for users that have been quarantined. The script has a one optional parameter where you can specify a specific server if you wish. I plan on updating the script to search through the registry as well in the event that your environment has many event logs that would remove the quarantine event log. I will update this blog when that happens.

The download for the script is

https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/office/Find-Poison-Exchange-6e7cc945

You can read more about the new cmdlets in 2013 at the link below:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/rmilne/archive/2014/01/13/how-to-set-mailbox-quarantine-in-exchange.aspx

Exchange 2013 DSC Module

Yes!!! Microsoft has completed work on a DSC (Desired State Configuration) module for Exchange 2013. This beauty has 24 resources in the module to setup and configure Exchange 2013. I plan on getting knees deep in this one and blogging more as I start playing with everything. You can find the module here. For a series of blogs explaining the module, check here.

Windows 10 won't start on Hyper V

So you're like a kid on Christmas signing up for the Windows 10 technical preview. You download the iso (zzzzzzzz), load up Hyper-V and create a new VM off of the ISO. As soon as you start the VM you're hit with this error:

Fortunately, I have only seen this issue with the Enterprise version of Windows 10 and the Server technical preview but there is a quick fix. When creating the VM, you need to make it a 'Generation 1' machine instead of 'Generation 2'.

 Of course, you cannot change the generation after the machine is created so you will need to delete and recreate the VM. Party on!