Search results for 'app:weblogs' matching tags 'OCS' and 'OCS R2'

Office Communications Server 2007 – Virtualisation Supported At Last!

Anonymous — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 06:00:00 GMT

Earlier this year, Microsoft confirmed that it would now support OCS 2007 in a virtualised environment. This has been a big ask by clients pretty much ever since OCS was launched. Just about every time I’ve taught OCS in the past couple of years, as well as in the OCS newsgroups, the question of why it’s not supported comes up over and over again. Along with anecdotal evidence that it worked in at least a VMware ESX environment. And in the classroom, we see OCS working (well as least the server components) just fine.

The support Microsoft is providing caters for OCS server roles running in VMs hosted on both a single server (a typical classroom scenario) or hosted on a number of servers (a scenario more likely in corporate deployment). Support is limited to a subset of OCS Server roles, i.e. Front-End Servers, Back-End SQL Server 2008 (64-bit), Group Chat Channel Servers, Group Chat Channel and Compliance Servers, and Access Edge Servers. This means no support of other server roles - Microsoft say these roles are not supported due to “possible quality issues” with real time media.

It took MS a while after R2 was released to support this - I understand that part of the delay in announcing full support was testing. MS always wants (needs!) to test anything it offers to support, and OCS is no different. In announcing VM support, MS has tested a fully distributed topology with 40,000 users and 10,000 group chat users. This means, says Microsoft that: “audio/video/web conferencing servers, audio/video/web edge conferencing servers, dial-in conferencing, Communicator Web Access, enterprise voice, or Remote Call Control may not be deployed as part of the virtualized pool.” The impact of this means that you can not (at least in a supported fashion) virtualise a Standard Edition pool (or for that matter an EE consolidated pool), a consolidated edge server or a CWA server.

Microsoft also published an interesting whitepaper detailing the tested architecture. The white paper also looks at OCS performance and how you can use the Capacity Planning Tool.

This is a great move forward but it comes with some strings. Namely, the roles that are supported only work in an administratively complex environment. Or to put it another way, all the easy installations of OCS (SE, consolidated EE pool, consolidated edge) can not be virtualised in a supported way. And since, with R2, Microsoft has de-emphasised the distributed architecture, to deploy OCS in a virtualised environment, you would need to use the command line tools which makes the deployment potentially more work. I am hoping we’ll see a better story with the next wave of product.

Technorati Tags: OCS 2007 R2,OCS,Office Communications Server,virtualisation

OCS R2 Training Materials

Anonymous — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 06:00:00 GMT

Microsoft has released an OCS R2 learning Portal – you can find this at: http://www.microsoft.com/learning/ocs2007/r2/default.mspx. It contains some training resources for OCS R2. However, the page is both already out of date, and is short on links. I have some more details to add to this page:

The OCS R2 Resource Kit is now available. I The book is good, but it appears rushed and needed a better technical editing. I am hoping to provide more assistance to the team writing the Wave 14 Resource Kit – but more about that (and about Wave 14) in due course.

The learning portal talks about an R2 exam – this is the same exam number as for RTM. This means that if you have already passed the earlier exam there’s no need to re-sit it. According to MSL the exam objective domain has not changed – but the questions have. Early experience with the updated exam suggests MSL needs to review and revise the exam as a matter of some urgency (which I understand is happening). So unless you REALLY need to take the exam now, I’d hold off a few weeks (months?) until those updates are completed. And if you DO need to take it now, ensure you train with a firm that understands the new exam and can help you to pass. Naturally, I’d suggest Global Knowledge.

The portal discusses a three-day OCS R2 Ignite workshop. This is available and it a very good course. It’s needs three days however. I love delivering this material.

R2 is now in the field and customers should start to evaluate it. If you have not yet deployed OCS at all, R2 is a natural next step, but you should still evaluate it hard and carefully – make sure it is able to meet your requirements. If you have already deployed OCS RTM, you may not want to take on the work needed to upgrade to R2 – you will need a new OS platform and some extra hardware in order to carry out the upgrade. Waiting for Wave 14 may be preferable – but that depends on your requirements.

Technorati Tags: OCS R2

OCS, WMI and PowerShell

Anonymous — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 06:00:00 GMT

This past week, I was teaching OCS Voice Ignite in Munich and a colleague (superstar Robin Edwards). During the week, we chatted about how to configure OCS’s Address Book service. This is a topic that comes up a lot in our OCS training, especially as the Address Book seems to be one of the key troubleshooting issues our delegates encounter.

As it turns out, you cannot do much with the GUI. There’s nothing there to enable you to do much more than view SOME of the settings. For example, by default, OCS ABS keeps 30 days worth of delta address books. If you login to Office Communicator, OC will download only the deltas since the last time you logged in, up to a certainly value – by default 30 days. This is a great feature for very large address books that don’t change a lot week to week.

The problem is, you can’t see this value in the GUI, nor can you set it. To view or change this, you need to use WMI in a direct way. Which leaves you three options: WBEMTest, VBS, or PowerShell. For most admins, WBEMTest is way too ugly and unfriendly and that probably is true for VBS. But PowerShell makes it very, very easy (assuming you know PowerShell of course).

The key settings for the Address Book Server are found in the WMI Class MSFT_SIPAddressBookSettings. This class is defined in MSDN at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb632067.aspx.

This class has some useful properties, including:

DaysToKeep – specifies the number of days to keep the delta data files. The default is 30.

ExternalURL - An HTTPS URL that specifies the external location for address book file downloads

InternalURL - An HTTPS URL that specifies the internal location for address book file downloads.

MaxDeltaFileSizePercentage - The maximum percent of change for which a delta file is created. A delta file is not created if the percent of change is greater than this number. Multiply the value by 0.01 to derive the percentage. The minimum value for this property is 0 and the maximum value is 9999 (99.99%). The default value is 1250 (12.5%).

OutputLocation - Specifies the directory in which the files are stored. PartitionOutputByOU - Controls whether data is partitioned by organization unit (OU). RunTime - Specifies the service start time. The minimum value for this property is 0 and the maximum value is 2359. The default value is 130.

SynchronizeNow - When true, triggers the Address Book Server to perform a synchronization pass.

SynchronizePollingIntervalSecs - Specifies the number of seconds between checks for synchronization. The minimum value for this property is 5 and the maximum value is 9999.

UseNormalizationRules - Controls whether normalization is performed.

So much for what it does, now to how to do it with OCS R2. To get this class, using Standard Edition, you just use:

Get-WMIObject –Class MSFT_SipAddressbookSetting

However, using EE, it’s a bit more complex and you have to use a slightly different variation on the Get-WMIObject sytax, as follows:

PS C:\foo> gwmi -query "select * from MSFT_SipAddressBookSetting where backend='dc1'" -computer ocs-ee

Backend                        : dc1
DaysToKeep                     : 30
ExternalURL                    :
IgnoreGenericRules             : False
InstanceID                     : {D265A402-BD08-4BCB-BEB3-CC7AFBD47C08}
InternalURL                    : https://Cookham.gktrain.net/Abs/Int/Handler
MaxDeltaFileSizePercentage     : 1250
OutputLocation                 : \\ocs-ee\absfiles
PartitionOutputByOU            : False
RunTime                        : 130
SynchronizeNow                 : False
SynchronizePollingIntervalSecs : 300
UseNormalizationRules          : True
WebServiceEnabled              : True

So to make some changes, you could do something like this:

PS C:\foo> $abs = gwmi -query "select * from MSFT_SipAddressBookSetting where backend='dc1'" -computer ocs-ee
PS C:\foo> $abs.daystokeep = 45
PS C:\foo> $abs.runtime    = 0230
PS C:\foo> $result = abs.put()

PS C:\foo> gwmi -query "select * from MSFT_SipAddressBookSetting where backend='dc1'" -computer ocs-ee

Backend                        : dc1
DaysToKeep                     : 45
ExternalURL                    :
IgnoreGenericRules             : False
InstanceID                     : {D265A402-BD08-4BCB-BEB3-CC7AFBD47C08}
InternalURL                    : https://Cookham.gktrain.net/Abs/Int/Handler
MaxDeltaFileSizePercentage     : 1250
OutputLocation                 : \\ocs-ee\absfiles
PartitionOutputByOU            : False
RunTime                        : 230
SynchronizeNow                 : False
SynchronizePollingIntervalSecs : 300
UseNormalizationRules          : True
WebServiceEnabled              : True

And finally – a bit tip of the hat to superstar Robin Edwards who showed me this class last week. Thanks Rob – you rock!

Technorati Tags: OCS R2,PowerShell,WMI