Posts made by Nara

@Carnival-Boy said:

Out of interest, why is your client moving?

With mailboxes that large, I can only imagine the Outlook sync has issues at best.

@scottalanmiller said:

http://opensource.com/business/14/4/open-source-community-beats-tech-support

Company's tend to like support because it gives them someone to blame, not because it actually provides support or makes them more money. It is generally about middle managers playing politics trying to protect themselves, not about doing what is best for the business - either in cost or in ability to support the products. How often do you see commercial support actually being worth the money (outside of hardware support contracts?)

I couldn't imagine running an LOB application or anything mission-critical without proper support. If it goes down, the company's losing thousands of dollars per hour. I'm not going to put a post up somewhere in hopes that someone'll give me the appropriate answer in a reasonable timeframe.

OWA isn't the same thing as Outlook. At least give Outlook a try. At this point, you don't know if it's a limitation with OWA, or if there's something else going on.

@technobabble said:

Looking for tool to do an internal audit of Microsoft licensing for a client. What do you guys recommend.

Take a look at the Microsoft Assessment Planning Toolkit (MAP). It's what's recommended by Microsoft. It uses WMI for scanning, so you'll want to make sure you have the firewall exceptions for it enabled.

@Dashrender said:

An RPO/RTO question is a lot more difficult to answer than one might expect. I'm sure that Alex and Scott have a linty of questions that can make it easier, but for a company that hasn't ever looked at these questions before it's likely they have no real understanding of how to answer these requests.

When I first started with my company I was told that we could live without our brand new EHR for 6 days (the downtime the vendor told us we'd suffer if we had a total server failure). The vendor at the time refused to provide installation media/files (they built then shipped the servers to us) and all we had for backups were SQL level backups.

I approached the board with a plan to provide better options, but at that near day one the board stated that 6 days of downtime considering the current setup was acceptable. Of course I nearly passed out that this consider I'd been supporting their phones for the past 4 years and they were nearly unbearable when their phones wouldn't sync for a day to their calendars.

Fast forward a year and a few minor outages later, the tune changed and we could now only afford one day of downtime, so they approved the purchase of Appasure, and we reduced our downtime to a few hours.

Back to the point at hand, if the Docs in technobabble's case haven't experienced downtime in the past they will have unrealistic expectations of either uptime or tolerable downtime.

For RTO, the easiest way to ask it is, "If X fails, how long can the business be without it before it severely impairs the business?" For some folks, it's a few hours, or even more than a day. For others, it's less. For RPO, it's, "If we need to roll back to backups, how far back can we recover to in an emergency without causing undue data loss?" Most folks are ok with the previous night's backup, but not quite everyone. The longest it's ever taken me to determine RPO/RTO has been about 30 minutes.

Does it work normally with Outlook?

@StefUk said:

hi I m doing a migration for a client that is moving from google apps to office 365. So far so good but I ve just checked their mailboxes size and some ( about 8-10 out of 45 ) are about 35-40 Gb in size. They want to move to the mid size business not the E plan ...
as far as size is concerned they are aware they will need to reduce the size of the mailbox soon ( as 50Gb ) limitation.

Is there anything to watch out for when migrating such a massive mailbox ? I m not sure how much time it will take or if it would be easier to do it staged ? any pointers much appreciated !! ;o)

Pity, if they went EOP2 or E3, they'd have unlimited archive storage.

Oh, heck no! There's no way I'm dealing with tickets off-hours unless it's a major work-stoppage emergency. Emergencies happen, sure, put those fires out. Sometimes after-hours maintenance comes up, and sure, I'll do what's needed.

Except for timelines (which I try not go give), my word's spot-on.

If it makes CBeyond suck less, I'm all for it!

@technobabble said:

@Nara
RDS

In that case, why not an RDS Gateway? Combine it with RD Web Access, and you have an easy portal for users to access their RDS sessions with while still keeping things secure.

@technobabble said:

Server desktops to use a Medical Billing program and scheduler.

Are they servers, or are they desktops? Is it a 1:1 ratio VMs to users, or is it shared, like RDS?

Was that a consultant, or a Dell rep? Tossing a SAN at something's typically something I see from resellers. From what you've explained, it sounds like you're short on IOPS. With the modern technologies available for localized and distributed tiered storage, SAN wouldn't be the way to go. What's your RTO for these systems?

@Dashrender said:

@IT-ADMIN said:

@technobabble also make sure that you create GPO for each policy, i mean don't set all your policies in a single GPO, each policy in a separate GPO, so if you want to remove a specific policy you will not have to remove all policies that reside in the same GPO, rather you will remove GPO that have only one policy,

You have to be careful with this, multiple GPOs to a single user/device can slow things down for logon, etc. Separation is nice, but you do have to pay attention to how it affects logon times.

Yes! I like to keep one GPO per major unit, with sub-GPOs as needed. For example:
Company.com - Default Domain Policy
-HQ (No policies)
--Computers - HQ Computers Policy
---Engineering - HQ Engineering Computers Policy
--Users - HQ users Policy
---Engineering - HQ Engineering Users Policy

This gives enough granularity to implement nearly any setting needed, while keeping the amount of GPOs to a minimum.

What are the users RDPing into, exactly?

@NetworkNerd said:

@alexntg said:

There's some info missing. How is this application being accessed? Are people going to be using RDP, PCoIP, or something else? Is this doing 3D modeling, or is it just the server component to a client installed on a local computer?

I had planned to have them use either RDP or VNC to access the VM. The application will be completely standalone inside a Windows VM (no client-server software) and will be either Windows 7 or 8/8.1 (whatever is supported by the software vendor). I believe they support 8 but not 8.1.

You won't get a rich end-user experience with RDP, let alone VNC, even if it doesn't choke on lack of graphics hardware. VMware Horizon View does support hardware-accelerated graphics with certain video cards. If you're considering VDI for a small number of use cases, consider going full-bore and doing it out fully.

As a side note, don't forget to address Windows licensing; VDI works differently from server licensing.

@scottalanmiller said:

@Nara said:
In many cases, LOB applications and/or job-specific applications don't support Linux. There are some that do (and I've worked with a couple), but when deciding on major applications, function comes before platform.

Agreed, but my findings have been that it is extremely rare today to find truly good quality software that is Windows only. More likely it is a poor choice that just isn't realized until it is too late. Windows-only apps should be a red flag. There are great Windows-only apps, but they are pretty rare. And they tend to be the same ones that only support legacy Windows. The factors that make them not support Linux, BSD and Solaris are the same ones that block them from supporting modern Windows much of the time. What seems like a good program today often turns into the unsupported quagmire of tomorrow.

Do you have some examples of mainstream business apps that are available for both platforms that have native clients that don't require a platform like Java in order to run?

@scottalanmiller said:

Even using Exchange I've started to prefer OWA over Outlook 2013. Smoother, more reliable operations.

I can't stand OWA. It isn't as feature-rich, and isn't available offline. It also doesn't support application plugins, such as CRM.

@Dashrender said:

Yes it was. When I was looking at the GPO diag from Group Policy Manager I saw that my new GPOs were seeing a computer account was not being assigned to the OU it was in. I don't understand why that was.

To 'force' it to work I checked the settings on the GPO to enforce - this seemed to solve the problem. After trying my Windows 8 systems on their GPO - I copied the Win 8 GPO and modified to match what I needed for the Win 7 machines and it worked.

In that case, it sounds like one of the other GPOs applied to that object may have conflicting settings. Turning Enforce on for the GPO increased its precedence for application, overriding any related settings on higher-level GPOs.

@Dashrender said:

It would be nice to see a VPN/Pertino appliance for say a home network. There are times when you need to hang a printer directly on the network for printing, so the appliance would be nice... but it's really no different than putting ASAs on both sides.

Something like a Sophos RED?

@scottalanmiller said:

@Nara said:

I've tried to move to Linux, but I can't. The tools that I need to do my job in an efficient manner aren't present on Linux. In order to run them, I'd need to dink around with wine or use a VM.

Is that because you are supporting Windows?

I'm supporting vSphere. Sure, vCenter uses a web interface, but until you get vCenter up and running, you need Windows. I'm also an Outlook user. So far, I haven't found an email client that has the level of functionality and smooth operation that Outlook does. I need something that'll support Outlook Anywhere, sync across multiple computers, have offline and online access, follow-ups with date-based reminders, access shared calendars, and have message rules. I'm also an OneNote user. There's nothing like it that has a native Linux application.

Beyond that, I do support Windows environments. In many cases, LOB applications and/or job-specific applications don't support Linux. There are some that do (and I've worked with a couple), but when deciding on major applications, function comes before platform. The product that has the most beneficial use for the company is the best choice.