So the title is a bit cryptic, but I ran into an issue where a certain blackberry decided to no longer sync it's contacts with our newly migrated BES server. No idea why, tried rebooting the phone, toggling wireless sync of contacts, etc etc... no luck. The user had a bunch of stuff on the phone, so I didn't really want to wipe it or reactivate it particularly. Found this little tidbit of info on Expert's Exchange at:
http://www.experts-exchange.com/Hardware/Handhelds_-_PDAs/Blackberry/Q_23024284.html
All you need to do is go to Options > Advanced Options > Enterprise Activation and in the email field press and hold the ALT key and type CNFG. Once you enter this a hidden menu will appear and you need to change "Wireless Sync" to No, now exit this menu and wait 30 seconds and repeat the process but turn sync back to Yes. Once you've changed this setting you will see a slow sync will automatically start and it will repair all the wireless sync settings. In the rare case that this fails you just need to wipe the device and reactivate.
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
Monday, February 7, 2011
Moving ESXi guests without vCenter
vCenter is a very cool application, enabling you to do many things that would otherwise take hours to figure out and execute, especially in a multi-host environment (which is pretty typical for VMware). One such feature is the ability to move guest VM's between hosts. Using vCenter, it's as simple as right clicking the guest and picking 'Migrate', then picking the new destination and waiting. But what if you don't HAVE vCenter, or in my case, the server you want to move IS your vCenter server. Not so easy then!
Veeam to the rescue! If you don't know what Veeam is, you haven't been working with VMware very long. It's a great company that produces lots of useful software for managing VMware environments... and some of their best tools are free! In this case, their free product FastSCP is what we are after. Register for it and install it on any other server than the one you want to move. Setup is simple, and adding hosts is even simpler. Once you add a host, you can expand it's storage just like the storage browser in vCenter or the vSphere client, and moving servers is just a simple copy/paste operation. Well, okay, there are a few more steps:
1) If the server you are moving is part of a vCenter environment, it is highly recommended that you unregister it first. Even if it's not, you should unregister it anyway. Either from vCenter, or using vSphere to connect directly to the host, shut down the guest machine then right click and select 'Remove from Inventory'. Don't click delete! It will warn you about some stuff, just click yes and proceed. You'll notice the VM is no longer listed under your host. It's now just a bunch of files in a folder on the datastore.
2) Start up Veeam, and add the source and destination hosts to the manager if you haven't already. Expand the source host, right click on the folder for the virtual machine you want to move, and click copy. Then, expand the destination host, and right click in the right hand side's empty area, and click paste.
NOTE: If you installed Veeam on an x64 server, you may get errors when trying to copy and paste folders, or create new folders. It's a bug, and Veeam disclaimers that x64 installations are purely experimental at this point. There are two workarounds... either create the folder first using vSphere by browsing to the datastore on the host and making a new folder, then copying only files from one folder to another, or follow this method to fix up your server so that you won't get that error:
http://www.virtualvcp.com/content/view/26/1/ details below
1. Download the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 SDK (THE 64-BIT VERSION!) from the Microsoft Website. This download is about 300MB if I remember correctly.
2. Install the SDK on the 64-bit machine that you would like to run Veeam FastSCP on.
3. Now, open a command prompt (Start -> Run -> Type "cmd" -> OK)
4. Change directory to: C:\Program Files\Microsoft.NET\SDK\v2.0 64bit\Bin
5. Now Run: corflags "C:\Program Files (x86)\Veeam\Veeam Backup and FastSCP\VeeamShell.exe" /32BIT+
6. Now when you try and run Veeam FastSCP again, it should work fine.
3) Anyway, now that the files are moved, all you need to do is register the virtual machine on the new host. Open up vSphere, connect directly to the destination host, then browse the datastore. Find the .vmx file inside of the folder you copied and right click on it, then select 'Import' to add it to your inventory. You may get asked something to the effect of "Where did this virtual machine come from?"... in our case, you will want to pick "I moved it".
That's it, start up your server, it should work fine!
Just wait for the copy to finish, then delete the source... migration complete!
Veeam to the rescue! If you don't know what Veeam is, you haven't been working with VMware very long. It's a great company that produces lots of useful software for managing VMware environments... and some of their best tools are free! In this case, their free product FastSCP is what we are after. Register for it and install it on any other server than the one you want to move. Setup is simple, and adding hosts is even simpler. Once you add a host, you can expand it's storage just like the storage browser in vCenter or the vSphere client, and moving servers is just a simple copy/paste operation. Well, okay, there are a few more steps:
1) If the server you are moving is part of a vCenter environment, it is highly recommended that you unregister it first. Even if it's not, you should unregister it anyway. Either from vCenter, or using vSphere to connect directly to the host, shut down the guest machine then right click and select 'Remove from Inventory'. Don't click delete! It will warn you about some stuff, just click yes and proceed. You'll notice the VM is no longer listed under your host. It's now just a bunch of files in a folder on the datastore.
2) Start up Veeam, and add the source and destination hosts to the manager if you haven't already. Expand the source host, right click on the folder for the virtual machine you want to move, and click copy. Then, expand the destination host, and right click in the right hand side's empty area, and click paste.
NOTE: If you installed Veeam on an x64 server, you may get errors when trying to copy and paste folders, or create new folders. It's a bug, and Veeam disclaimers that x64 installations are purely experimental at this point. There are two workarounds... either create the folder first using vSphere by browsing to the datastore on the host and making a new folder, then copying only files from one folder to another, or follow this method to fix up your server so that you won't get that error:
http://www.virtualvcp.com/content/view/26/1/ details below
1. Download the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 SDK (THE 64-BIT VERSION!) from the Microsoft Website. This download is about 300MB if I remember correctly.
2. Install the SDK on the 64-bit machine that you would like to run Veeam FastSCP on.
3. Now, open a command prompt (Start -> Run -> Type "cmd" -> OK)
4. Change directory to: C:\Program Files\Microsoft.NET\SDK\v2.0 64bit\Bin
5. Now Run: corflags "C:\Program Files (x86)\Veeam\Veeam Backup and FastSCP\VeeamShell.exe" /32BIT+
6. Now when you try and run Veeam FastSCP again, it should work fine.
3) Anyway, now that the files are moved, all you need to do is register the virtual machine on the new host. Open up vSphere, connect directly to the destination host, then browse the datastore. Find the .vmx file inside of the folder you copied and right click on it, then select 'Import' to add it to your inventory. You may get asked something to the effect of "Where did this virtual machine come from?"... in our case, you will want to pick "I moved it".
That's it, start up your server, it should work fine!
Just wait for the copy to finish, then delete the source... migration complete!
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