The answer is 3. If you install a manager on every machine, you’re still 1 manager short in case of the disaster. It’s possible to use a virtual manager, but the SAN still goes down at the time of the disaster. The virtual manager can only help to start it again.

The logical thing to do here, is to install a Failover Manager. Put this manager in a third location and you’re protected against a disaster in any of those 3 locations.

For our pleasure, HP created a Virtual Appliance to be installed on a virtual platform. Download it here. In my case I used a simple HP ML110 G5 with 2x Intel Xeon 3065 CPU’s, 8GB RAM, 2x 500GB SATA disks and 2 GBit NICs with VMware vSphere Hypervisor (Free ESXi) as a dedicated server for the Virtual Appliance. And even that is overkill. You can easily make it work with 1 dual core CPU and half the RAM.

Setting up the complete environment and integrating it into the existed infrastructure took me less then a day. Configuring the Virtual Appliance is not a lot more then assigning an IP address.

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

Madison Square Garden can seat 20,000 people for a concert. This blog was viewed about 68,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Madison Square Garden, it would take about 3 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

And thus began my quest for contacts… The question was simple. How to transfer the 300+ contacts from my BB 9780 to my new Galaxy S II? After a short while I found Google Sync. Pretty straight forward. Syncing your BB contacts and calendar with Gmail. Gmail is of course bound to my Google account and so is my Android phone. Seems simple.

After the installation and initial sync I noticed not all contacts were on my Android phone. I tried to export my contact to a .csv file by using the Blackberry Desktop Manager because I can import those in Gmail. Only 48 contacts were exported. Why? After a long while I found out my BB had 3 contact lists. 2 Bound to my @gmail.com account (don’t ask me how this is possible) and 1 bound to my @hotmail account.

No matter what I tried, only the 48 contacts bound to my @hotmail account were syncing while the majority of my contact details were in one of the @gmail.com accounts.

Blackberry has a tool to get rid of Duplicate Address Books, but of course this only work in BB OS 5 and 4.5. How LAME. In the end it came down to Workaround 3: Delete everything and restore a backup after re-installing your BB. This made me so mad.

After a long search, I found this workaround from mattyass from January 2009. It’s really short so I’ll provide some more info here on my blog as my last effort I ever put into RIM devices.

1. Create a backup of your BB containing ONLY the Address Books
2. 
3. Download a device simulator from RIM: https://swdownloads.blackberry.com/Downloads/entry.do?code=060AD92489947D410D897474079C1477. I got the 9780.
4. Install and run it
5. 
6. 
7. Start you BB Desktop Manager and connect the simulator by pluggin in the virtual USB cable
8. 
9. Now restore your backup to the simlulator
10. 
11. In my case the restore resulted in just 1 address book in the simulator device. I sincerely hope this is also the case in your situation.
12. Now you can export the contacts to an .csv file.
13. Choose Organizer and Configure Settings
14. 
15. Choose Address Book
16. 
17. A screen will pop up. Choose the ASCII importer/exporter. Choose Next.
18. 
19. Choose ‘One way sync from device’
20. 
21. Choose a file name and location for the .csv file
22. 
23. I didn’t change the default options
24. 
25. Choose Finish
26. 
27. When you come back to the main screen, press sync and all you contacts will be exported to the .csv file. Hooray!
28. 
29. You can now import the .csv file into your Gmail contacts
30. 

To make things clear: I enjoyed 2 years of Blackberry phones. A 9700 and a 9780. Only the last couple of months things weren’t working. The functionality and speeds basically remained the same in those 2 years. Back then, it were great machines. But now, because of the tremendous progress of both hardware and software of smart phones, they are quite worthless to me. Not in general, just to me.

I hope this guide helps you guys out there struggling to get rid of all things RIM. Good luck!

vssadmin list writers
pause
takeown /F %WINDIR%\winsxs\*.* /A /R
icacls %WINDIR%\winsxs\*.* /grant “NT Service\trustedinstaller:(F)”
icacls %WINDIR%\winsxs\filemaps\*.* /grant “NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM:(RX)”
icacls %WINDIR%\winsxs\filemaps\*.* /grant BUILTIN\Users:(RX)
vssadmin list writers
pause

Warning: Syslog not configured. Please check Syslog options under Configuration.Software.Advanced Settings in vSphere client.

This happens to be a fix rather than a bug =) The following issue is resolved in the Update 2 package as you can read in the Release Notes:

The vSphere client does not display an alert message if Syslog is not configured
If the configuration information is not found while loading the syslog.conf file, an alert message related to configuration issues is not displayed in the Summary tab of the vSphere client.

This issue is resolved in this release. You can now see the following message in the Summary tab of the vSphere Client if Syslog is not configured:

Warning: Syslog not configured. Please check Syslog options under Configuration.Software.Advanced Settings in vSphere client.

The warning was correct because there was nothing configured for this setting.

So I checked the other hosts, which I upgraded earlier for their value of this setting. The totally logical value of [] /scratch/log/messages came to light. I didn’t look any further and put in the same value on the host that had the error.

No more worries

Active Directory Web Services encountered an error while reading the settings for the specified Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services instance. Active Directory Web Services will retry this operation periodically. In the mean time, this instance will be ignored. Instance name: ADAM_VMwareVCMSDS

Luckily this error is documented e.g. here and here.

Replace the ‘Port SLL’ REG_SZ key under HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\ADAM_VMwareVCMSDS\Parameters

for a REG_DWORD key with the name ‘Port SLL’ and decimal value 686 (or simlpy create the key)

Now restart the VMwareVCMSDS service and the error should be gone.

Please note: This is a fix for vCenter Server 4.1 and 5.0 on Windows Server 2008 R2. Running vCenter Server 4.0 on Windows Server 2008 R2 is not supported until Update 3. I got this error after a fresh install of vCenter 5.

Why 2008 R2? Because it has a kind of transfer wizard that isn’t present in 2008. If you want to transfer your licenses to 2003 or 2008 server, you’ll have to get on the phone with Microsoft. In both situations you’ll need the authorization and/or license codes, so keep them at hand. If you can’t find them anymore, you can ask Microsoft to send you a license report for your company. You’ll also need a connection to the Internet so the wizard can contact the Microsoft Clearinghouse server to register your transfer.

Start the Remote Desktop Licensing Manager

Add your servers to the overview screen to the left by right clicking on All servers and choosing Connect

You’ll end up with something like this:

Right click your new server and choose Manage Licenses

The Manage licenses Wizard will start. Click Next on the welcome screen

The wizard will try to contact the Microsoft Clearinghouse server

Now choose your action. I’ll choose the first option because this a a migration and not a disaster recovery

Put in the source license server’s DNS name

I had to put in the IP address because our source license server had a name with an underscore and the wizard did not like that

Agree to discontinue using the source license server

Choose you license program

I chose Open License which required me to input the Authorization number and License number

Choose your product version, license type and the quantity

The licenses will be migrated

You’re done

If you receive the error “The Microsoft Clearhouse server could not be contacted. Ensure that you have Internet connectivity …..”, you can try to first open a browser windows to http://microsoft.com and (repeatedly) try the last step (press Back and Next) of the migration again right after the Microsoft website appears. This resolved this weird problem in my case.

If you experience high CPU load from the vmnat.exe process, do the following:

Close all VM’s and VMware Workstation. Start the Virtual Network Editor from your start menu.

Now press the Restore Default button. VMware will reset all virtual interfaces.

I ended up with a Host-only network type VMNet1 and a NAT network type VMNet8. I reckon this will be the same for you.

Don’t forget to check the VM’s that need to use a NAT network connection.

I found some posts that suggested to uninstall security patches, but I’m not very keen on that. I actually immediately suspected the new Office File Validation Add-In because we had some problems with it before. It appeared indeed related to the OFV Add-In.

It seems Microsoft issued a fix and several work arounds for exactly this problem in KB2570623. A patch was released on sept. 13th through KB2553065. We are currently testing the patch.

I’ll list the work arounds here for archive purposes. My preferred method, might the patch not fix the problem, seems to be Method 4:

Workarounds
Method 1:
To be able to have both the protection of the OFV, and typical performance over the network when opening files, upgrade to either Microsoft Excel 2007 or Microsoft Excel 2010.

Method 2:
Copy the file to the local workstation. Open and save it in Excel from the local hard drive. Copy the file back to the network location.

Note: If multiple users are accessing the same file, you must be cautious to collaborate with the other users before you copy the file back to the share so that you do not overwrite the changes that were made by another user. The Shared Workbook feature cannot be used with this workaround.

Method 3:
To use Excel 2003 and avoid the network performance issue, you can disable the Microsoft Office File Validation Add-in for Excel by removing the Excel portion of the OFV. This removes the additional protection of the OFV for Excel while still protecting the other Office applications.

Fix it for me
Microsoft Fix it 50748

Method 4:
To use Excel 2003 and avoid the network performance issue, you can disable the Microsoft Office File Validation Add-In for Excel by using a registry setting. This removes the additional protection of the OFV for Excel while still protecting the other Office applications.

More information about this setting is available here:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg985445%28office.12%29.aspx

Fix it for me
Microsoft Fix it 50741

Let me fix it myself
You can use the EnableOnLoad registry entry to configure how you want Excel to handle opening workbooks for the OFV. By default, the EnableOnLoad entry is not present in the Windows registry. To add the EnableOnLoad entry to the Windows registry, follow these steps:

Exit Excel.
Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK.
Locate and then click to select the following registry key:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\
After you select the key that is specified in step 3, point to New on the Edit menu, and then click Key.
Type Excel, and then press ENTER.
Select Excel, point to New on the Edit menu, and then click Key.
Type Security, and then press ENTER.
Select Security, point to New on the Edit menu, and then click Key.
Type FileValidation, and then press ENTER.
Select FileValidation, point to New on the Edit menu, and then click DWORD Value.
Type EnableOnLoad, and then press ENTER.
Note: The default value is 0 which disables the validation.
On the File menu, click Exit to quit Registry Editor.

esxcfg-vswitch -a vSwitch1
esxcfg-vswitch -m 9000 vSwitch1
esxcfg-vswitch -A iSCSI1 vSwitch1
esxcfg-vswitch -A iSCSI2 vSwitch1
esxcfg-vmknic -a -i 10.1.41.101 -n 255.255.255.0 -m 9000 iSCSI1
esxcfg-vmknic -a -i 10.1.41.111 -n 255.255.255.0 -m 9000 iSCSI2
esxcfg-vswitch -L vmnic2 vSwitch1
esxcfg-vswitch -L vmnic3 vSwitch1
esxcfg-vswitch -p iSCSI1 -N vmnic3 vSwitch1
esxcfg-vswitch -p iSCSI2 -N vmnic2 vSwitch1
esxcfg-swiscsi –e
esxcfg-scsidevs -a | grep “iSCSI Software”
esxcfg-vmknic –l
esxcli swiscsi nic add -n vmk1 -d vmhbaxx
esxcli swiscsi nic add -n vmk2 -d vmhbaxx
esxcli swiscsi nic list -d vmhbaxx

On every iSCSI portgroup, put 1 vmnic as active, the other as unused (standby didn’t work for me).
When config is complete, don’t forget to set a path selection policy on your datastores.