Installing VMWare Tools from a Red Hat Shell

Installing VMWare Tools from a Red Hat Shell

Installing and Upgrading VMware tools on Red Hat is very straightforward. In the steps below I will demonstrate what to do assuming that you are happy to install under /opt and accepting the defaults during the installation. There are some advanced features you can choose to enable during installation as well as choosing different locations for the software to find key files.

From vSphere right click the Virtual Machine, guest, Install/Upgrade VMWare Tools. Next run the commands below.

1. mkdir -p /mnt/cdrom          - This creates the directory /mnt/cdrom which we will mount the VMtools installer to
2.  mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom -This mountes the media the virtual machine see's as it's CDROM drive to the directory /mnt/cdrom
3. cd /opt
4. cp /mnt/cdrom/VMversionname.tar.gz /opt
5. tar -xvzf VMversionname.tar.gz
6. cd vmware-tools-distrib
7. ./VMware-install.pl
8.  Hit enter to accept each default answer through the installation

Rebalance databases in a DAG on Exchange 2010

Sometime you will find that your mailbox database will all be mounted on one of your mail servers where they should be split between members of your DAG. This can be caused but network outages, server crashes and more.

Microsoft have included a powershell script that you can run to quickly fix this. By running this script with the options below, Exchange will attempt to put all mailbox databases back on their preferred servers based on Activation Preference.

From an exchange server, launch the Exchange Management Shell

1. cd "C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\V14\Scripts"

2. .\RedistributeActiveDatabases.ps1 -DagName nameofyourdag -BalanceDbsByActivationPreference

3. For each mailbox that it says Considering move of 'DATABASE NAME' from 'SERVER' to 'SERVER' type Y and press enter. There is an option to say yes to all but i've never had any success out of it.

4. When its finished, open the exchange management console and check the screen above. It should show half mounted on one and half on the other.

If you get a message come up saying that a move has failed because the content index state is failed you will need to run the following command in the exchange management shell on the server which the content state is failed on.

Update-MailboxDatabaseCopy "MAILBOX_DATABASE_NAME\SERVER_NAME" -CatalogOnly

Creating Shared Mailboxes in Microsoft Exchange 2010

Creating Shared Mailboxes in Microsoft Exchange 2010

In Exchange 2010 you can create a shared mailbox which doesn't rely on a user account being active to use it. This is better security and will stop exchange from telling you that you need a CAL for the account. Once the account is created you will see a disabled user in the OU you specify below. This user should not be touched.


To do this, log onto you Exchange server and launch the Exchange Management Shell. This will open a special powershell module with the exchange cmdlets loaded.

In the example I give you, you will be creating a mailbox called Quarantine. In this window, run a modified version of this:

New-Mailbox –Name Quarantine –Alias quarantine –OrganizationalUnit “yourdomain/path/to/organizational/unit” –Database “name of database to store mailbox” –UserPrincipalName quarantine@youremaildomain.com -Shared

Below is a breakdown of what this will do:

New-Mailbox at the start indicates that you are creating a new mailbox
-Name is the flag to say whatever follows it will be the name of the mailbox, in this case Quarantine
-Alias is the flag to say whatever follows it will be the alias/user logon name of the mailbox, in this case quarantine
–OrganizationalUnit is the flag to say whatever follows it will be where the account is stored in active directory
-Database is the mailbox store in which the mailbox will be created
–UserPrincipalName is the flag to say whatever follows it will be the email address created for the account
-Shared is the flag that goes on the end to say this is going to be created as shared type of mailbox (free of particular ownership)