Monday, March 24, 2014

altering retention policy for deleted items in Office365

By default, Office365 mailboxes retain deleted items for 30 days.  This is a bit short, I think.  I typically like to make this limit 90 days to one year.  Here are the powershell commands needed to run to make that happen (365 days in this example):

PS C:\scripts> enable-organizationcustomization
PS C:\scripts> Set-RetentionPolicyTag "Deleted Items" -AgeLimitForRetention 365


This is based on getting into PowerShell, based on my directions here:
http://t-solve.blogspot.com/2013/11/how-i-configure-script-to-get-into.html



Sunday, March 23, 2014

setting up Blackberry services on Office365

These are the steps to enable Blackberry services on Office365 (running Exchange 2013).

From the admin console, go to service settings -> mobile

















Click on Enable service


From there, you can manage the service.  Of note, as of 3/23/14, I'd get an error when I tried to manage the Blackberry service from IE 11, but I was able to use Chrome.  Pretty weird.










Monday, March 3, 2014

Snapshots taking up tons of space on VM host machines

I found myself in a situation where I had a 1 TB drive on a VM host (running Windows 2008 R2) with four virtual machines on it that was completely out of space.  I found that there were tons of AVHD files taking up a lot of room.  Per what I read, these are snapshot files, even though I deleted the snap shots from the Hyper-V Manager (and cleared up a dozen GB or so), the snapshots were not truly gone.

This page talks a little bit about the process:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/charles_sterling/archive/2008/08/06/what-are-all-these-avhd-files-hyper-v.aspx?Redirected=true

But in the end, I got the space back by just turning off the virtual machines.  When I did so, there was a merge process that went on with the snapshots.  In a turned off machine, this just happens automatically.  In the end, I turned off the machines and left them off until the "cancel merge in progress" went away.  For my largest VM (approx 400 GB of storage), this took about 4 hours.

This is what the cancel merge in progress looks like: