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Getting Started

To sign up for a trial account, log in with your Hotmail or Live account and go to http://www.office365.com.  There, you can sign up for a free 30-day trial of the software, long enough to see the administration interface, and use it.

Choose the Right Office 365 Plan for your Business

The P ("Professional") Plan

The first option you can choose is the plan type.  There are several features that the P plans offer, including email and calendar with Exchange Online; creating and editing Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote with Office Web Apps; Instant Messaging, online meetings, and PC-to-PC audio and video calls with Lync Online; and websites and document sharing with SharePoint Online.  The P plan can only be used for organizations that have up to 50 users, and cost $6 per month for each user, if you decide to convert your trial into a subscription. If you have more than 50 users, then you’ll need to use the Enterprise plans (or “E” plans.)

The E ("Enterprise") Plans

The E plans have 4 levels, E1 through E4.  E1 plans are $10/user/month.  In addition to all of the features that you get with the P plans, the E1 plans sync with your Active Directory and provide a client license for accessing on-premises installations of Exchange, SharePoint, and Lync.  However, the $10/user/month E1 plan does not allow access to Office Web Apps.  If you already have SharePoint onsite, this may be a great plan for you, since Office Web Apps is probably already available to you through your SharePoint server.

The E2 plan brings back the Office Web Apps, and is $16 per user per month.  The E3 plan, at $24/user/month allows advanced features on websites hosted by SharePoint online, advanced archive features in Exchange, and also provides a full version of Office 2010 Professional that can be loaded on the systems. Finally, the E4 plan allows all of those features, plus allows a Lync Server on-premises to provide enhanced PBX services.

You can choose from either the P or E3 for a trial, but if you suspect that your company will be going with an E plan to take advantage of either the Office Professional Client or the Active Directory synchronization, then you should know that a P plan cannot be upgraded to an E plan:  The user would need to be dropped from the plan, and then added in as an E account.  Not sure which one to choose?  Try either one.  The P plan trial allows up to 10 licenses, but the E plan provides only 1.

After you choose which plan you want to try, fill out the form to complete the trial activation.

During the setup of the trial account, you will be asked what you want to domain to be.  You will add a subdomain to the “onmicrosoft.com” domain.  For my trial account, I used the domain name for my technology blog, geekSerious.com.  I want to use the trial to receive emails at “Me@geekSerious.com”, but that can’t be setup yet.  So during the setup, I choose MichaelSimmons.onMicrosoft.com, and I continued with that as the domain.

How To Setup Office 365 To Use Your Own Domain Name

After you’ve setup your trial account, you will be taken to the Start Here screen.  This will be the same screen that is first seen by users you add to the account.

To configure Office 365 to use your own domain name, instead of the “yourdomain.onmicrosoft.com”, first go to the Admin page.

You can find the link to the Admin page under the “Start Here” heading.

At the Admin Page, there is a link to the process for adding your own domain to the trial.

Adding a custom domain is a simple process which is broken into 5 sections.  Each of the sections provides guidance through it.

Step 1:  Confirm your Domain

To confirm that you own the domain, you’ve got to access the DNS manager from the domain registrar where you bought the domain.  Many of the big domain registrars, including MelbourneIT and GoDaddy have specific instruction pages to tell you how to add a DNS entry to the domain.  You can either point a high priority number mail (MX) record to a fake Office 365 mail server, or point a TXT record over to an Office 365 server.  Once the record is in (it says it can take up to 72 hours but my change was reflected immediately), you press a button to confirm and move to Step 2.

Step 2:  Make sure people can still get to your website

Once step one is completed, step 2 was much easier.  It was pressing one button, and Office 365 checked to make sure the website was still active.  It was very fast and

Step 3:  Update existing Office 365 email addresses

This was another very fast process.  Since at the time I set this up I did not have any other users added to my trial, there was only one account to update.  It changed Michael@michaelsimmons.onmicrosoft.com to Michael@geekserious.com.  My password remained the same.  I logged off and logged back on to complete this step.

Step 4: Add users to Office 365

I took the time during this step to add my users – in my case I added my family members to my account.  There are import tools available to import several users from a file. For my needs, I only added them in individually.

Step 5: Complete the Process

Finally, the last step made me the most nervous, but I gave it a try anyway.  To complete the process, I had to change the name servers on the domain to point to Microsoft’s Office 365 name servers.  It took several minutes for mine to process (and like step 1 it can take up to 72 hours to complete), but when it did my Office 365 trial was completely setup, I was using my own domain name for my accounts, and geekSerious was still up and running.

Conclusion

When deciding whether or not the Office 365 service is something you want to use for yourself, or recommend to either your business customers or the company you work for, you should test the service first.  When setting it up and ready to present it to decision-makers, it may be a more accurate view of what it will look like in production if the domains and accounts are setup with your companies real domain name.  You may use your own domain name for trials of Office 365 without disrupting the current services of your website, even if they are blogs and database driven applications.

In Part 1 of this 2-part series we discussed initial configuration of Cisco UCS Service Profile Templates. In this second and final part of our series on creating service profile templates, we discuss configuration of Cisco UCS vNIC/vHBA Placement Policies.

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vNIC / vHBA Placement Configurations

Placement Policies is a relatively new feature in UCSM. The long and short of it is, this becomes important in two areas:

1. If you’re moving from, say, different blade types with different adapters like full to half or half to full, or one adapter to two adapters; or
2. If you’re using that vNIC connection with VMWare where you’re going to create 16 new NICs.

And so what you want to do here is make sure that your set devices like your HBAs and your hard set vNICs come before those dynamic vNICs. So then you set placement.

You can just set it to Let System Perform Placement, which is the default. But you also have other options, like you can choose any of the placement policies you may have already created.

To create a Placement Policy from here, just click Create Placement Policy. This will bring up the Create Placement Policy dialog box. You can then just move things around and tell the system where you want the slots to assign. For example, you can say Exclude Dynamic. This means, dynamic does not get placed up front.

The system allows you to set PCI order. So that when the system boots up, your devices are in the same order. Things like VMWare really care about PCI order, so that’s an important thing to do when you set this. Click Next to proceed to Server Boot Order configurations.

Server Boot Order Configurations

This is where you specify what you want to boot from. Just like in the other sections, you can either select an existing Boot Policy from the drop-down list or you can create a new one by clicking Create Boot Policy.

Here’s what you’ll see if you click Create Boot Policy.

Give your boot policy a name and (if you want) a description.

Check the Reboot on Boot Order Change checkbox if you want to reboot all servers that will be using this boot policy each time you make changes to the boot order. You can also check the Enforce vNIC/vHBA/iSCSI Name checkbox if you want to enforce naming schemes. Otherwise, just leave these checkboxes to their defaults, which is unchecked.

The next step is to tell UCS how you want to boot. So, for instance, if you want to boot from SAN, just click the Add SAN Boot link found inside the vHBAs panel. Then when the dialog box pops-up, you specify which vHBA (e.g. “vhba0”) and whether you’re adding a Primary or Secondary path. Let’s say you’re adding a Primary, so click its corresponding option button. Click OK when you’re done with all that.

That newly created SAN boot will then be added to your Boot Order list.

But there are still other things you need to set, like your LUN ID and the WWN. To set those, click the Add SAN Boot Target link, which is located right below that Add SAN Boot link you clicked earlier.

When the Add SAN Boot Target dialog box appears, specify the Boot Target LUN. This is normally set to zero. Then type in your initiator in the field labeled Boot Target WWPN. Usually, you just enter the desired value (e.g. 50) right before the first colon and then leave the rest unchanged. Click OK.

If you want to set up a Secondary, repeat the same steps you took in creating that first SAN boot. Of course, you need the specify another vHBA (e.g. “vhba1”) and select Secondary from the option buttons. Click OK.

Again, that Secondary SAN boot will be added to the Boot Order list.

Just like you did earlier, you need to add a SAN Boot Target. However, because you already have a Primary and a Secondary, once you click the Add SAN Boot Target link, the system will ask you to choose which SAN boot the SAN Boot Target should be added to. Select Add SAN Boot Target to SAN secondary.

Then do pretty much the same thing as you did earlier.

So now you have your Primary and Secondary, which will give you two options when you do SAN boot.

But that’s only for SAN boot. You can actually come up with a combination of boot options. So you can add LAN Boot, Local Disk, CD-ROM, Floppy, and iSCSI. Here’s a screenshot showing a variety of boot options:

Boot policies are very flexible. For example, you can have Boot from SAN as Primary and LAN PXE as Secondary, or you can have Primary from SAN and Secondary from CDROM. It’s completely up to you as to how you want to do it.

When you’re done setting this part up, just click that OK button at the lower-right corner of the screen (see previous screenshot).

Once you’re back in the Server Boot Order window, you may select that boot policy you just created from the Boot Policy drop-down list, and then click Next.

Maintenance Policy

Create a Maintenance Policy by clicking the appropriate link on the screen.

Give the policy a name and then pick from the Reboot Policy options listed below. Basically, by picking an option, you are telling the system what it should do every time you make a change to this profile.

• Immediate - The server will reboot automatically
• User Ack (Acknowledge) - The user must reboot the server manually
• Timer Automatic - Reboot is based on a schedule

The recommended option is User Ack, so pick that option and then click OK.

Back in the Maintenance Policy window, select the Maintenance Policy you just created from the drop-down list and then click Next.

Server Assignment

This is where you assign a server pool to this particular service profile template. Select your desired pool from the Pool Assignment drop-down list. Alternatively, if you don’t want to associate this profile template with any server pool yet, you may select Assign Later.

You’ll then be asked which power state (Up or Down) you’d like the server to have the moment the profile is associated with it. The default is Up and most admins prefer to leave it that way.

If you scroll down to the bottom of this screen, you’ll see some Firmware Management (e.g. BIOS, Disk Controller, Adapter) policy settings there. You may have to click those down arrows on the Firmware Management bar to expand that section.

There are two items in there: Host Firmware and Management Firmware.

You may select a host firmware package or management firmware package from their corresponding drop-down lists to associate that package to this service profile. Or, if you want, you may create a package by clicking on the appropriate “Create …” link.

Inside the Create Host Firmware Package dialog box, you’ll see a bunch of tabs for components like: Adapter, BIOS, Board Controller, FC Adapters, HBA Option ROM, and Storage Controller.

This is how it works. When you specify a configuration here, you’re actually telling the system that when you apply this service profile from one blade to another, it should lay down this particular configuration.

Let’s say you went into the Adapter tab, checked M81KR and selected Version 2.0(1q). Once the system lays down this service profile, it will put 2.0(1q) firmware on that M81KR. And if it gets disassociated and moved to another blade that has 2.0(1t), the system should still put down 2.0(1q).

This is particularly useful if you don’t want to worry about a firmware bug that you haven’t hit yet and you already know that this particular configuration for M81KR really works.

You can do this for all the other components you can find in there. When you’re done, click OK.

There’s one little downside to this though. When you try to update firmware using a unified firmware management tool, the system wouldn’t let you update firmware on blades. That’s because the system will see that you have a firmware policy in place and it won’t be able to override that.

So, you would then need to change your firmware policy or create one and then change it instead of doing things from that unified firmware management tool. For some admins, that’s fine because you’re changing firmware on a blade that interacts with an OS, which can be a scary proposition.

So once you already have the Host Firmware Package you want, you can select that from the Host Firmware drop-down list.

You can do the same thing for Management Firmware. If you click the Create Management Firmware Package link, you’ll see something like this:

Just apply the same procedure/principle you used when you created the Host Firmware Package.

When you’re done selecting a Host Firmware policy and a Management Firmware policy, click Next. This will bring you to the last set of configurations needed to create a service profile template.

Operational Policies

Operational policies are more like a bunch of miscellaneous settings that aren’t as important as those found in the other sections. But let’s go through each one of them quickly.

BIOS Configuration

The first item you can set here is the BIOS policy. Click the Create BIOS Policy link to create one.

Everything that you can set in the BIOS you can set in the BIOS Policy. We won’t go into the details here, but let me show you a couple of screenshots so you can see what you can find in there.

There’s actually more, but once you’re done changing some of the defaults to settings that you prefer, click Next. Again, once you apply this service profile to a blade, all those BIOS settings will be automatically set for you.

External IPMI Management Configuration

IPMI or Integrated Platform Management Interface is part of the CIMC (Cisco Integrated Management Controller) and is responsible for giving access to CIMC. To give access, you have to select an IPMI access profile from the drop-down list. If what you want doesn’t belong to the list, then you create it. Click the Create IPMI Access Profile link to do that.

Creating an IPMI access profile would entail giving the profile a name and description, as well as creating IPMI users.

Each IPMI user you create should be assigned a name, a password, and a role (Read Only or Admin).

What are the things you could do with IPMI?

If you do VMWare Dynamic Power Management, where you could bring up and shutdown hosts or blades based on need, you can do that via IPMI. You’ll need to set up access, control and all that, and you do it right there. Another management tool that uses IPMI is Wake-On-LAN.

Management IP Address

When you have pools and management IP addresses for KVM, you have an option to either assign IPs to a blade or to a service profile. This is where you specify which option you prefer. Choose None if you want to assign them to the blade and Pooled if you prefer the service profile.

Monitoring Configuration (Thresholds)

This is simply where you set thresholds for almost anything measurable in your system.

Power Control Policy Configuration

UCS has the capability to cap power. So you can do a number of things that can ensure that power is kept within a certain range.

Here’s a quick look at some of the settings included in a Power Control Policy.

Scrub Policy

A scrub policy will tell the system what it should do to local data and BIOS settings when a server is disassociated from a service profile containing this policy. Here are your options:

Select Yes for the Disk Scrub option if you want all data on the server local drives to be completely erased and No if you want them to be preserved.

For the BIOS Settings Scrub options, select Yes if you want the BIOS settings for that server to be erased and reset to the defaults associated with that server type and vendor, and No if you want them to be preserved.

That’s it. We’ve already pretty much covered all steps required for creating a Service Profile Template, so click Finish.

Before we end, let me show you first how easy it is to create profiles off of that Service Profile Template.

In the UCS Manager, scroll down to the Service Profile Templates node.

Now, you can either right-click on a Service Profile Template and then select Create Service Profiles from Template from the context menu ...

… or click Service Profile Template and then click Create Service Profiles from Template  as shown.

When the Create Service Profiles from Template dialog box appears, enter a Naming Prefix and the number of profiles you want to create. When done, click OK.

Those newly created service profiles will then be added to your Service Profiles node.

Notice that the system appends a number to the naming prefix you specified earlier, i.e. 1 for the first profile, 2 for the 2nd, and so on. They’re all enclosed in blue boxes because they are not yet associated to a service or a blade pool.

Conclusion

Well, we’re finally done talking about what you need to know to create service profile templates. These templates make it much faster to provision multiple servers that share basic parameters and have similar requirements. If you have any questions about any of the steps, please comment below.

Microsoft’s System Center Service Manager 2012 Beta is now available for download. In this series of articles we’re going through all of the necessary steps to install and configure all of the different components of SCSM so you can start using it right away.

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So far we’ve covered:

• Part 1: System Center Service Manager 2012 System Requirements
• Part 2: How to install the Service Management Server 
• Part 3: How to Install the Data Warehouse Server 
• Part 4: How to Configure the System Center Configuration Manager 2007 R3

Today we’ll take a look at configuring the Active Directory Connector. And in the upcoming part 6 in this series we’ll complete our Service Manager setup by installing the Self-Service Portal.

How to Configure the Active Directory Connector in SCSM 2012

In Part 4 of this series I showed you how to create a System Center Configuration Manager connector, which synchronizes data between Configuration Manager and Service Manager.

Another available connector for SCSM 2012 is Active Directory Connector, which will synchronize data from Active Directory. Let’s take a look at how to configure the AD connector.

Step 1: Open the Active Directory Connector Wizard from the Service Manager console and click Next to begin the process.

Figure 1: Active Direcotry Connector Wizard

Step 2: Enter the name and description for this connector; in our scenario we kept it simple and enterd AD Connector for both.

Figure 2: Enter a name and description for the connector

Step 3: Select to synchronize the full domain information or specific organizational unit (OU) information and click Next. For our demonstration I’ll choose the first option, to use the entire doman.

Figure 4: Select a domain or organizational unit

Step 4: Select which objects you want to synchronize; you can choose to do all computers, printers, users and user groups or select individual ones. You can also provide LDAP query filters to specify which objects to synchronize.

Notice you also have two checkboxes at the bottom of the screen that allow you to choose whether to automatically add users of AD Groups imported by this connector and to write null values for properties that are not set in your AD. In our example, we’ll leave both of these checked off.

Once you’re done with all of the options click Next to continue.

Figure 5: Select AD objects to synchronize

Step 5: Next you’ll get a chance to review and confirm all of your AD connector settings. If everything looks ok, click Create.

Figure 6: Confirm AD Connector Settings

Success! Your Active Directory connector was successfuly configured.

Figure 7: Active Directory connector successfully created

Conclusion

At this stage, the Service Manager 2012 Management Server, the Data Warehouse Server, as well as the Data Warehouse server registration are completed successfully.

For this specific environment, we also configured the Active Directory and System Center Configuration Manager connectors, which allows for synchronizing data between those environments and Service Manager’s CMDB.

In the final article in this series we’ll go over the installation steps of the Self-Service Portal.

I’ve been teaching end-users various operating systems and Microsoft Office applications for many years now and in that time I have become fairly acquainted with a lot different computer help and how-to books on the market. Sudhir Diddee’s book Priceless Computer Tips at Your Fingertips is unlike any help and how-to book I've seen thus far.

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Rather than creating yet another beginner deep-dive book on any one application, or a task-based step-by-step reference book, Diddee has compiled a simple book of tips covering a variety of applications that an “average office worker,” a label given to the book’s intended reader, could use to shave time off of ordinary daily tasks performed on Windows 7 and its common applications (Outlook, Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and OneNote). These “tips” take many forms, be it a not-so-commonly-known keyboard shortcut, application or OS feature, or in some cases advice on how to better leverage a feature that has been staring you in the face, every day, since the application was first loaded onto your machine. Typically, application manuals (take the Missing Manuals books for instance) treat tips such as these as an aside to the narrative or explanatory flow of the book, placing the tips in a shadowy box or divided sidebar. Here, Diddee has turned the spotlight onto these tips, making them the focus of the book.

Not Your Average Book

In short, this is not your typical book, and it cannot be read as such. In fact, I would not recommend reading this book cover-to-cover or keeping it on the desk like you would a reference book. As the preface suggests, the purpose of the book is to change an old habit—the habit of how we navigate and utilize features of our computer and its applications. And considering how hard it is to break an old habit, Diddee recommends we familiarize ourselves with a few tips at a time and really force ourselves to follow those tips until they become rooted.

In reading this book, I decided to try and take his advice. For one week, I took his very first tip, a keyboard shortcut to lock my machine, one that I’ve known about for some time now but for one reason or another—call it habit—I’ve never actually used (Windows Start Key + L), and I forced myself to really use it. For the first couple of days before going to a meeting or to lunch, I’d catch myself reaching for the mouse and moving it towards the start button, only to stop myself and think, “Oh right, use the keyboard shortcut.” But by the end of that week, I didn’t have to think about it; now I just use the shortcut! Is it shaving hours off of my work time? Of course not. But it IS faster. And with time, as I begin to incorporate more of his tips (this week, I’m focusing on using Outlook Quick Steps, Ctrl + R, and Ctrl + F), I expect that these saved seconds will add up to something quite substantial.

Conclusion

All in all, if you are someone who has already been using Windows 7, Microsoft Outlook, Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and OneNote, and feel you’ve fallen victim to the force of habit, this book can help you discover a few new ways of doing things, and unleash a more productive and efficient computing you.

Sudhir  is offering the 1st chapter as a free preview to Petri members. You can download it as a PDF here.

This is the 3rd part in the series, and in this post we’ll actually work through the analysis of a memory dump. There are many other names for the memory dump.  Besides memory dump, they’re called crash dumps, system dumps, blue screen dumps, blue screen errors, system crash files, plus every other combination of those words.  Microsoft calls them memory dumps in their documentation, but I refer to them all synonymously.  No matter whether you call them system dumps or crash dumps, this post tells you how to read them.

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How To Find Out What Causes A Blue Screen and Memory Dump

Once you’ve gotten a copy of a memory dump file, the first thing you’ll need to do is

1. - Open Windbg
2. - Press CTRL+D, or choose “Open Crash Dump…” from the File menu
3. - Select the crash dump

If you haven’t already gotten your crash dump, then you’ll need to do that.  There are options for connecting to a remote session, but that cannot be used to connect to a memory dump file located on another machine. You can email it to yourself, save it to the administrator’s file server, or carry it over on a jump drive.  For that matter, if you can talk a customer through finding it over the phone (as long as the machine is bootable and operable), just have your customer email it to you.  As long as it’s not a complete memory dump it will likely be small enough to send.

Save the WinDbg Workspace After Making Changes, Then Tell it to Shut Up

If you’ve already setup your symbols, then saving the workspace is not a big deal.  Save it or don’t save it.  It’s very likely that what you’ve installed this for is to perform “Postmortem” troubleshooting – that is, figuring out what happened after the system has crashed.  If that’s the case, then all you really need configured is the symbol path.   However, the symbol file path IS part of the workspace, so if you haven’t setup your symbol file path already, then you should go back and check out part 2, where I describe the process.  Then, save your workspace.  Once the symbol file path is setup, you can put a check in the box to “Don’t ask again…”

WinDbg Does the Basic Analysis for You, and You Don’t Have to do Anything Else.

Windbg first looks at the crash dump file and determines what type of system it came from.  Then it checks the symbol path for the correct symbols.  If they don’t exist, it downloads them from the Windows Download Symbol Server.  This makes the process go so much better, because without the right symbols, you can get a much better idea of what is going on. The correct configuration line for your symbol file path is

“SRV*C:\symbols*http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols”.

This looks in C:\symbols on my debugging machine, and if symbol files are needed, they are downloaded into there from http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols.  (This is not a reachable through web browsers, only from WinDbg.)

To demonstrate the quality of information that symbols provide, I’ve changed my symbols path to just “C:\symbols”, and deleted my symbols directory. Here’s part of the initial output of the command window when I connect to a saved BSOD crash dump (a minidump) without my symbols correctly setup.

*******************************************************************************
*                        Bugcheck Analysis                *
*******************************************************************************

Use !analyze -v to get detailed debugging information.

BugCheck 3B, {c0000005, fffff9600012d907, fffff88003d5cc30, 0}

Unable to load image win32k.sys, Win32 error 0n2
*** WARNING: Unable to verify timestamp for win32k.sys
*** ERROR: Module load completed but symbols could not be loaded for win32k.sys
***** Kernel symbols are WRONG. Please fix symbols to do analysis.

Compare this information with a correctly configured symbol path:

*******************************************************************************
*                        Bugcheck Analysis                *
*******************************************************************************

Use !analyze -v to get detailed debugging information.

BugCheck 3B, {c0000005, fffff9600012d907, fffff88003d5cc30, 0}

Probably caused by : win32k.sys ( win32k!InternalGetRealClientRect+f ) .  Notice the “InternalGetRealClientRect”?  We are shown that method name because the symbols are working correctly.  Without the symbol files being downloaded we get far less information about what is going on.  With the correct symbols the debugger can usually point the finger at a “probable” culprit.  The debugger never says “is caused by”, instead it says “probably caused by”.

How To Read the Information From a Crash Dump

I don’t know exactly what that method does, but since I have the symbols setup right it at least shows me enough to make an educated guess. I wonder if the Rect in the function name is a rectangle for drawing. Maybe it’s a graphics driver issue, and not a Win32K.sys issue after all. The first thing I do is check out the “probably caused by” line.  If it’s very clear that it’s a driver file, it may be trying to access some memory directly instead of asking the system to do that for it.  Often, whatever driver is pointed at in the probably caused by is the culprit (but not always).  You can usually find an update that resolves the problem.  This can really come in handy if you were thinking that it was the wireless networking card you just installed, but WinDbg points the finger at the video driver instead.  Updating the drivers is a good idea, especially when the system is blue screening and WinDbg points to the driver as the likely cause.  But don’t stop there.

For More Information You Can Check the Call Stack Window

The call stack window shows the last few calls that the thread made before the crash.  It’s available even with a Minidump.  In fact, it’s one of the few advanced windows that are available in a Minidump.  Of course, the symbols play a huge role in deciphering what is going on in the call stack, too.  Here are two instances of WinDbg looking at the same crash dump.  The instance on the left side has no symbols installed.   The instance on the right side has the symbols downloaded from the Microsoft Download Server.

The stack is read from the bottom to the top.  Notice the top line of the instance with the symbols setup correctly?  nt!KeBugCheckEx means “Start the Blue Screen of Death process.”  It’s the last thing you see before the blue screen, and the system starts making the memory dump that you’re now viewing. Reading back through the line, we can see where the thread stopped, and then the blue screen was set in motion:

win32k!InternalGetRealClientRect+0xf. 

The next thing that happened after that was a page fault, and then it was “all over but the crying crash dump analysis”. Even before that call took place, the few calls before that are telling:

“NTUserCreateWindowEx”

suggests to me that perhaps a user had opened a program and the system was ready to draw the window.  “xxxCreateWindowEx” is the next step in the process, then it called “SetTiledRect”.  Have I mentioned how awesome the symbol server is?  It sure beats downloading them all yourself, and it really beats trying to decode what was going on when all you see is “win32k+0x8d907”. So this can provide a further clue into what was really going on that may have caused the blue screen.  But there’s still one last place that I’ll mention in Basic BSOD Troubleshooting:  Use the Blue Screen Reference in the help section!

Follow these steps to find out what a Blue Screen of Death error code means

1. Open WinDbg
2. Help –> Contents (or press F1)
3. Expand the “Debugging Techniques” tree.
4. Expand the “Bug Checks (Blue Screens)” tree.
5. Expand the “Bug Check Code Reference” tree.
6. Select the stop code referenced in the memory dump file (in my example it was 3b, so I find 0x3B)

Could this have been done first? Yes, it could have.  I often fire up WinDbg just to find out what an error code means, on behalf of a user or fellow technician.  The blue screen codes that are provided by the system dump- not only the stop code itself but the numbers given after it (especially the first number) is a key indicator of what really went wrong. Want to know what the Blue Screen Reference said about my error code (3b)?  Find out for yourself after you Install the Windows Debugger.

Conclusion

The windows debugger (WinDbg) is a very powerful tool, but it doesn’t have to be used by an expert to be useful.  In the hands of even a novice technician or administrator, this tool should be used to help find out what’s going wrong when a system crash happens.  Using some very simple techniques, anybody can learn more about what happened to cause the system crash, and some probable ways to resolve it.

Service Pack 2 for Exchange Server 2010 offers four key features along with several smaller enhancements that will help Exchange Admins get more done and save time. What are these features you ask? And how can you take advantage of them?

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Join me on Wednesday, February 1st for a free live webinar on the Best New Features in Exchange 2010 SP2 to learn about the new features and enhancements built into the service pack and how you can start utilizing them today.

Register Today: Best New Features in Exchange 2010 SP2

Date: Wednesday, February 1^st 2012

Time: 12 PM - 1 PM CST

Registration: Register today. Seats are limited.

During this free webinar you'll learn about:

• Outlook Web App Mini - a lightweight browser-based client that provides all the basic functionality of OWA but is easier to use than the standard OWA webpage.
• Address Book Policies - which allows you to specify which Global Address Lists, offline address books, room lists or address lists are visible to users.
• OWA Cross-Site Silent Redirection - which improves user experience by performing a silent redirection for requests to a Client Access Server (CAS) in another Active Directory site, also allowing for a Single sign-On (SSO) experience.

You'll also learn about the new Hybrid Configuration Wizard which will help you simplify deployments of your hybrid scenarios, as well as an easier way to enable the Mailbox Replication Service that will prove to be a huge time saver, plus a lot more.

Why spend hours (or days!) researching the different features in SP2 to see which ones are right for you, when you can spend just an hour with me. Save yourself some time and effort and join me this Wednesday as we take a look at the best new features in Exchange 2010 SP2.

Storage I/O bottlenecks can have a big impact on virtual environments and can wreak havoc on the performance of the virtual machines within them. The guest operating systems and applications running inside VMs are constantly reading and writing to and from their virtual disks and anything that delays this can slow a VM to a crawl.

Of all the resources a host manages, traditional storage devices are typically the slowest resource because they rely on mechanical spinning hard disks. In addition shared storage arrays are commonly used in virtual environments because of the many features that require shared storage and as a result there is a longer path to get to storage resources. Storage I/O must leave the host through an I/O adapter and traverse a storage or traditional network to get to a storage array. This long data path creates the potential for several choke points or bottlenecks that can occur which can reduce the capacity and speed of storage I/O.

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Bottlenecks dictate the speed limit of your storage I/O; for example you may have a very fast storage array but if the path to that storage array has a bottleneck you are not going to be able to take advantage of the speed of the storage array. On the flip side you may have a fast connection to your storage array but if it is not optimally configured the storage array can become a bottleneck as well. The result is that a bottleneck becomes a funnel that limits the speed of data between your hosts and your storage arrays.

Measuring Storage Array Performance

There are two storage statistics that are good indicators of how a storage array is performing; they are IOPS and latency. Let’s first take a look at IOPS.

IOPS

IOPS stands for I/O Operations Per Second and it is a common measurement of the performance of a storage device. I/O operations occur for every read or write to a disk, so on a busy host there can be thousands of IOPS occurring at any given moment. IOPS can show us how much disk activity is occurring individually on each VM or the combined total for a host datastore. IOPS is an important measurement because every storage device has a limited number of IOPS that it can support. While there are a number of factors that determine the amount of IOPS that a storage device can handle, it is mainly determined using simple math by taking the rotational speed of a drive and multiplying it times the number of drives in a RAID group. The higher the rotational speed of a drive the more IOPS it can handle. A typical 15,000 rpm drive is capable of supporting around 175-210 IOPS; a typical 7,200 pm drive is only capable of supporting around 75-100 IOPS. So a RAID group consisting of six 15K drives would be capable of around 1,050 IOPS (175 X 6). SSD drives which are becoming increasingly popular are not bound by mechanical components and are capable of over 5,000 IOPS.

RAID levels also play a factor in IOPS as there is a RAID penalty to factor in for additional disk writes that slightly decreases the amount of IOPS available. The greater the level of RAID protection the higher this penalty is as I/O has to be written to more disks. If the IOPS statistics on your hosts are high it can indicate that the amount of I/O that is occurring might be greater than the storage device can handle. Re-arranging your workloads so they are balanced evenly across multiple datastores can help eliminate any IOPS hot spots that may be occurring on individual datastores. Sometimes re-architecting your storage configuration by putting more drives in RAID groups can help ensure that the number of IOPS that your VMs are generating does not exceed the number that your storage device is capable of.

Latency

Where IOPS is focused on how much disk activity is occurring, latency is focused on how long it takes for a host to read or write data to a storage device. Disk latency is the time it takes for a disk sector to be positioned under the drive head so it can be either read from or written to. Anytime a VM makes a read or write to its virtual disk, that request must follow a long path from the guest OS to the physical storage device. Along that path bottlenecks can occur at different points as the data goes from the guest OS, to a virtual SCSI adapter, through the VMkernel, to a physical I/O adapter and then across a storage network to get to the destination storage device. The total amount of time it takes I/O to make this trip is referred to as total guest latency and is measured in milliseconds. There is several different latency statistics that combine to calculate total guest latency which can help pinpoint which part of the storage sub-system that bottlenecks are occurring in. The below figure illustrates the path that data takes to get from the VM to the storage device and shows the different latency statistics that form total guest latency.

Kernel latency - is the average amount of time spent by VMkernel processing each SCSI command. This value should be as close to zero as possible and less than 1ms.

Queue latency - is the average amount of time each SCSI command spends in the VMkernel queue. This value should also be as close to zero as possible and less than 1ms.

Device latency - is the average amount of time it takes to complete a SCSI command from the physical device. This is frequently the cause of high latency; depending on the storage device type this value should be between 0-10ms.

All of the latency statistics are further split into two sub-statistics for read and write so you can see on exactly which operation latency is occurring.

Viewing IOPS and Latency Statistics

So latency is a good statistic for pinpointing where bottlenecks are occurring and IOPS is a good statistic for pinpointing the source of storage I/O. These statistics can be viewed through either the esxtop command line utility or through the vCenter Server performance graphs. vCenter Server is good for looking at general reporting statistics but since it relies on set sample periods and rolled up statistics it doesn’t provide thorough and detailed reporting. You can view IOPS and latency statistics in vCenter Server by selecting a host and clicking on the Performance tab and then clicking on the Advanced button. If you click the Chart Options link you can select the information that you want displayed, under the Disk category you can select a time period (i.e. Real Time, Past Day). On the right side you can select the disk you want to report on under Objects and then select the individual statistic counters that you want to display as shown below.

The Description column is the user friendly name of statistics; the Internal Name column is the technical name that VMware refers to it. You can view IOPS by selecting the Commands Issued counter; you can also select the various latency counters as well. Once you select the counters the graph will display the information allowing you to see average, minimum and maximum for each counter as shown below.

This allows you to see how busy your host datastores are and how much latency is occurring which can impact performance. You can also do this with VM objects instead of host objects so you can further drill down and see individual VM statistics.

Using Esxtop

Esxtop is a command line utility that can be used with ESX or ESXi that provides continuous real-time statistics, which is handy when troubleshooting performance problems. Esxtop was a utility first introduced in the ESX Service Console and is based on the top command that is used in Linux to display CPU information. Esxtop displays information specific to virtual hosts and VMs and unlike top can display information on all resources (CPU/memory/disk/network). The utility is not part of ESXi and to use it with ESXi you need to use one of the remote command line utilities like the vSphere CLI (linux only) or the vSphere Management Assistant (vMA).

The commands for using esxtop are all single keystroke commands; you can press ? or h to get a list of them all. You can add/remove fields (columns) and/or change the display order by pressing f (add/remove fields) or o (change field order). The relevant commands for storage views are:

• d - disk adapter i.e. HBA
• u - disk device i.e. LUN
• v - disk VM

Once you are in a view you can press f to make sure the latency statistics are displaying; you may need to scroll right or remove columns so you can see all the information. The disk adapter view allows you to see IOPS and latency statistics that are a combined total for a specific physical disk adapter. In the below screens we can see IOPS (CMDS/s) and latency statistics (DAVG/cmd, KAVG/cmd, QAVG/cmd and GAVG/cmd), in this case vmhba0 is a local storage adapter and vmhba34 is an iSCSI adapter.

The GAVG/cmd column is the total guest latency; the iSCSI adapter is very busy in this case with high IOPS (922.72) but low total latency (2.68). The local adapter has low IOPS (2.92) but high total latency (26.14), the latency can be further narrowed down to high VMkernel latency (KAVG/cmd). This can be caused by queue depths that are set too low, in this case the queue latency (QAVG/cmd) is low so that’s not the cause of the high latency. The VMkernel manages all storage adapters and since the iSCSI adapter is so busy, the VMkernel might be slow to respond to the local adapter.

You can drill down further and see statistics for individual LUNs by switching to the disk device view. Here you can see our iSCSI volume and our local disk listed by their device IDs. You can match up the device IDs to the friendly names in the vSphere Client in the Storage view as shown below.

The iSCSI volume is showing high IOPS with the majority being disk writes as shown below.

In this case our latencies are not too bad with most of the latency being in the physical storage device (DAVG/cmd).

Finally you can switch to the disk VM view where you can further drill down to see individual VM statistics and see which VMs have the highest IOPS and latency as shown below.

Here we can see the VM named Dodge City is causing almost all the I/O usage on the host; note the latency statistics (LAT/rd & LAT/wr) are different in the disk VM view as the other statistics like DAVG/cmd only apply at the host level.

Conclusion

This should get you started with understanding storage I/O bottlenecks and how to identify them. vCenter Server and esxtop can provide some good information when troubleshooting issues but can be complicated and are bit lacking to provide a complete storage monitoring solution. There are better third party tools available like SolarWinds Virtualization Manager and Storage Manager that can provide better and easier to understand reporting of storage resources so you can quickly resolve bottlenecks and proactively prevent them from occurring. The dashboards in Virtualization Manager can provide you with a wealth of critical information about your storage in a single pane of glass so you can quickly see the health of your environment. Storage I/O bottlenecks are perhaps the biggest threat in virtualization; you can’t afford to let them choke off the storage resources that your VMs require. Bottlenecks are not always obvious and you may not know you have one until you actually take the time and look for it. Having an understanding of what they are and having the right tools to eliminate them is the key to a healthy and well-performing virtual environment.

Microsoft has recently released the Beta version of System Center Service Manager 2012. In this series we’re focusing on all of the installation and configuration steps you’ll need to go through to successfully get your Service Manager 2012 up and running. In previous parts in this series we covered:

• Part 1: What SCSM 2012 has to offer and the system requirements you’ll need before you begin the installation 
• Part 2: The complete installation walk-through of the Service Management Server installation 
• Part 3: How to install and configure the Data Warehouse Server

In today’s Part 4 of the series we’ll focus on configuring the System Center Configuration Manager 2007 R3, which is a fairly simple process. In the upcoming parts of the series we’ll cover:

• Part 5: Active Directory Connector Configuration
• Part 6: Self-Service Portal Installation

Diagnose Performance Issues In a Virtualized Infrastructure

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Problem: Virtual machine degradation in a virtualized environment can occur in a few different ways, such as a sharp decline in application or server response times. The challenge is determining when the problems started and the cause.

Solution: VM monitoring software will enable you to look at the changes that were made over time and so you can pinpoint & diagnose past performance issues in your virtualized infrastructure.

Learn More or Download a Free 30 Day Trial

Configuring System Center Configuration Manager 2007 R3

One of the major benefits when using System Center Service Manager, is also making use of System Center Configuration Manager. This allows for “feeding” Service Manager with important data from Configuration Manager, into the CMDB, which in turn simplifies the management of objects and data into the Service Desk application.

Step 1: From the Service Manager console, select Create Connectors wizard and choose Create a Configuration Manager Connector.

Figure 1: Create Connectors Wizard in SCCM Step 2: Once you’re in the connector wizard, click Next to start the process.

Figure 2: Creating a new connector in SCCM

Step 3: Enter a Name and Description for this connector. In our scenario we’ve made it simple, the name is SCCM2012 Connector and the description simply states Pulls information from SCCM2012.

Figure 3: Enter a name and description for the connector

Step 4: Select the System Center Configuration Manager 2012 Connector Configuration Management Pack from the dropdown and click Next to continue.

Figure 4: Select a management pack where this connector will be stored

Step 5: Next, enter all of the required information; by default, this will be the service account that is used during the setup of the System Center Configuration Manager installation.

Figure 5: SCCM account information

Step 6: Enter the Database Server name and, Database Name, Test Connection and click Next to continue (Figure 6). You can also click on Test Connection to see if your connection to the server was successful (Figure 7).

Figure 6: Connect to System Center Configuration Manager Database

Figure 7: Test Connection successful

Step 7: Select the SCCM collections from which you want to synchronize data into the Service Manager’s CMDB. In our scenario, we select all collections and click Next to continue.

Figure 8: SCCM Collections to synchronize

Step 8: Select a schedule for synchronization; in our scenario we’ll choose every day at 6 AM.

Figure 9: Creating a schedule for synchronization Step 9: Review your connector settings and click Create to confirm

Figure 10: Confirm your connector settings Congratulations! Your System Center Configuration Manager connector wizard completed successfully. You can click Close to exit the wizard.

Figure 11: System Center Configuration Manager connector setup completed

Conclusion

Now that your System Center Configuration Manager is connected to your System Manager it will feed important data into your CMDB simplifying the management of objects and data in your Service Desk application.

I can remember way back when how amazed I was to order a new desktop computer with 2MB of RAM. Even the days of ordering a server with 64MB of RAM seemed like sooooo much memory. And in case you missed it, those are values in megabytes. Naturally today’s systems are in another class altogether. And while I’d like to think the quality of memory manufacturing has also increased over the years, things can still go wrong.

Failing or faulty memory doesn’t always manifest itself with a huge announcement. In the event that Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 detects such a problem, it will most likely prompt you to run the Windows Memory Diagnostic tool. But you can also manually run this tool anytime you’d like if you prefer to be a bit more proactive.

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Using the Windows Memory Diagnostic Tool

You can manually launch the Windows Memory Diagnostic tool from the Administrator Tools menu short cut. Or if you prefer a command line approach run this:

C:\> mdsched

Alas, there do not appear to be any command line parameters. However you launch it you should get something like Figure 1.

Figure 1 Windows Memory Diagnostic

As the dialog suggests you can either reboot immediately or schedule the diagnostic for the next reboot. Whichever option you choose, upon reboot, the memory diagnostic will launch automatically and begin running. You will see something like Figure 2.

Figure 2 Running Memory Diagnostic

Press F1 to customize the tools. You can modify what tools are run and how many passes. Figure 3 shows the Basic tests that will be run. These tests run pretty quickly.

Figure 3 Basic Memory Tests

Figure 4 shows the Standard tests. This is the default behavior.

Figure 4 Standard Memory Tests

If you prefer a more thorough examination, select the Extended test mix, as shown in Figure 5.

By default, the diagnostic will run two passes, but you can tab down to the Pass Count section and put in a number between 0 and 99. I wish there was a way to set this when configuring the scheduled task, but I have yet to fine one.

Figure 5 Extended Memory Tests

Now, it would be nice to have a more granular selection of tests or even an explanation about what all these acronyms mean. But I guess that’s why we have search engines. In any event, all that really matters is if you pass or fail. Upon completion, the computer will automatically reboot. After you logon, you should get a balloon message in the system tray. It may take a few minutes for it to appear and it will fade away as Figure 6 demonstrates.

Figure 6 Memory Diagnostic Result

But at least I have no issues. You can also check the Windows event log for the results. Open the Event Viewer Management Console and select the System Event Log. Then do a search for MemoryDiagnostics-Results. Or if you’re using PowerShell, run a command like this:

PS C:\> get-eventlog system -after "12/26/2011 12:00PM"
-source Microsoft-Windows-MemoryDiagnostics-Results |
Select EntryType,InstanceID,Message |
format-list

EntryType : Information
InstanceId : 1201
Message : The Windows Memory Diagnostic tested the computer's memory
and detected no errors

EntryType : Information
InstanceId : 1101
Message : The Windows Memory Diagnostic tested the computer's memory
and detected no errors

I’m using the –After parameter to speed up my search to only return results from the last run.

Conclusion

You can run this tool on both Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008. It is a simple tool in some regards but it is free and readily available. I expect most of you will have vendor or OEM supplied tools for this sort of diagnostic, but if not this is a good place to start.

A new year always brings new promises, fresh starts and an opportunity to right what was wrong from the past year.  With 2011 in the rear view mirror we can make changes that will put us in a better place in 2012.  The resolution I'm talking about is finally securing your data in the Cloud.  It might sound like a daunting task, but believe me, it's easier than you think.

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Problem: Virtual machine degradation in a virtualized environment can occur in a few different ways, such as a sharp decline in application or server response times. The challenge is determining when the problems started and the cause.

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In 2011 there was an outcropping of attacks by hackers and phishers looking to either corrupt our data, steal it or destroy it. Let's look back at a few of the startling statistics from 2011:

• Playstation Network was hacked and 77 million user accounts were compromised
• Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) website was hacked taking control of the site's accessibility
• PBS.org website was hacked taking control of internal hosts and databases

These attacks and others have cost companies loss of revenue and has hurt the consumer's wallets as well.  So what is the ironclad approach to securing our personal data? Unfortunately, there is no ironclad approach. There are however, some simple ways that we can protect our data that will keep us from losing all that we have. The majority of us are not CEOs or Executive Vice Presidents, but our data is still important to us and we should treat it as such. With the growth and popularity of Cloud Computing, we have the opportunity to create a multi-layered approach to securing our data.

Here are 3 small steps you can take this year to secure and back up your data in the Cloud.

1. Copy and Move Your Data to Cloud Storage Providers

This first option is by far the easiest way to secure your data.  I recently received a frantic call from a family member (names withheld).  She told me that her 5 year old Mac Book was acting weird and she couldn't get logged on.  Come to find out, the hard drive crashed and she lost all of her data from the past 5 years.  Unfortunately, she wasn't the only person in the house that used that laptop, 7 others did as well.  Invoices, school work, applications, resumes, receipts, photos, music and more were gone in the blink of an eye.  To prevent a situation like this, a simple back up could have saved all that data.  There are also Cloud storage providers who offer certain amounts of space for your to store your data in the Cloud.  Below are some very good options for Cloud storage, I've done some of the leg work for you, choose one and store your data now!  When your daughter decides to spray your laptop with a water bottle, you'll thank me (yes, this happened to me, and no, I didn't back anything up... we all make mistakes).

Box 

Box is a great option for storing your data securely in the Cloud.  Not only is safe, it's also very easy to manage from your computer as well as your wireless device.  Both Android and Apple have the Box app available.  Read the quote from Box below as they make their case for your data storage:

Box lets you store all of your content online, so you can access, manage and share it from anywhere. Integrate Box with Google Apps and Salesforce and access Box on mobile devices.  If you can store a file on your computer, you can store it on Box – easily and safely.  Truth is, once your files are on Box, they're not going anywhere. We're a pioneer in robust content-management security.

Box starts you off with 5GB of free storage and anything above 5GB you pay a monthly fee for.  Check out the video below for a good idea of how Box works.

Dropbox

Dropbox presents a very user friendly, access anywhere approach to Cloud data storage.  Dropbox gives you the option of installing it on your computer, which will give you a desktop icon where you can drag and drop files to which then automatically syncs with your Dropbox account.  Here's an what Dropbox has to say about storing your data with them:

Your files are actually safer while stored in your Dropbox than on your computer in some cases. We use the same secure methods as banks.Dropbox takes the security of your files and of our software very seriously. We use the best tools and engineering practices available to build our software, and we have smart people making sure that Dropbox remains secure. Your files are backed-up, stored securely, and password-protected.  Dropbox has a strict policy and technical access controls that prohibit employee access except in rare circumstances. In addition, we employ a number of physical and electronic security measures to protect user information from unauthorized access.

Watch the video for more info.  Dropbox starts you out with 2GB of free storage and you can purchase more if needed.

SugarSync

SugarSync is another very easy to use and accessible anywhere solution for data storage in the Cloud.  Why take the chance of losing your precious data when you can set up a SugarSync account in minutes and have peace of mind.  Take a closer look at SugarSync:

Crash happens. That's why SugarSync has automatic, continuous, real-time backup for all of your files. Your latest files are accessible on our secure server from any computer or mobile device. SugarSync also stores the last five versions of your files for easy recovery.  Your entire library of work and personal files are available to you at a moment's notice. If you've got an Internet connection, you've got a mobile office. Just log on to SugarSync from any device and you're good to go. No Wi-Fi? No problem! Fire up any web-enabled mobile phone for 100% access to your files.

SugarSync offers a 30 day free trial to start.

2.  Create a strong password.  You didn't really think "password123" was strong did you?

What's the use of taking the time to choose a Cloud storage provider and paying for it if you don't secure it with a strong password?  What is a strong password you ask?  A strong password will consist of a minimum of 8 characters with at least one of each of the following; uppercase character, lowercase character, a number, and a special character ie. * $ % @, etc.  Some organizations take it a step further and mandate that you cannot use more than 3 of the same character type consecutively, it starts to get really difficult to create a strong password you can remember.  Let me present an example of a strong password that meets those guidelines and one that you can remember.  Take your dog's name for example, if you just used "fido" as your password, it could be cracked in less that 5 minutes most likely.  Instead you could make it strong and use "F1d0#1p3t", which is actually 9 characters and follows all the guidelines previously discussed.  Here's a nice infographic from GADG.com of how fast it would take a hacker to crack your password and gain access to whatever account it is that the password is trying to protect.

According to the infographic above, our password we created, "F1d0#1P3t" would take up to 44,530 years to crack.  These are the kinds of passwords you need to use for your most sensitive data.  Yes, they are harder to remember than your average weak password, but you need to match the strength of your password with the sensitivity of the data you are securing.  Use your own judgement, I always think, "Do I want someone else to have this data?" and then create my password accordingly.

3.  Password protect your most important documents

I know, you're thinking, "Ugh, more passwords to remember?"  Yes, if you care about protecting important documents, remember we're talking about a multi-layered approach to security here, not simply a one dimensional password.  If you are someone who has a hard time remembering your passwords, this can actually help you out a little bit.  You can create an Excel spreadsheet or Word document with all of your accounts and passwords, and then protect that document with a password so no one gets a peek at all the keys to the kingdom.  This doesn't only apply to a password sheet, it could apply to your financial spreadsheets, tax returns, or any other document that is ultra sensitive.  Here's how you apply a password to an Excel or Word document (the process is virtually identical so we'll cover MS Word here).

1. Open the document you wish to protect.
2. Click on the file button at the top of your document to display your options
3. You will see an option in the middle of your screen for encrypting your document with a password, click this option

4.  Once you click it, a window will appear asking you to enter your password.  You will have to enter it again to confirm it.

5.  Once you've chosen a password and confirmed it, your document is now encrypted with a password.  No one will be able to open that document without knowing your password, so make it a strong one and it will remain secure.  Upon opening your document you will get a dialogue window telling you to "Enter password to open file".  You won't be able to open it without it.

Conclusion

Hopefully you can apply the things you've learned here to your current data situation and gain a peace of mind knowing you have secured your data in the Cloud with a multi-layered security plan.  Not only will this protect your data from hackers, but it will also protect it from many of life's mishaps that take the life of our PC, laptop or smartphone.  Have a safe and secure New Year!