The magic of virtualization

If you haven't done so you should check out two very cool (and free) products from VMWare, one being VMWare server and the other being VMWare converter (P2V.) For those who don't know VMWare is a great way to make use of under-utilized hardware. It is also great for testing and development. You can run many different virtual machines on the same hardware, so you could have a CentOS Desktop, Windows XP Client, and a Windows 2003 Domain Controller all running on the same machine (that is if you have the proper licensing.) This is really a great way to test and learn especially with all the available virtual appliances out there ready to download.

Here are some links:

Vmware server (configure and run virtual environments)
http://www.vmware.com/products/server/

VMTN (virtual appliance marketplace, tons of prebuilt machines ready for you to break)
http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/

VMWare Converter (convert a real working machine into a virtual machine, windows only)
http://www.vmware.com/download/converter/

I used VMWare converter to convert a running Windows 2003 SMS server to a virtual machine and it took only 35 minutes! All I had to do to get the virtual machine running properly was reactivate Windows and then run chkdsk.

Currently I'm running a Windows 2003 DC, an Exchange 2003 server, two XP clients, and an SMS 2003 server all on a Dell Optiplex GX620 with a hyperthreading 3.2 Ghz P4 and 3GB RAM for developmental and testing purposes.

No Free/Busy Data Available When You Try to Schedule a Meeting

All of the sudden we had someone in our organization who's free/busy data would be grayed (or slashed) out when attempting to schedule a meeting with them. In an Exchange 2003 environment this user had roughly a 2GB mailbox so my thoughts were that the mailbox had gone beyond the point of no return. My first step was to archive the mailbox down to a reasonable size. Still no luck. What did the trick was running outlook from the run prompt by typing outlook.exe /cleanfreebusy