Category Archives: Live Meeting
Collecting OCS Performance Data For PSS
It has been a while since I have had a post over here, guess you can blame the holiday season as well as the busy beginning of the year at Winxnet. Anyways, I have been working with PSS on an issue with external live meeting through the edge for quite some time now, and with that has been lots of performance monitor collection, after clicking through all of the different collectors multiple times, I decided to create some templates to have for future use and wanted to share them. Its nothing special, no awesome script or anything complicated, but a very basic tool that may be useful to anyone going forward.
http://cid-389bd51b03b1f8f9.office.live.com/embedicon.aspx/Public/Performance%20Monitor%20Templates
Above is a link for access to these files on my sky drive. If you have any issues accessing these please leave a comment or contact me via email and I will get them to you.
They are very easy to use, once downloaded, open Reliability and Performance Monitor from either your Front End or Edge Server…
Expand “Data Collector Sets” and right click on the User Defined folder. Choose New->Data Collector Set
Name the collector set whatever you would like and make sure to choose Create from a template.
Click next to access the next page in the configuration wizard. Choose Browse and locate the XML file you downloaded containing the template information. Once you select that file the page should look like this:
The next two screens will ask you where to save this file, I would suggest a drive with plenty of space as these can get very large depending on the amount of traffic on your server and how long they are running.
When you are ready to collect data simply right click on the set you created and choose start.
Once you are ready to analyze data, or send to Microsoft PSS for data analysis you simply choose stop, and you will have a file in the location you specified. Microsoft PSS uses a tool called PAL(Performance Analysis of Logs) which is an open source application written by a Microsoft employee. This tool can be found here: http://www.codeplex.com/PAL If you are feeling up to performing some of your own analysis this is a great tool to use. I may try to post some more detailed information on using this tool soon.
The templates included in my link include the following Counters:
Logical Disk
Memory
Network Interface
Objects
Paging File
Physical Disk
Process
Processor
TCPv4
Thread
All <LC: > Counters
Hopefully soon I will have a new post describing the fix for this strange live meeting issue, until then, Enjoy!
Having trouble creating OCS Shares on non windows file server?
On two recent deployments our team ran into some issue when trying to create pools with file shares created on an EMC NAS device. The install wizard was not seeing those folders as setup properly so it could not complete the install. All the permissions were checked best we could see, but it still did not like the share configuration.
I decided to try creating the shares on one of the front end servers and moving on with installation, I then would xcopy the data over to the EMC NAS, and then modify the file locations for the pool.
There is a great article here that goes over the bulk of this migration process, the one difference for my situation is the xcopy from windows share over to the EMC device.
In my example my file shares were in D:\OCS Shares on local folder and I had mapped the folder on the EMC containing all of the OCS Shares to Z:
xcopy “d:\ocs shares” z: /e /k /o /x /y
This basically will copy everything in the D:\ocs shares folder, including sub directories and files to the Z: drive.
All attributes, including all ACL information will be kept, and it will not prompt to overwrite any existing files.
Once we completed this xcopy, we followed the instructions in the above link to modify all WMI settings and all IIS settings, from there we were able to restart services and verify all functionality.
Obviously there is a way to get the EMC NAS file shares setup correctly, however I did not have this knowledge, and as a time saver, this was the best fix for me.
How to Disable “Schedule A Conference Call” button in Live Meeting Outlook Add-In
Some organizations will deploy LiveMeeting either without the existence of OCS, or without OCS Audio/Video Conferencing being enabled. By default, the conferencing addin for outlook has a Schedule A Conference Call button regardless of the environment you are connecting it to.
There is a registry entry that can be used to disable this button:
1. Locate and then click to select the following registry subkey:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Live Meeting\Addins
Note Use this subkey for x86-based systems. If you are running a x64-based system, locate and click the following subkey:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Live Meeting\Addins
2. After you select the subkey that is specified in step 3, point to New on the Edit menu, and then click DWORD Value.
3. Type RemoveConferenceCall, and then press ENTER.
4. Right-click RemoveConferenceCall, and then click Modify.
5. In the Value data box, type 1, and then click OK.
6. On the File menu, click Exit to close Registry Editor.
If you wish to remove this setting, simply change the Value to 0 and the button will be available again.
A full list of livemeeting registry keys can be found here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd637135(office.13).aspx
Microsoft UC Made Easy 