Category:

Datacenter

Unitrends offers free backup’s with Unitrends Free

by Roger Lund May 28, 2015

written by Roger Lund

Product overview:

Unitrends is a software company that has been doing backup’s since 1985 according to Wikipedia. On may 12th they announced a open beta to a free version of Unitrends free..

Unitrends free is a Virtual Appliance that offers data protection in the form of a Linux based VMware or Hyper-v VM. You can protect VM’s with Full backup’s, incremental backups, on demand or scheduled. You can recover individual files, the entire vm or perform a instant recovery.

Features in Unitrends Free include:

Free vSphere and Hyper-V Backup for Unlimited Virtual Machines (VMs) and Sockets. Unlike other tools that restrict usage by number of VMs or sockets, Unitrends Free provides hypervisor-level protection for up to 1 terabyte (TB) of data.
Instant VM Recovery. Unitrends Free makes it possible to quickly run a VM directly from a backup to reduce downtime. Instant recovery also allows users to spin up copies of their VMs for recovery verification, testing and development.
Automated Daily Scheduling. The product features “set it and forget it” scheduling with daily recovery points to keep a user’s system protected at all times – even when no one is around.
Fast, Incremental Forever Backups. Unitrends Free delivers changed-block tracking and incremental forever backups to ensure that backups complete rapidly every day – without using a lot of storage.
Cloud Integration. Users can also take advantage of low cost long-term storage via integration with third-party clouds such as Google Cloud Storage, Google Nearline and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3).
Unitrends Community Integration. Users benefit from limitless support provided by the Unitrends Community. Directly integrated into the Unitrends Free user interface, IT professionals can search the forum and collaborate to help one another, while also earning attractive rewards. Source http://www.unitrends.com/company/press-releases/2015/unitrends-redefines-free%E2%80%9D-virtualization-backup-w

Availability:

The beta version of Unitrends Free is available to download now. Here is the Unitrends Free Administrator’s Guide

In celebration of the launch, one lucky user will win a $1,500 Visa Giftcard.

UnitrendsFree

To download the software and obtain more details regarding the sweepstakes, please visit: http://www.UnitrendsFree.com.

I will be following up with installation and configuration of the product.

Roger Lund

May 28, 2015 0 comments

Datacenter Storage

Realizing the benefits of a Microsoft Premier support agreement

by Philip Sellers May 27, 2015

written by Philip Sellers

I do not normally get excited when talking about technical support but Microsoft Premier is different. The goal with having a Premier contract is that you will be more proactive, and try to locate and resolve issues before they become bigger problems. By purchasing this agreement you will also have access to an account manager that will communicate with you regularly to ensure that your goals and needs are being met.

One of the great benefits with a Premier agreement is the Risk Assessment Programs (RAPs). You are able to use a portion of your contract hours to have a Premier Field Engineer, onsite or remotely, analyze your environment. These engineers specialize in the product that they support. Microsoft has different RAPs for each of their products. An additional part of the RAP is knowledge transfer. The engineer will assess what you know and try to fill in any gaps. You will have access to an expert that will be able to answer any questions you may have about the product. Microsoft has developed tools to thoroughly check your configuration and will provide you with a detailed report. This report will contain the information on how to correct potential problems or confirm that what you have already done is to best practice.

We all face those problems that are difficult to resolve. It might be something that is uncommon and unique to your environment. The problem resolution support with Premier will enable you to access higher level engineers and easily escalate your case if needed. This was the original reason why my company decided to go with a Premier contract. We had an issue with Kerberos authentication that we were not able to get resolved using the standard technical support or through our other support channels. Once we were able to log a case with Premier we were able to quickly find a solution. I do not believe we would have been able to resolve our issue without it.

Another part of Premier is access to training. You will be able to use part of your hours towards training courses on a variety of different topics. You can also use part of your Premier hours to obtain a pass to the annual Microsoft Ignite Conference (formally known as TechEd). This can be helpful if you have a limited training budget.

From my experience our Premier agreement with Microsoft has proven its value. My company has done many RAPs for different applications including Exchange, Active Directory, Group Policy, and SharePoint. We have also had PFEs come onsite for consultations on Lync and implementing a proper EFS infrastructure. Every one of these engagements have exceed our expectations and have always left us in a better place than when we started. If you support an enterprise environment I recommend you visit the link below and see if you too could benefit from this program.

This article was not approve or requested by Microsoft. Since our experience with Microsoft Premier has been so good I thought I would share.

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftservices/support.aspx

May 27, 2015 0 comments

Datacenter Storage

A rapid-fire, action-packed week at HP Discover is just around the corner

by Philip Sellers May 25, 2015

written by Philip Sellers

This time next week, HP will be putting the final touches and opening the onsite registration lines for HP Discover. Discover is HP’s annual trade show featuring the full breadth and depth of the HP product portfolio. This is also the final Discover before its separation into two companies, HP, Inc. and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, expected in November. HP holds another HP Discover event in Europe during December, so it will be interesting to see how the show is planned once it divides into two separate companies. But as for next week, Discover is always a rapid-fire week of information overload for attendees. It is a challenge to soak up as much as you can to bring back to your employers and I expect no difference this time around.

HP Discover is a chance to learn from experts in sessions, talk with experts on the show floor and network with other HP customers. It’s also a time to hear about direction from executives in the company, who speak to customers and partners together to let us know where the company is going strategically. Discover is used to show off the latest innovations, shiny new things and incremental advances. HP has been busy pushing out new releases and announcements ahead of Discover and there plenty more to come during the event.

I have been invited back to HP Discover by the HP social media group to attend the event as a blogger. Attending as a blogger always gives me a different view than most because we get a great chance to hear directly from executives and product managers about the latest releases and direction of their product lines. Highlights for me always include hearing from the HP storage team and from the ProLiant (aka Industry Standard Server) team. The software and cloud teams always come with challenging new concepts and releases – many of which push me out of my comfort zone, but also provide me with a rich set of ideas to bring back to my company.

I have also been invited to speak along side Kara McMillian, Sr. Product Manager for Storage Management on the Business Software Management team, about my experiences with the brand-new HP Storage Operations Manager (SOM) product. I tested evaluation releases of the SOM product in as HP developed a brand-new, heterogenous storage resource management software product. SOM is the next-generation product that aims to replace HP Storage Essentials, which I have been a long-time user. I’ve spoken along side of Kara and co-worker Inge DeMaere at several previous HP Discover events about the ways we have leveraged Storage Essentials in our enterprise. Please join us for our session, B1058 Introducing HP Storage Operations Manager, the evolution of Storage Resource Management, on Wednesday, June 3, at 11 am.

I’ll be blogging during the week as announcements are made and as I discover things at HP Discover. You may also follow @pbsellers on Twitter for instant updates and retweets from the event.

Disclaimer: HP has invited me and will be covering my costs to attend HP Discover. The offer does not allow any editorial control or direction to HP and the invitation does not have any requirements of me as a blogger. The views and opinions I choose to post are solely my own and are not controlled by HP. I am an HP customer through my primary employer and the level of coverage of this particular vendor is a direct reflection of that relationship and my hands-own experiences.

May 25, 2015 0 comments

Datacenter

With backups, it’s the restore that really counts

by Philip Sellers May 21, 2015

written by Philip Sellers

Broken iPhone When is the last time your backups were tested? For me, personally, it was a couple weeks ago. My wife and I were sleeping beside our very sick child in the hospital (he’s great now, by the way). My wife got up in the night to do something and her phone hit the floor – one of those unfortunate and precise hits that ruined the phone. The screen detached but didn’t shatter, but I wasn’t able to pull data off of it the next day. I went into one of my company’s stores and purchased a new phone. While there, I saw another father from our daycare who was doing the same – buying a new phone to replace his that ended up taking a cola bath. While I stayed and began my restore from the cloud backup, he left with fingers crossed that he might be able to dry out his phone in a bag of rice and get data off of it. I honestly don’t know if he succeeded. I left that store an hour later with an exact duplicate of my wife’s phone from a day earlier.

It’s a pretty common scenario at home. It’s a common scenario in business, too. Four years ago, a friend called me one Monday morning. She arrived to work to find out that her office suite had been flooded due to a burst pipe in the unit above her. No one was able to find her contact information over the weekend and so she arrived to the shock of her life – a very soggy and expensive problem. When she called me, she needed to know how safe her data was and to see about how to handle several computers who had spent the weekend at an indoor waterpark. After going through something of that magnitude, it brings a whole new urgency to data protection and she was ready to sign up for a cloud backup immediately. Two years later, another (near) tragedy struck – this time in the form of data corruption that lost all the data in her NAS. Fortunately, all the data was protected online and was restored to a clean volume a short time later. I could tell you other stories without happy endings from my years of experience.

The good news is that cloud backups or backup as a service makes it incredibly easy and attainable to have a bullet-proof backup strategy. It’s basically Baskin Robbins in cloud backup today – there’s a flavor for everyone. You can choose from simple file-based backups all the way up to mirrors of production servers that can be booted up in the cloud during a disaster. There’s specialized application mirror and application aware backups and everything in between. The moral of the story and what I hope you think about, is how safe is your data? Yes, you may have a backup that runs without error – but when’s the last time you tested a restore?

The infographic below from SingleHop gives some stats on cloud backups along with the causes and costs of downtime.

May 21, 2015 0 comments

Datacenter Storage Virtualization

HP 3PAR SSMC 2.1 makes Peer Persistence configuration easy as 1-2-3

by Philip Sellers May 19, 2015

written by Philip Sellers

With the 2.1 release of the HP 3PAR StoreServ Management Console, HP has enabled the creation and control of Peer Persistence configurations within the management tool. Peer Persistence is the HP branding for transparent LUN failover between storage arrays with no downtime – a concept VMware administrators will recognize is Metro Storage Clustering in the VMware vernacular. HP 3PAR Peer Persistence relies on operating systems which can use the ALUA command set of of the SCSI bus to recognize open and closed paths to a single volume. The source array provides open paths while the replication target shows its paths in standby. At a high level, when a switchover command is issued, the path states change from active to standby and vice-versus. ALUA allows the OS to recognize and redirect IO. Add a quorum witness server to the switchover magic and you have a

This addition to SSMC brings a simple three step process for provisioning new Peer Persistence volumes in the management GUI: Create a new volume, add it to Remote Copy and then Export the volume from both arrays. When an administrator adds the volume it into a remote copy group, the group auto-provisions and assigns the same World Wide Name (WWN) to the target, secondary volume and that is required for Peer Persistence. Previously, administrators performed this using the 3PAR Command Line Interface, and early adopters had to manually lookup and assign the WWN on the secondary array. The auto-provisioning will simplify the process and the chance for human error. The auto-provisioning can be enabled on any Remote Copy group through the SSMC interface. The administrator pre-defines the CPG for the remote array and enables the auto_failover and path_management policies to make a normal Remote Copy group into a Peer Persistent remote copy group.

Initiating a switchover of a Peer Persistence Remote Copy Group is now an options within the SSMC interface. The switchover command is found under the Remote Copy Group within the interface and is found with all the other operations under the Actions menu for a Remote Copy Group. When a switchover is initiated, the interface shows a status of that command, shows the original Remote Copy Group go into a stopped state, the target-side Remote Copy Group named with a similar name then appears and shows that the switchover has completed.

In order to make use of Peer Persistence, there is a fairly strict list of requirements you must meet. The most restrictive of the requirements is latency, since Peer Persistence is built on synchronous replication which the 3PAR platforms limit to 2.6 milliseconds or less of latency. This amount of latency allows for fairly liberal definitions of metro distances. So, first a quick review of all of the requirements for Peer Persistence and then a quick tour of the simple SSMC provisioning process.

Requirements for Peer Persistence

Below is a consolidated list of all the requirements for running HP 3PAR StoreServ arrays with Peer Persistence.

Round trip latency of 2.6 milliseconds or less.
2 arrays with Remote Copy 1-to-1 configuration in synchronous mode.
3PAR StoreServ Firmware 3.1.2 MU2 or newer for VMware and Firmware 3.2.1 or newer for Windows.
VMware ESXi 5.x or newer and Windows Server 2008 R2, and Windows Server 2012 R2 for host OS.
All associated hosts are connected to both arrays.
Hosts created with 3PAR host persona 11 for VMware hosts and 15 for Windows hosts, which supports Asymmetric Logical Unit Access (ALUA).
Quorum Witness virtual machine at a third site, reachable by TCP/IP from the management port of the two 3PAR arrays.
All 3PAR Virtual Volumes (VV) exported from both arrays must have the same volume WWN, both source and target WWN should match.
Fibre Channel (FC), iSCSI and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) are supported. iSCSI and FCoE require later version of 3PAR StoreServ Firmware.
Both auto_failover and path_management polices in 3PAR Remote Copy Group configuration are required to enable automatic transparent failover.

Provisioning Peer Persistent Volumes with SSMC

Step 1: Create a new virtual volume by going to the Main Menu and choosing Virtual Volumes under Block Persona.
(File Persona is hidden in the screenshot below because the arrays connected to SSMC do not support File Persona, otherwise it is displayed next to Block Persona).

Complete the General section, but do not export the LUN yet.

Step 2: Create the Remote Copy Group located under the Main Menu in the Replication section. If you have an existing Remote Copy Group, click on the name of the group to edit it.

For Peer Persistence, the configuration is set here. The sections outlined in red are the sections required for Peer Persistence. To make it easiest, select the Create automatically option under Source, you must set Synchronous replication under Backup and you need to tick the Advanced Options checkbox and then check the Auto failover checkbox under Backup. Checking the Auto failover checkbox automatically enables Path Management, too.

Also within Remote Copy Group, you will add your virtual volume from the source array under the Volume Pairs section. Once you select it in the dialog box, you will notice that it is added to the group and the target volume shows a message stating “auto-create”. Click Create or Ok and the changes will be made.

Step 3: Export the volumes from both arrays to the hosts. To do this, you go back to either Virtual Volumes or Virtual Volume Sets in the Main Menu and you choose the Export command to export the volumes to the desired hosts.

This assumes that you’ve already created host records, so if not, you need to create the host records using host persona 11 for VMware or host persona 15 for Windows. In SSMC, you cannot select the host persona directly. Instead, you must choose an operating system from a drop-down menu. You will either choose ESXi 4.x/5.x, Windows 2008/2008 R2 or Windows 2012/2012 R2. The host persona is also displayed after you choose the OS, so you can confirm the setting.

Implementation Guides

For all the detailed configuration and detail about implementing HP 3PAR Peer Persistence, refer to these two guides that outline the specifics for VMware hosta and for Windows hosts:

May 19, 2015 2 comments

Datacenter Storage

HP releases StoreServ Management Console 2.1 with lots of Goodies

by Philip Sellers May 18, 2015

written by Philip Sellers

Moving from version 2.0 to 2.1 may not seem like a big jump, but for users of HP’s new 3PAR StoreServ Management Console, the point release is a big deal. HP’s new release came to customers on April 30 and it included a lot of great new features that complete the toolset for 3PAR administrators. The initial release of SSMC was fairly feature rich, but some specific capabilities were missing and HP has received a long list of requests. With the SSMC 2.1 release, HP is answering a lot of those customer requests.

Additions in the SSMC 2.1 Release

One of the nice features of SSMC is the Dashboard – a quick and easy display of what is good and bad in the 3PAR environment. One capabilities that 2.1 adds is the ability to drill down into the Performance and Device Type donuts. Now in the UI, all of the green/yellow/red donuts have the capabilities and the blue/grey donuts do not as a quick way to know.

AO and DO are now configurable within SSMC. Adaptive Optimization and Dynamic Optimization are major features within the 3PAR arsenal and so its no surprise to find them in the new release, however its also a welcome addition. These are found under the Storage Optimization area in the Main Menu.

3PAR traces its origins to service providers and for this market virtual domains exist within the OS to segment and ensure that customer data does not ever cross boundaries. Domain support is now available in SSMC with the 2.1 release allowing this tool to be doled out for customer management.

Remote Copy replication gets a slew of additions in the 2.1 release. With this release, you may create 1:1 remote copy configurations, in addition to just displaying the configuration. You may also view 1:N configurations. For shops who can run it, Peer Persistence management is also added in the 2.1 release. Most early adopters of Peer Persistence were relegated to the command line for management, so a GUI interface for management is a welcome change. I’ll be posting a more in-depth view on Peer Persistence management on Tuesday.

Tune System or tunesys makes its debut in SSMC with 2.1 release. Tunesys is a management process that rebalances the array and perform housekeeping tasks. This feature is conveniently available under the Systems area of the Main Menu.

System Reporter in SSMC is a huge leap forward from the stand-alone System Reporter product of old. This integrated reporting tool has the same modern interface as the rest of SSMC and OneView and makes use of the modern interface. Building reports is quick and simple in the interface. In most cases, the reports are already defined – it is just a matter of setting times, which array and giving the report a name. But, new in 2.1 is the ability to set threshold alarms. One of the primary features missing in the 2.0 release was the ability to send alarms within the product to notify someone of a performance related problem if there is no one actively watching the arrays. (Hardware issues still call home, so alerts haven’t changed there.)

Users also gain the ability to schedule and email reports. This is a big plus and a feature of the original System Reporter that was missing in 2.0. Quality of Service and Deduplication reporting has also been added to the list of pre-defined formats. For more in-depth information about System Reporter additions, see the blog post from Ivan Iannaccone on HP’s Around the Storage Block blog.

Easier Adoption with Navigation Overview

After you complete the upgrade to SSMC 2.1, the first thing you notice is a new introduction to the user interface. For anyone who has not used SSMC 2.0, this is a great way to get to know the user interface and learn how to navigate around. The tour highlights areas of the screen and moves you from screen to screen while explaining what information is found where. Even better than a video or tutorial, the SSMC navigation overview is live with your systems and data in the background. You will see your 3PAR arrays and their alerts of information while the navigation overview takes you through the interface. And best of all, after the one-time introduction, users can always refer back to this navigation overview from the Help menu anytime.

Upgrade Process

The upgrade process for a SSMC 2.0 installation is relatively simple. The installer recognizes the existing version of software and performs an upgrade. It removes the earlier version and then writes the new installation. Interestingly, it also removes and recreates the local user account – the same one that had to have login as service rights added after installation to start on installation.

May 18, 2015 0 comments

Datacenter Software Storage

Using PowerShell to compare a registry key before and after a change

by Philip Sellers April 27, 2015

written by Philip Sellers

So, while deploying IE 11, it became evident that something was happening in the IE settings that affected the display of certain webpages. If we ran an IE Reset in the browser and set all the default settings, the sites would work fine, but after a while a policy or some change was occurring to break websites. It isn’t easy to find the exact setting that is changing, so I thought, PowerShell’s Compare-Object would be great.

In PowerShell, its easy to get a data object that contains all the properties in a particular registry key. To return the IE settings, it is under HKEY_CURRENT_USER in Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer. The PowerShell to get this data is:

[code]

Get-Item ‘HKCU:\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main’

[/code]

From prior work, I knew I should be able to store this in a variable before and after a change and then compare the two objects. But every time I ran the Compare-Object on the two variables, there were no differences. I even manually changed data in one of the registry properties and got no differences.

What I found is that even though the registry key is stored in a variable, it actually pulls the live data – not a point in time snapshot of the data, as expected.

Instead, I came across an article from Guy Thomas that talked about Compare-Object and the registry and it suggests exporting the registry values to a .reg file before and after the change and then using Compare-Object. This works like a champ. Its a simple comparison of two text documents and makes quick work of what I was trying to accomplish.

The first step is to go into registry editor and use the File > Export command to create the before.reg file. Make sure you export only the select branch of the registry.

[code]

Compare-Object $(Get-Content before.reg) $(Get-Content after.reg)

[/code]

For screenshots and more details, see the post from Guy Thomas.

April 27, 2015 0 comments

Compute Datacenter Storage

Installing Windows 2012 R2 on ProLiant DL380 G7 without SmartStart

by Philip Sellers April 22, 2015

written by Philip Sellers

Since HP SmartStart CD went the way of the dodo bird before Windows 2012 R2 was released, HP ProLiants older than a Gen8 require administrators to manually install Windows 2012 R2. On ProLiant Gen8 and higher, you have Intelligent Provisioning – the replacement for SmartStart – embedded on the system, but this isn’t available on G7, so the user needs to manually install Windows according to the “Implementing Microsoft Windows Server 2012” technical whitepaper.

error

In the case of the HP ProLiant DL380 G7, the normal Windows installation doesn’t recognize the P410i storage controller during installation and it fails with the strange “We can’t create a new partition or locate an existing one.” Searching forums, you find several solutions suggesting boot order or removable mdia like USB or SD storage causes the problem in many cases, but for the DL380 G7, however to get past this on my servers, I needed to download the storage controller driver and add it during installation.

You will need a USB drive where you can load the drivers during Windows installation.

The steps to do this and successfully install Windows 2012 R2 are below:

Browse out to hp.com and go to the Drivers & Software download section or directly to http://www8.hp.com/us/en/drivers.html.
Search for the DL380 G7 in the search and click on the link for the server displayed after search.
Select Windows 2012 R2 as the operating system dropdown.
Navigate to Storage Controller and download the latest “HP ProLiant Smart Array SAS/SATA Controller Driver for Windows Server 2012 x64 Edition.” If you use this link, make sure to check revision history to ensure this is the latest available.
Click the Download button and then run the .exe file. Use the Extract button to copy all the files onto a USB stick.
Boot the system and begin Windows 2012 R2 installation from CD or from ISO connected via remote console on the iLO.
Click the Install Windows.
Custom Installation.
Storage window – choose Have Disk. Make sure USB is plugged in on the server.
Choose the HP driver
Click next and the installation will now continue instead of giving the error.

April 22, 2015 12 comments

Datacenter Storage

Installing and Configuring HP 3PAR StoreServ Management Console

by Philip Sellers April 21, 2015

written by Philip Sellers

Back in December, HP was showing off the new StoreServ Management Console (SSMC) at HP Discover in Barcelona. In January, the product was released to the public and I have been testing it in my environment. The installation is straight forward, with one gotcha on Windows for the 2.0 release. The product is available on Microsoft Windows or Red Hat Linux. A full list of requirements is available from the HP website.

Installation

Once you launch the installer, you follow the wizard through the normal license agreement and you set the path for the installation. The following screen allows you to set the TCP port for the web service and one more screen to confirm settings. The installer is quick and easy.

Once you finish the installation, the installer tries to start the service. If you have altered the Local Security Policy on your Windows system and removed the Users group from the Allow log on locally, you will get an error. To fix this, see the end of this post.

Configuration

On the SSMC server, you may browse to http://localhost:8443 (if you chose the default TCP port during installation) and you will be presented a message saying that the Administrator credential is not set.

SSMC2-14

You click Set Credential button and save a password for the administrator account. The next step is to login to the Administrator console and connect the SSMC to your 3PAR arrays. Once you login, you are presented with a Storage Systems view with no systems connected. To connect your 3PARs, you use the Actions button to add the arrays. Once the arrays are added, the SSMC begins the process of connecting the arrays to manage them.

SSMC2-18

Once the arrays are connected, you may logout of the Administrator console and you will go back to the login page. Uncheck the box for Administrator Console and you will get the normal SSMC login page. To login to the SSMC, you will use either a local account on the 3PAR arrays or using an LDAP account if your 3PAR arrays are configured and connected to LDAP. It would be the same account you used to login to the 3PAR Inform Management Console (IMC) — the old client.

SSMC2-13

Once you login, you should see the Dashboard and from there, its time to start exploring SSMC.

Local Security Policy & Possible Error

On my system, the service failed to start and gave an error after the installation completed.

SSMC-15

This is because we removed the Users group from the Allow log on locally policy in the computer’s Locally Security Policy as part of our standard server build. Since we may not be the only company to make this change, I have included it. A fresh build of Windows 2012 has the following settings in the Allow log on locally policy and with these settings it would work. But if you want to keep a more locked-down policy in place, there is a workaround.

AllowLogonLocally

The service attempts to use a local Windows account called hp3parssmcuser that is created during the installation. This account needs to have “Allow log on locally” in the Local Security Policy on the server. To allow this, go to Start and then to Administrative Tools. Choose the Local Security Policy item in the menu. In the Local Security Policy, navigate to Security Settings > Local Policies > User Rights Assignments.

Double click Allow log on locally and add the .\hp3parssmcuser account to this policy. Once you save the permission in the policy, you may go into Services and start the HP 3PAR StoreServ Management Console Server service successfully.

April 21, 2015 3 comments

Datacenter Software Storage

Force IE 11 Enterprise Mode to update a HTTP-hosted site list

by Philip Sellers April 15, 2015

written by Philip Sellers

I have been spending a good bit of time implementing and learning about Internet Explorer 11’s Enterprise Mode. This feature is great of the enterprise because it allows administrators to tell IE exactly which version, or document mode, of IE to mimic for specific websites. Previous versions of IE had Compatibility Mode, but this feature was only granular to a domain level, meaning your internal sites were all in or all out of Compatibility Mode. Enterprise Mode improves allowing admins to configure settings for individual web sites within your internal domain or specific application on external domains.

The settings for each site are controlled by a site list. This list can be published to a client through group policy (or set manually in the registry) and the list can reside on a File Share, web server or the local filesystem. Microsoft has a free tool to edit the list called the Enterprise Mode Site List Manager. This tool lets you import or add sites to the list, validate that they are online and responding and then save a correctly formated XML file for distribution. The file format includes a version number and this is how IE keeps up with when to download an updated list to use.

I recently ran into an issue with the versioning where the site list won’t update often. If you are trying to add a site to the list for a particular user to solve a problem, there isn’t an easy way to force IE to get a newer copy of the site list when the list is hosted on HTTP. Using HTTP is part of the problem and I suspect the issue likely doesn’t occur on local or file share paths for the site list. The problem seems to be that IE caches the site list when hosted on HTTP and won’t update until the cache expires. Even if IE is relaunched, the cached copy is checked and the version number will match and so no update will occur. To solve this problem and force an update, you need to:

Clear the IE temporary internet file cache.
Remove the CurrentVersion value under HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main\EnterpriseMode key
Restart IE

To help with this, I wrote a quick PowerShell script to delete the key and call the InetCpl control panel and clear the cache, leveraging part of a PowerShell script contributed by Chan V on TechNet.

[code language=”PowerShell”]

<# Force Refresh IE Enterprise Mode #>

<# Clear IE Cache for User #>
RunDll32.exe InetCpl.cpl, ClearMyTracksByProcess 8

<# Remove Version Registry Key #>
Remove-ItemProperty -Path ‘hkcu:\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main\EnterpriseMode’ -Name CurrentVersion

<# Send Instructions #>
Write-Host "Close and restart Internet Explorer to refresh the Enterise Mode site list."

[/code]

April 15, 2015 4 comments