Intelligent-Ware.com the Blog – Page 2 – Dale Callow's rants, raves, and code

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Microsoft 365 Mailbox Quota – Check Your Usage

by Dale

August 13, 2022

2:28 pm

Comments Off on Microsoft 365 Mailbox Quota – Check Your Usage

Productivity, Raves, Technology

Computer, Mobile Phones, MS Office

What is the Quota?

When we sign-up and first use Office 365, Exchange Online, and other MS Office 365 products we get in, start working and are usually unaware that there is a limited amount of storage. That’s because these services are cloud-based and Microsoft limits the maximum amount of storage based on the type of license you have.

You can refer to the below image to know the storage limit based on the mailbox type and license.

Shared mailboxes do not require licenses until their mailbox size exceeds 50 GB. To increase the mailbox size from 50 GB to 100 GB, you must assign an Exchange Online Plan 2 license.

So, how do I check how much space I have, and make more available space?

Besides upgrading your MS Office 365 plan (which can get costly), you can use the guides below based on the ways you use Outlook for your email.

If you use Microsoft Outlook online you can follow this guide

If you use the Microsoft Outlook desktop application use this guide

Using Outlook Desktop to check and clear free space

With Outlook desktop open, select the file menu:

Next, locate this area on the ‘File’ page:

This will show you how much free space you have, using the “Tools” button will give you options on freeing up space.

Using Outlook online to check and free up space

After you’ve logged in to your Exchange Online account and have it open, select the gear icon in the upper right corner:

After you have selected the “Gear” icon a fly-out menu will be displayed, select “View All Outlook Settings”:

That will open the complete page of settings, select the “General” link:

When the General settings are shown, select “Storage”:

On the “Storage” page you will see your storage usage and have selections to free up available storage:

Exchange online showing the storage settings

Last word about quota and storage

Quota and checking free storage space is not a daily task, but knowing about it and knowing ways to manage it will prevent you from receiving errors and being unable to send and receive until you clear some space.

If you need help with your IT needs or have a question drop me a line, or hire me. Call 972.571.4808 I’m happy to help.

Typewritter with paper that says send a mail

What is, and where is the Outlook Safe Senders List? Why You Need to Know

by Dale

June 30, 2022

11:59 pm

Comments Off on What is, and where is the Outlook Safe Senders List? Why You Need to Know

Productivity, Raves, Safety, Security, Technology

MS Office, MS-365, outlook

One topic that seems to get overlooked is MS Outlook’s “Safe Senders” list. Recently I was asked about whitelisting a perspective email address that was expected to be going to send important emails. I suggested using Outlook “Safe Senders”

What it is and How it Works

When you receive an email from someone and you right-click on the header you will get a list of selections…

When you select “Add Sender to Safe Senders List” the email address from the sender is placed in a special address list. All emails received are compared to that list and if found they will automatically go to your inbox. Think of it as your personal “Whitelist”.

But, what if you add someone and you didn’t mean to? Where is your “Safe Sender” List?

If you happen to mistakenly add someone to the list or wanted to check or update “your safe sender” list click on your junk settings. I’m using Office 365 desktop, other desktop versions of outlook are similar. Click on the “Junk Settings” button.

Here are the selections after you select the toolbar “Junk” button. Select “Junk E-mail Options…”

A dialog box will pop up, select “Safe Senders” on the tab bar.

From this dialog box, you can “Add”, “Edit” and “Remove” the addresses in your “Safe Sender” list. A few other selections are “Also trust email from my Contacts” and “Automatically add people I email to the Safe Senders List. You can also Import or Export to a file.

Conclusion

Our email has certainly proved to be the basic communication standard in modern times and features like “Safe Sender” in Outlook is an unsung hero in managing our email senders. If you would like to hire me for a project, or need IT support I have plans and features available for any size business. Happy computing!

Exporting Proxmox VM’s to VHD Simplified in 4 Steps – Updated 8/2024

by Dale

May 15, 2022

1:28 pm

Comments Off on Exporting Proxmox VM’s to VHD Simplified in 4 Steps – Updated 8/2024

Productivity, Technology

conversion tools, Converting virtual drive formats, export, import, Proxmox, qemu, vhd, Virtual Computers, vma

Disclaimer: I’m not fluent with the Linux operating system, I’ve always been a Windows user and this is to help others in the same boat. I realize this might not be as much of an issue for someone with more Linux experience.

Back Story

I’ve been upgrading my data center servers a little at a time since last month and was trying out Proxmox coming from VirtualBox on a Windows server. After a few upgrades, I decided to use Hyper-V. For the most part, because I’ve never had to work with Linux and I felt if something goes wrong I’m not going to be able to troubleshoot the problem quickly. So, I searched for ways to export the virtual computers from Proxmox, surprisingly I picked up pieces of information here and there but there really wasn’t a definitive guide, so here goes.

Step 1 – Create a Backup in Proxmox you can work with:

What I did was create a backup without any compression (so I wouldn’t have the extra step of decompressing the file first). The screenshot is just showing the first two VMs since I was testing my method. I’m creating the backups on a ‘Directory’ storage I created for that purpose that I called ‘Transfer’, the schedule doesn’t matter since I’m only doing this to export the images, once I do that I’ll remove the backup job.

Step 2 – Connect to the Proxmox server with an SSH tool

I used MobaXterm (Available Here) you could probably use any SSH program

Step 3 – Get the RAW image from the VMA file

There are several backup images in this location, but the image we want has the .vma extension (highlighted in the picture above). The first thing we want to do is get the raw image out of the vma image. We will run this utility to get the RAW image:

vma extract vzdump-qemu-100-2022_05_15-11_36_43.vma -v ./vm100

This tells the vma image to extract to a new folder named vm100 and to verify the image extracted. When it finishes when we navigate to the new folder we’ll see:

Step 4 – Convert the RAW image to a virtual disk image

Now we have the RAW image that we need to convert to a new virtual hard drive image that we can work with on our Windows Server. For that we need to use the Qemi tools and convert the image:

qemu-img convert -f raw -O vpc disk-drive-ide0.raw dcsvr.vhd

This utility will convert the image from a RAW format to the VHD format. After it’s converted to the vhd format we can ‘drag and drop’ the file to our Windows computer. If your windows computer isn’t local, you would want to use a USB drive since the image may be large.

Final thoughts

There are a lot of features that I like with Proxmox and if I didn’t have some mission-critical applications and customer replication requirements from their Hyper-V servers I would seriously consider keeping Proxmox on the server for managing my virtual machines. Sure, there’s a learning curve with any new software, but I just can’t take an unnecessary risk of downtime.

UPDATE 8/2024

I was doing some recent conversions from vmdk to vhdx both were on my Windows machine. With some searching, I found a QEMU tool available for Windows. I thought anyone reading this article might want more information on it. Here’s the link: https://cloudbase.it/qemu-img-windows/