OCS 2007 R2 and Server 2008 R2

Originally posted the 17 November 2009, now updated on 20 November 2009

I get this question over and over:  Can we deploy OCS 2007 R2 on Server 2008 R2?

According to the Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Documentation:

All domain controllers in the forest where you deploy Office Communications Server run Windows Server 2003 with SP1, Windows Server 2003 R2, or Windows Server 2008.

All global catalog servers in the forest where you deploy Office Communications Server run Windows Server 2003 with SP1, Windows Server 2003 R2, or Windows Server 2008.

All domains in which you deploy Office Communications Server are raised to a domain functional level of Windows Server 2003 or Windows Server 2008.

The forest in which you deploy Office Communications Server is raised to a forest functional level of Windows Server 2003 or Windows Server 2008.

As of 16 November 2009, Windows Server 2008 R2 is still not supported.

Having established the “official” facts, I can tell you empirically, OCS R2 on Server 2008 R2 might be OK (emphasis on MIGHT) in a lab, but it is nothing I want to try (again) in anything resembling a production environment.

SharePoint stuck in Read-Only

Our office, like many others, uses SharePoint for a wide variety of uses.  To say that our SharePoint is “business critical” is not an over-statement.  Recently, we ran our SQL Express instance of the SharePoint database into the SQL Express 4GB database size limit.  While moving the database was not a huge issue, what was an issue is that SharePoint, on an internal basis, apparently marked the database as “read-only.”

What is important here is that SQL did not think the database was locked, SharePoint thought it was locked.  After we moved the database to full SQL server, and reconnected the database to the SharePoint farm server, we still could not edit, add, or remove items, documents, or perform other action/task except look at database contents.

Running the following command showed that SharePoint had the database marked as “readonly” (command may have wrapped)

stsadm -o getsitelock -url http://servername

This command returned this output, which explained our issue!

<SiteLock Lock="readonly" />

How to fix this?  Here’s how: (command may have wrapped)

stsadm -o setsitelock -url http://servername -lock  none

Problem solved!