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Microsoft: Get Virtual Now

rastix — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 23:03:11 +0200

I just finished watching Microsoft's virtualization launch event keynote. A couple of things to note from the event and announcements:

System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 (SCVMM) will be released within 30 days.
Hyper-V Server will be available as a free download within 30 days.
Windows Server 2008 R2 with the next version of Hyper-V wlll contain a live migration feature.

I am quite interested in the Hyper-V Server product. It is a stripped down version of Windows with just the Hyper-V role, meant to compete with VMware's ESXi product. It's like Server Core except even more stripped down with some extra commands to configure the server. To manage Hyper-V server, you will have to connect to it from a remote machine with the Hyper-V management console or the SCVMM Administration Console. Be aware of the fact that there is no clustering for this version of Hyper-V. In contrast, ESXi can be clustered but then you will have to pay for the appropriate licenses.

The keynote in itself was not very interesting because most of these things were known or could be expected.

Microsoft IT: Storage Design for Exchange Server 2007

rastix — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 19:13:14 +0200

Microsoft published a very interesting whitepaper about their use of Exchange Server 2007 and Cluster Continuous Replication (CCR). I was surprised to learn that they use DAS instead of a SAN-based solution. When you think of it, it makes sense because it eliminates some complexity and dramatically lowers the implementation costs. A big advantage of that design is that it avoids what they call hot-spot contention when another workload is using the same spindles as Exchange Server 2007.

All in all a very interesting read! You can find it here.

Exchange Public Folders and SharePoint

rastix — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 16:38:25 +0200

A while ago I did a talk at the Microsoft Techdays in Belgium about migrating from public folders and file servers to SharePoint. In that talk I mentioned the fact that public folders are not dead and that you can continue to use public folders if you really want to. I mentioned the guidance from a blog post at msexchangeteam.com and that guidance has now been updated. You can find the updated guidance here.

The guidance boils down to these main points:

Public Folders have full support for 10 years after the release of the next version of Exchange Server. That is longer than the initial reported date of 2016.
SharePoint is the better option for document sharing and custom applications (e.g. workflow) even if you currently use public folders for this.

For many users, the strength of public folders comes from the fact that there is full Outlook integration. It is easy to drag and drop e-mails as msg files in public folders or share things like calendars and contacts. Although some of these things can be done with Outlook 2007 and SharePoint, the features are not exactly the same. Outlook 2007 does not do two-way sync or allows you to drag and drop e-mails as msg files in document libraries. A tool such as Colligo Contributor is needed if you need those abilities. Colligo Contributor works really well and is worth having a look at.

Another strength of public folders is the built-in replication. SharePoint does not do replication but there are several 3rd party tools that can do it such as those from Infonic.

It would be great if the next version of SharePoint would include features such as replication and better Outlook integration because that would make it even easier to migrate without having to incur extra (potentially high) costs for these extra features.

Exchange Server 2007: Service Pack 1 is here at last

rastix — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 21:51:26 +0100

This is the one that most of us have been waiting for because the adoption of Exchange Server 2007 is rather slow. Service Pack 1 provides a lot of features that were missing from RTM and a lot of extra features as well. The most notable new features are SCR (Standby Continuous Replication) and Windows Server 2008 support. Some other cool stuff:

Import/Export from and to PST files with PowerShell commands
Public folder administration with the GUI
Support for Office 2007 formats in OWA
More OWA features like S/MIME support, public folder support and rules
Extra ActiveSync policies for mobile devices

Go ahead and download from here.

Remember that you can deploy Exchange 2007 from scratch directly from the SP1 download because the service pack is effectively RTM+SP1 slipstreamed!

Exchange Server 2007 on Windows Server 2008

rastix — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 10:26:56 +0200

On the Microsoft Exchange Team Blog, Scott Schnoll writes about Exchange Server 2007 in combination with Exchange Server 2008. Among other things, he writes that rolling cluster upgrades are not supported. This means that if you have existing Windows Server 2003 clusters, you need to build a new Windows Server 2008 failover cluster and move mailboxes with the Move Mailbox operation. This is not a limitation posed by Exchange. Rolling upgrades from Windows Server 2003 to 2008 are not supported in general (see this).

More details: You Had Me At EHLO... : Exchange Server and Windows Server 2008

Note: I already tried to install Exchange Server 2007 SP1 Beta 2 on Windows Server 2008 and the process failed during the configuration of the client access role when the virtual directories are created (new-owavirtualdirectory cmdlet). The other roles work fine (mailbox, hub transport).

VMware: Exchange Server 2003 performance on VI3

rastix — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 16:16:44 +0200

VMware published a whitepaper about Exchange Server 2003 performance on VI3. It is an interesting read because it shows that it is perfectly feasible to run Exchange Server 2003 boxes with 1000-2000 or more users. Loadsim was used to do the testing so you have to factor in some extra headroom for antivirus and backup procedures. The whitepaper also shows that the virtualization overhead is mainly for the CPU and not for other components such as storage and networking. Because Exchange Server 2003 is effectively limited to 4GB, you can drive up utilization by using a large VMware box with 16GB of memory and lots of cores and run multiple virtual machines with Exchange. Of course, that is the technical side. Many of our customers still don't feel at ease with putting such a critical piece of their infrastructure on a virtual machine but I guess that will change over time.

Of course, it would be more interesting to see Exchange Server 2007 performance on VI3 because Exchange Server 2007 is so radically different from its predecessor. Exchange Server 2007 is a 64-bit app so it does not have the memory limitations of Exchange Server 2003. I hope they will publish a whitepaper about Exchange Server 2007 soon.

Get the whitepaper here.

DPM 2007: Recovering Exchange data

rastix — Sun, 03 Jun 2007 23:17:12 +0200

To recover Exchange data with DPM, you first need to select a recovery point. The Recovery section of the management console contains a handy calendar to select such a recovery point. Every bolded date contains recovery points:

Most of the time, you will need to recover user data on the mailbox level instead of the entire database. You first select a time to go to (usually not Latest) and with a double click on the name of the database, the mailboxes in the database are shown. You can then right click on a user and select Recover... to start the wizard-driven process. The options in the wizard are simple and usually you will recover to an Exchange server database in a recovery storage group:

DPM does not create the recovery storage group for you so you need to create one using PowerShell cmdlets or the Exchange Server 2007 Troubleshooting Assistant. If you use Exchange Server 2003, you just create the recovery storage group with the Exchange System Manager. In the screenshot above, you can see I restore to a database called Mailbox Database in a recovery storage group called RSG. When you reach the end of the wizard and start the recovery, you can switch to the Monitoring section to check the recovery status.

NOTE: don't think that because you restore on the mailbox level that you can get a PST. The DPM restore is always a mailbox database (edb) and log files. You need to use Exchange tools to get a PST if you wish.

When the database is restored, the work in DPM is finished. You now need to use Exchange tools to mount the database in the recovery storage group and recover the mailbox data. A few options are available:

You can use the Troubleshooting Assistant (Exchange 2007) to merge the content of the user's restored mailbox with his current mailbox.
You can use the restore-mailbox cmdlet (Exchange 2007) to copy the user's restored mailbox to a subfolder of another mailbox.
You can use ExMerge 2003 (Exchange 2003) to do the same as restore-mailbox or to export to a pst file.

The restore-mailbox cmdlet works like this:

restore-mailbox -id "Administrator" -RSGDatabase "RSG\Mailbox Database" -RSGMailbox "Geert Baeke" -TargetFolder "geba"

The above command restores the mailbox of Geert Baeke (in the Mailbox Database of RSG) to the live mailbox of Administrator in a subfolder called geba:

Conclusion

It is very easy to recover Exchange 2003/2007 data with DPM 2007. I only touched on recovery of individual mailboxes but there are other possibilities like restoring entire mailbox databases to the original location, to a network folder and so on. The keyword here is flexibility!!! Later posts will show how to recovery data from other workloads like SharePoint and SQL Server.

Exchange 2007 Deployment Guides

rastix — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 13:56:13 +0100

Microsoft released four deployment guides for several types of organizations:

Naturally, there is quite some overlap in all four guides. The guides also contain an introduction to Exchange Server 2007 management with PowerShell.

All of this documentation is also available in the Exchange help files but they are more convenient to read in Word format.

Outlook Web Access 2007 Demo

rastix — Sat, 16 Dec 2006 14:02:49 +0100

There's a great flash demo of Outlook Web Access 2007 on the Microsoft site. If you do not have any experience with the new version, check it out.

Exchange 2007 Deployment Tips

rastix — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 16:11:37 +0100

At the Exchange Server 2007 TechCenter, there is an article called Exchange Server 2007 Deployment: 10 Tips When Installing. Microsoft has tried to make the Exchange Server 2007 installation experience as easy and flexible as possible. They have largely succeeded at doing so. This does not mean you can just go ahead and run setup without thinking so read up on the technology, test it and plan, plan, plan...

From the article, a couple of things are interesting:

You always need to install the Hub Transport role. Every mail that is sent will pass through this server. It makes journaling, rules, building ethical walls etc... much easier. In most deployments, you will put the Hub Transport and Mailbox role together on one server.
The cluster installation process is integrated in setup. You get a checkbox in the installation wizard for the active node and one for the passive. For an overview on how to setup CCR with two nodes, check out my tutorial based on beta 2. Also check out the videos on the Exchange Team's blog.
Exchange Server 2007 setup can be delegated to another user.
Think about routing groups in the scenario where Exchange Server 2003 and 2007 coexist. Some more information about this can also be found here.

Check out the complete article, it is well worth the read.

Exchange Server 2007 Editions

rastix — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 17:20:35 +0100

Microsoft has posted details about the available editions of Exchange Server 2007. You can find them here. The Exchange Server 2007 Standard Edition is interesting because Microsoft have removed some limitations when compared to Exchange Server 2003. The most notable changes are:

Support for five mailbox databases and storage groups (only one in Exchange 2003).
Unlimited database sizes (16GB in Exchange Server 2003 pre-SP2, 75GB with SP2)

Besides that, the Standard Edition also supports local continuous replication (LCR). With LCR, you can have a copy of your Exchange databases on separate local storage.

If you want clustering or cluster continuous replication (CCR), you will need the Enterprise Edition. That edition also supports up to 50 mailbox databases and storage groups.

There are some changes to the CALs as well. Check the web page for more info.

Network path not found when upgrading an Exchange 2003 cluster to SP2

rastix — Sat, 25 Nov 2006 13:27:59 +0100

During an upgrade to service pack 2 of an Exchange 2003 active/passive cluster, we had the following error:

The solution was simple but difficult to find. You need to make sure that the cluster's public network interface is listed first in the network binding order. This is done from Control Panel / Network Connections / Advanced menu / Advanced Settings.

So before you start such an upgrade, check those settings and correct them. It is actually a best practice when a cluster is installed.

Creating a CCR cluster with Exchange 2007 beta 2

rastix — Mon, 14 Aug 2006 14:12:43 +0200

The past few weeks I have been busy playing with Exchange 2007 beta 2. There are many new (and dropped) features but I am especially interested in the CCR feature. CCR stands for cluster continuous replication. It is a new type of cluster that does not require any shared storage. You do need MSCS (Microsoft Cluster Server) which is a part of Windows Server 2003 Enterprise.

To be able to install a CCR cluster, you first need to install a Windows Server 2003 cluster that uses the MNS quorum type. MNS stands for majority node set. The complete process to install a CCR cluster can be found here . Note that this document does not necessarily follow best practices. It just documents the steps I followed to install such a cluster.

While I was playing around with this, the guys from the Exchange team have posted a blogcast of the whole process as well.

Good article about Exchange DirectPush

rastix — Tue, 04 Apr 2006 21:15:39 +0200

On the Exchange Team’s blog, an article has been posted about Exchange 2003 DirectPush. An interesting read for all those that need to implement it. They also explain why DirectPush only works over a cellular connection like GPRS and not Wi-Fi.

The thing is, a GPRS radio does not consume power when no data is being sent/received. That is not the case for a Wi-Fi connection. Having to keep the connection going for the heartbeats would drain the battery very rapidly.

Microsoft's Monad shell

rastix — Fri, 24 Mar 2006 08:42:31 +0100

Monad is a new shell that can be used in Exchange 12 for command line management. Very powerful stuff, check it out. Get the docs as well.

Check out what you can do with Monad for Exchange 12 here.

Exchange 12 webcasts

rastix — Fri, 24 Mar 2006 08:21:49 +0100

Want to know more about Exchange 12? Then check out the webcast series here. Not too technically detailed but good for having an overview.

There are many other webcasts about Exchange there, enough to fill a few empty hours.

Windows 2003 SP1 clusters and mount points

rastix — Mon, 20 Feb 2006 14:08:57 +0100

When you build a Microsoft cluster with Windows Server 2003 SP1 nodes, mount points are fully supported. This is useful on larger clusters because you can save on drive letters.

For example, if you create an A/A/P/P cluster for Exchange 2003 where each active node has four storage groups you easily end up with >16 drive letters. One drive letter for each storage group's databases (8), one drive letter for each storage group's logs (8) and then some drive letters for quorom, SMTP queue drives, and so on. Still not a problem but you see what it leads to when you add more nodes.

To avoid using this many drive letters, you can just mount some drives in a folder of another drive. For example, if you use G:\ for Exchange databases, you could use G:\Logs for the log files. In this case, a separate volume is mounted on that folder.

This worked very well in Windows Server 2003 (without service pack) but with service pack 1, there are some issues. The issues are descibed in http://support.microsoft.com/kb/898790 and there is a patch that solves it.

Exchange 2003 and kernel memory: 4GB and hot-add ram issues

rastix — Wed, 14 Dec 2005 21:36:51 +0100

A second article has been posted on the Exchange Team's blog about Exchange 2003 and kernel memory issues.

In this article, they talk about not giving more than 4GB ram to an Exchange Server and to disable hot-add memory support on servers with that feature.

If you implement Exchange 2003 servers with a large amount of users, you should read the article.

Exchange 2003 and kernel resources

rastix — Mon, 12 Dec 2005 14:27:02 +0100

A first article in a series of three has been posted on the Exchange Team Blog about kernel resources and Exchange 2003.

This first article serves as an introduction. The next articles (coming soon) will present more details. Interesting stuff!

There can be quite some issues with this, especially when you plan to host a large number of users on a server (4000+) when all these users have large access tokens.

Quest Availability Manager for Exchange

rastix — Fri, 25 Nov 2005 17:59:44 +0100

Quest have again created an interesting product: Availability Manager for Exchange.

It works by having an agent (or MOM) check the status of the server or store. When the server or store is down, mailboxes (empty ones) will be created on another server and mailbox information on the user's account will be updated to point to the new location. A user needs to stop and start Outlook to access the new mailbox. When service is restored, users can connect back to their original mailbox. The data from the temporary mailbox is copied to the original one.

Interesting, especially for users who always need to be able to send and receive mail (dispatchers etc...). It is all a bit more automatic than Microsoft's Dial tone recovery procedure which, essentially, provides the same basic feature.

Product Information

Good article about database changes in Exchange 2003 SP2

rastix — Fri, 25 Nov 2005 11:27:31 +0100

The article on the MS Exchange Blog clearly explains the changes such as the database limits, logical vs. physical size of the databases and so on.

Exchange Disaster Recovery Analyzer

rastix — Tue, 22 Nov 2005 16:27:04 +0100

Microsoft's Exchange Disaster Recovery Analyzer (ExDRA 1.0) is a tool to inspect Exchange database files and log files. Basically, you point the tool to your Exchange server, you select (dismounted) databases and the tool starts to do its work.

Under the hood, the tools inspects the headers of database files and log files and uses that information to present you with a list of possible errors.

Of course, you can also get this information with eseutil.exe (normally in c:\program files\exchsrvr\bin).

To examine the header of a dismounted database, you can use eseutil /mh <path_to_edb_file>. From the header, you can read the shutdown state. During a disaster recovery, it will be in Dirty Shutdown mode. Under that line, you will see the logs that are required during the soft recovery process. From the header, you can also read the database signature, the log signatures and so on. But then you are on your own because you need to be able to interpret the data. That's always tricky!

So basically, ExDRA 1.0 gets the same information as eseutil.exe but automatically makes some conclusions depending on the output. It can certainly help during a disaster recovery because of the "level of stress" that can be involved.

For an overview of how the tool works and some screenshots: Overview and screenshots

Exchange 2003 on 64-bit hardware

rastix — Sun, 20 Nov 2005 14:17:26 +0100

No problem running Exchange 2003 on 64–bit hardware, as long as you are running a 32–bit OS. Of course, Exchange 12 will require 64–bit hardware and a 64–bit OS. No Itanium though, just x64 or EM64T.

This article contains more info: You Had Me At EHLO... : x64 bit hardware will run Exchange 2003 on 32 bit Windows

Nice Outlook Web Access tips

rastix — Thu, 27 Oct 2005 23:56:17 +0200

If you work with OWA a lot, you will probably know most of them.

You Had Me At EHLO... : Top 11 Hidden Features in Outlook Web Access for Exchange 2003

Exchange 2003 standby clusters are now supported

rastix — Mon, 17 Oct 2005 14:25:19 +0200

It is now possible (and supported) to move Exchange 2003 virtual servers from a production cluster to a standby cluster. If the production cluster is a 2–node active/passive cluster, the standby cluster can be single node.

This is great and opens up some more scenarios for Exchange disaster recovery. For full details, follow the link below:

How to Move All Exchange Virtual Servers from a Production Exchange 2003 Cluster to a Standby Exchange 2003 Cluster

Create a MAPI profile on an Exchange 2003 Server

rastix — Mon, 29 Aug 2005 20:42:53 +0200

It is a common misconception that you need to install Outlook on an Exchange 2003 Server to create profiles and to be able to send e-mails with MAPI. There are multiple ways to do it but the easiest method is to use newprof.exe.

Newprof needs a prf file that contains enough settings to create a profile with. You can run newprof -s to run in it interactive mode so you can select the prf file to use.

After your profile is created, applications on the server can use the profile to send mail:

Set objSession=CreateObject(“MAPI.Session”)
objSession.Logon “PROFILENAME”
Set objMessage=objSession.Outbox.Messages.Add
objMessage.Subject=”….”
objMessage.Text=”…”

The code above is not complete but I just want to show that code like this DOES NOT REQUIRE OUTLOOK on the Exchange 2003 Server. In fact, it is not supported by Microsoft that you do.

File Attachment: newprof.zip (23 KB)

Default ADC replication behaviour can be dangerous at times

rastix — Fri, 19 Aug 2005 21:29:41 +0200

I had to configure replication between Exchange 5.5 and Active Directory using the Active Directory Connector (ADC). We are doing an intra-organizational migration which means we just install a new Exchange 2003 server in an existing Exchange 5.5 site. To do this, you have to configure the ADC first with replication connection agreements according to the steps presented in the ADC Tools.

Basically, when you migrate like that, you perform the following steps:

1) Forestprep
2) Domainprep
3) Install ADC
4) Configure ADC with ADC Tools
5) Install first Exchange 2003 server (includes the SRS)

Not too complex in reality.

Ok, so I configure the AD using the ADC Tools and everything works fine. Not a single error from the ADC. Logical because that was well prepared and the ADC Tools do a great job holding your hand.

However, the ADC replicates the Display Name of an Exchange 5.5 mailbox to the display name AND cn of the matching AD object. The display name in AD needs to be the same as in Exchange 5.5 or you will have different address books. But replicating display name to the cn (according to me) is not required to properly migrate. So of course, because the customer has all sorts of applications that actually depend on the cn and dn of the AD object, several applications just broke.

The customer’s developers fixed the applications amazingly quickly so all issues were resolved a little bit before 9 ‘o clock but it was close.

So, like in any project, go over all the details of the migration and check if custom applications don’t depend on any of the changed properties. This can be anything because if you have an application that depends on, say, the department name in AD and values in Exchange 5.5 are different from AD, you have the same problem.

Actually, Microsoft should not have made this the default behaviour. It is also very easy to prevent, just check this KB article.

ISA 2004, forms-based authentication and radius

rastix — Wed, 10 Aug 2005 00:23:48 +0200

At the moment, I am busy with an Exchange 2003 migration project. The project includes secure access to Outlook Web Access, Outlook Mobile Access and Server ActiveSync. We use load-balanced ISA 2004 servers, load-balanced front-end servers and clustered Exchange 2003 back-end servers.

The ISA 2004 servers are installed in a workgroup and are connected to an external DMZ. To provide user authentication, ISA server can be configured with forms-based authentication in combination with RADIUS. A RADIUS server is required and we use Microsoft’s IAS.

This solution requires ISA 2004 with SP1 as discussed in KB article 884560. The user can then connect to https://serverFQDN/exchange. ISA will present the FBA form (which by the way, can be customized) and the user types the username and password on the AD domain. ISA will then use RADIUS to authenticate the user. You should use IPSEC or something similar to encrypt this traffic, because this solution only supports PAP, SPAP and CHAP.

After ISA has verified your credentials, access to the front-end servers is granted. If you configure the publishing rule to forward authentication credentials, no additional authentication dialogs will be shown to the user. This works really well and it allows you to use ISA servers not part of the domain and still use AD authentication.

Of course, you can hardly call the above solution secure because it depends on the user’s password. Most companies will require two-factor authentication.

ISA 2003 natively supports RSA SecurID but many other solutions are used. One such solution is Aladdin’s eToken with OTP (one-time password). To authenticate, RADIUS is used again but instead the user supplies the username and OTP from the token. This is checked against a replicated user account in a shadow domain that contains all the information about the eToken, seed values etc… The advantage of using a shadow LDAP directory (can be AD or ADAM) is that the production forest does not need schema extensions but that you can still use AD management tools in the production domain to configure users for OTP etc…

But now we have a problem. The user can specify the username and OTP in the ISA form, but the response from the RADIUS server is not recognized because it is not what ISA server expects. This will soon be solved by Aladdin (we hope). Another question is whether or not this solution will support forwarding the user’s credentials to the front-end server. I expect not so we will have to see if this will be a good solution.

Anyone with a good solution? Other products and technologies to recommend? Anyone???

Customizing OWA 2003

rastix — Tue, 09 Aug 2005 01:28:28 +0200

This is not very new but since I needed it recently I decided to post it here anyway. The article provides good information about creating themes for OWA 2003.

Storage group design for Exchange 2003 Enterprise

rastix — Tue, 02 Aug 2005 12:51:50 +0200

When I needed to create a storage group design for an Exchange enterprise server, I always used the guideline of not creating the full amount of storage groups at once. For example: when I would have 8 databases, I would use 2 storage groups. The reason for this is that Microsoft recommended this approach because of the negative effects on memory etc…

This seems to have changed from Exchange 2000 SP3. Microsoft now recommends to work the other way around. So when you have 8 databases, you would create 4 storage groups. Something like this:

SG1: DB1, DB5

SG2: DB2, DB6

SG3: DB3, DB7

SG4: DB4, DB8

This is discussed in knowledge base article 890699.