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Exchange 2013 SCOM Management Pack Download

2013-05-22T12:26:00Z

The Exchange 2013 System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) Management Pack has been released to the download centre.

This Management Pack is designed to work with the new features in Exchange 2013, namely Managed Availability. It is supported on SCOM 2012 RTM or later, and on SCOM 2007 R2. More on these big changes later on in this post!

The Management Pack (MP) is build 15.00.0620.030 can be obtained here. Before installing the MP, please be sure to review all of the documentation and prerequisites. A great starting place is the MP Guide.

One of great benefits of running Office 365 is that the Exchange product group can share solutions to scenarios that they see in the service which will benefit on premise installations. The Exchange Server 2013 Management Pack works with the Managed Availability feature in Exchange 2013. The alerts within the System Centre Operations Manager (SCOM) portal indicate unhealthy states as reported by the Managed Availability components in Exchange 2013.

What’s New

The following are some of the new features in the Exchange 2013 Management Pack:

Simplified dashboard The dashboard of the Exchange 2013 Management Pack has been simplified and refined into the following three categories:
- Active Alerts Provides a list of all outstanding alerts in your organization.
- Organization Health Provides an overview of the overall service health in your organization.
- Server Health Provides an overview of the health of individual servers in your organization.
User focused monitoring Exchange 2013 introduces a monitoring and recovery infrastructure called Managed Availability. Managed Availability focuses on the user experience. All Exchange 2013 components have built-in monitors that detect problems and attempt to recover the service availability. Any issues that can't be recovered automatically are escalated to the Exchange 2013 Management Pack as an alert.

What’s The Big Deal With That?

What does that really mean? Well you will see a radically simpler, smaller and leaner management pack! Why is this?

Exchange 2013 with Managed Availability is now able to monitor itself and determine if it is healthy or not. Who better to gauge the condition of Exchange than Exchange itself! Another benefit is that this can be controlled by Exchange itself in two distinct ways:

Admins can tune Managed Availability themselves without having to engage SCOM team
Exchange Product Group can ship Managed Availability enhancements without having to ship a new Exchange Management Pack.

Both of these mechanisms will allow for a greater degree of flexibility and agility when monitoring Exchange 2013. Additionally you may have seen previous issues around the Exchange 2010 Management Pack when it was updated for Exchange 2010 SP2 and then re-released.

One other change that will bake people’s noodles is that changes to monitoring thresholds are to be done in Exchange directly and not in SCOM. Again this is because Exchange is monitoring itself, and SCOM is responsible for the escalations that are produced by Managed Availability.

Management Pack Troubleshooters

The Exchange Server 2013 Management Pack relies on the Managed Availability feature in Microsoft Exchange Server 2013. In Managed Availability, each component in Exchange Server 2013 monitors itself using probes, monitors, and responders. Any component that implements Managed Availability is referred to as a health set. For example the OWA Health Set has documented troubleshooting steps.

This includes getting details about the server and Health Set in question

Get-ServerHealth <server name> | ?{$_.HealthSetName -eq "<health set name>"}

Get-ServerHealth Exch-1.Tailspintoys.com | ?{$_.HealthSetName -eq "OWA"}

Check to see that none of the Alert Values are displayed as unhealthy. If one is shown in an unhealthy state, then rerun the associated monitoring probe:

Invoke-MonitoringProbe <health set name>\<probe name> -Server <server name> | Format-List

All of the Exchange 2013 Management Pack Troubleshooters are documented here.

Other Changes From the Exchange 2010 MP

We already covered that Exchange is now responsible for monitoring itself and SCOM will do the escalation portion of the alerting system. In addition there are a couple of other changes that are worth highlighting:

Correlation engine – there is no correlation engine in this MP. The correlation engine was introduced in the Exchange 2010 MP to link alerts which likely had the same root cause. In large environments this could be a significant resource impact on the SCOM RMS.
There are no additional reports included with this MP
No additional performance monitor counters are included. Exchange 2013 does monitor a lot of performance data by default. Please look for an upcoming post on this topic!

Additional Reading

Exchange Team blog

SCOM Team blog

Lessons from the Datacenter: Managed Availability

Cheers,,

Rhoderick

Technorati Tags: Exchange,Exchange 2013

Dude, Where’s My Set-DAG Command

2013-05-14T13:05:00Z

Have you read a blog or web site that asked you to run the Set-DAG command? Were you told by someone to run the Get-DAG command? You then went to your lab Exchange server to test and validate the command only to find that it does not work. At this point it’s a case of: Dude, where’s my command! **

The Exchange Management Shell will look like the below:

No Set-DAG Command for you! " width="644" height="114" border="0" />

The reason is as mentioned in the red output text, the command is not recognised. It’s simply just not there…

This is because Set-DatabaseAvailabilityGroup is a little wordy to type, and is often abbreviated to Set-DAG. The same is true for the other DAG commands as well. I’ll put them into a table so that search engines will pick them up and people can easily find them. And for the record, I’m pretty guilty of shortening them which is why I started to write this in the first place……

Database Availability Group

Full Command	Abbreviated
Restore-DatabaseAvailabilityGroup	Restore-DAG
Start-DatabaseAvailabilityGroup	Start-DAG
Stop-DatabaseAvailabilityGroup	Stop-DAG
New-DatabaseAvailabilityGroup	New-DAG
Remove-DatabaseAvailabilityGroup	Remove-DAG
Set-DatabaseAvailabilityGroup	Set-DAG
Get-DatabaseAvailabilityGroup	Get-DAG

Database Availability Group Server

Full Command	Abbreviated
Add-DatabaseAvailabilityGroupServer	Add-DAGServer
Remove-DatabaseAvailabilityGroupServer	Remove-DAGServer

Database Availability Group Network

Full Command	Abbreviated
Get-DatabaseAvailabilityGroupNetwork	Get-DAGNetwork
New-DatabaseAvailabilityGroupNetwork	New-DAGNetwork
Remove-DatabaseAvailabilityGroupNetwork	Remove-DAGNetwork
Set-DatabaseAvailabilityGroupNetwork	Set-DAGNetwork

Cheers,

Rhoderick

** – Ashton Kutcher films never really became more cerebral, did they?

Technorati Tags: Exchange,Exchange 2010

Exchange 2010 DAG AllowCrossSiteRPCClientAccess Reverts to False

2013-05-08T12:30:00Z

When browsing a customer’s Disaster Recovery document I noticed that the Exchange admins had added a step at the end of the document when recovering the DAG back to the primary datacentre. This was to enable AllowCrossSiteRPCClientAccess in the DAG. This was curious as it had already been enabled when the DAG was first created. This environment has Exchange 2010 SP2 RU3 and higher installed so AllowCrossSiteRPCClientAccess is a supported capability.

The admins were running:

Set-DatabaseAvailabilityGroup –Identity DAG -AllowCrossSiteRPCClientAccess:$True

This was being done as they had noticed in testing (full marks for testing !!) that the AllowCrossSiteRPCClientAccess setting was being changed from $True to $False. To ensure that the DAG was configured as per the design they were running the Set-DAG command to again reset the value for AllowCrossSiteRPCClientAccess.

This was a concern as we assumed that the setting should not be getting changed.

Sometimes we want to use Set-DatabaseAvailabilityGroup with no additional parameters to:

Remediate incorrect cluster quorum types. Running Set-DatabaseAvailabilityGroup with no other parameters will set the correct quorum type based on the number of nodes in the underlying cluster.
Correct issues with File Share Witness (FSW) folders and permissions. For example if the FSW share is manually removed this will re-create it.

What happens if Set-DatabaseAvailabilityGroup is run to change another aspect of the DAG – would the AllowCrossSiteRPCClientAccess be changed in that scenario? Let’s see…..

Quick Batman, to the Lab…..

So Robin, here we are in an Exchange 2010 SP3 lab. We have a simple 3 node DAG, called “DAG-01”. All Exchange servers have the same build running on Windows 2008 R2 SP1 Enterprise Edition.

This is the DAG we shall look at:

Initially DAG-01 does not have AllowCrossSiteRPCClientAccess set to $True

Then we set the AllowCrossSiteRPCClientAccess value to $True, and then verify

So far so good! But let’s now run the following command and see what happens to the AllowCrossSiteRPCClientAccess value:

Set-DatabaseAvailabilityGroup –Identity DAG-01

You can see that as a result of running the Set-DatabaseAvailabilityGroup cmdlet the value for AllowCrossSiteRPCClientAccess has changed from $True to $False.

The same behaviour was also noted when running other parameters in Set-DatabaseAvailabilityGroup and again without specifying the AllowCrossSiteRPCClientAccess parameter.

Conclusion

The behaviour that we saw was the AllowCrossSiteRPCClientAccess was reverting back to it’s default value ($False) unless it was explicitly specified in the command.

If you have set AllowCrossSiteRPCClientAccess to $True for a DAG in your environment, please ensure that when running Set-DatabaseAvailabilityGroup cmdlet you specify the AllowCrossSiteRPCClientAccess. You can also run Get-DatabaseAvailabilityGroup to validate the configuration on a scheduled basis.

BONUS TIP: Some of the Exchange cmdlets do not retrieve all of their data by default as they are costly operations. To instruct the cmdlet to retrieve this additional data add the –Status parameter. Set-DatabaseAvailabilityGroup is a good example of this! Try it and see the difference when piping to Format-List.

Cheers,

Rhoderick

Technorati Tags: Exchange,Exchange 2010

Exchange Support – Save The Date 8th April 2014

2013-04-08T19:25:00Z

Well it’s a year from today until a raft of products reach the end of their extended support window. As they say in the boy scouts, better be prepared!

Please make sure that the 8th of April 2014 is in your calendar.

Outlook 2003 will transition out of extended support on 8th of April 2014

Exchange Server 2003 will transition out of extended support on 8th of April 2014

Windows XP will transition out of extended support on 8th of April 2014

Exchange 2010 SP2 will transition out of support on 8th April 2014

And as non Exchange specific item, please also note Windows 2003:

Windows Server 2003 will transition out of extended support on 14th of July 2015

The Lifecycle site’s FAQ has more information and details on support options if you are not able to complete your migration prior to the end of support dates.

Make sure that you are able to migrate to a supported product prior to the support expiration date. Security updates will not be provided for products that are not supported.

Cheers,

Rhoderick

Technorati Tags: Exchange,Exchange 2003,Exchange 2010

Exchange 2013 CU1 Released

2013-04-03T01:15:17Z

After a small delay the Exchange team have announced the eagerly awaited release of Exchange 2013 Cumulative Update 1! Knowledge base article 2816900 contains a description of CU1. This update will allow on premise installations to co-exist with Exchange 2007 and Exchange 2010.

CU1 marks a change in how updates are going to be released and supported by the Exchange team, and this is detailed in a previous post.

As always check the Exchange 2013 system requirements to ensure that all support aspects have been met. Exchange 2013 CU1 will support coexistence with Exchange 2007 SP3 RU10 and Exchange 2010 SP3 servers in the same Exchange organisation. Just as before you cannot re-introduce a down level Exchange role once the last one has been removed. For example if you want to maintain the capability to install additional Exchange 2007 servers ensure that you preserve at least one machine that has all the roles. This will allow you to add more Exchange 2007 servers in at a later date. the same also applies for Exchange 2010, once that role has been removed you cannot add additional servers back into the Exchange org.

Exchange 2013 RTM’ed at build 15.00.0516.032 and CU1 takes this build number to 15.0.620.29

CU Is the New SP

You will want to start thinking of a CU like a service pack in previous versions of Exchange. There are several good reasons for this:

A CU can update a previous install
A CU is a complete build of Exchange and CU1 can be used to install a server – no need to install RTM bits and then have to upgrade them
You cannot uninstall a CU. Removing the CU will uninstall Exchange 2013 from that server
CU may have Active Directory schema changes
CU may make additional Active Directory changes

Some Items For Consideration

Exchange 2013 sizing guidance is not yet finalised
CU1 requires AD and Schema changes, plan accordingly
Read the release notes to understand the impact on OAB downloads. Unexpected full OAB downloads in a large environment are not a good thing….
Cannot uninstall a single role from a server, uninstalling a single role will remove both CAS and Mailbox. This is a change from previous versions.
Mailbox sizes will be tracked more accurately and thus appear to be larger. Make sure you understand what growth ratio is applicable in your environment based off moving pilot users.
Exchange 2013 Public Folders can be accessed through Exchange 2013 OWA
Do not install this update (or any other for that matter) until you thoroughly test it in a lab
Do not install this update until you ensure that all 3rd party vendors have certified their product against it. Hearing the words “Not Supported, sorry but you are on your own” is guaranteed to ruin your day…….

And for many customers who had issues with managers of Distribution Groups after moving to Exchange 2010 it is great to see that Group on Group action is back!!! Groups in Exchange 2013 can now manage groups!

Note that Exchange 2013 does NOT support

Outlook 2003
Exchange 2003 co-existence in the same forest
Exchange 2007 SP3 RU9 or lower versions of Exchange
Exchange 2010 SP2. Exchange 2010 SP3 is required for coexistence with Exchange 2010
Outdated Outlook 2007 clients (Outlook 2007 SP3 with November 2012 Cumulative Update is required)
Outdated Outlook 2010 clients (Outlook 2010 SP1 with November 2012 Cumulative Update is required)

Additional Resources

What's Discontinued in Exchange 2013

Exchange 2013 CU1 Release Notes

Exchange 2013 Release Announcement – especially the comments!

Exchange 2013 High Availability Changes in CU1

Keep a weather eye on the Exchange 2013 forums to see what feedback the community has

Cheers,

Rhoderick

Technorati Tags: Exchange,Exchange 2013

Busting The Set-AutodiscoverVirtualDirectory Myth

2013-04-02T13:00:00Z

This is one of those long overdue posts (and yes there are certainly many more where it came from in my drafts folder) regarding some of the incorrect instructions about setting up Autodiscover which can be found on the Internet.

What am I wibbling about? Well repeatedly over the last 5 years or so since Exchange 2007 shipped, multiple sources have claimed that one *MUST* configure the InternalURL and ExternalURL on all of your Autodiscover Virtual Directories. It does not help that TechNet also says the same thing for Exchange 2007 & 2010.

Setting the InternalURL and ExternalURL on the Autodiscover Virtual Directory is not required, and has no effect on your configuration. You can knock yourself out and change it if it makes you feel good, but it's pretty pointless!

Let’s look to see what Autodiscover is doing and why we do not have to set InternalURL or ExternalURL values on to the Autodiscover Virtual Directory.

Autodiscover – Bring The Action!

The below screenshot shows a default Exchange 2010 installation. Note that the InternalURL and ExternalURL parameters are not filled in by default for any of the Autodiscover virtual directories.

So let us check that Autodiscover is actually working, and we will use the Test-OutlookWebServices cmdlet. This example retrieves the information for the Administrator account (yes kids, don’t do this at home ) and as you can see the relevant information is found and rendered onto the screen.

So that is good, and the InternalURLs are not entered onto the Autodiscover Virtual Directories. These values are obtained by directly querying Active Directory. What about machines that cannot query AD directly to locate the Autodiscover endpoint?

Machines that are not domain joined or are outside of the corporate network cannot get to AD to issue any queries. For such scenarios DNS name resolution to well known names is the only way to locate the Autodiscover endpoint. As covered on more detail here the flow looks like this:

With this update installed the SRV query is added:

https://<smtpdomain>/Autodiscover/Autodiscover.xml
https://autodiscover.<smtpdomain>/Autodiscover/Autodiscover.xml
http://autodiscover.<smtpdomain>/Autodiscover/Autodiscover.xml
SRV record query for _autodiscover._tcp.<smtpdomain>

Sooooooooooooooooooooooooo

If Autodiscover is working, clients are getting the right data and we do not have the URLs filled in on the Autodiscover Virtual Directories then what gives? How is this possible?

As mentioned in this post on Autodiscover, domain joined machines that are on the internal network locate the Autodiscover endpoint by directly querying AD. They look for Service Connection Point (SCP) objects that have a well known GUID and AD returns a list to the Outlook client. Outlook will get either an in-site list or out of site list of SCP endpoints. It will not get both. The SCP contains the URL that the internal domain joined Outlook client will connect to using HTTPS. This and the AD Site coverage can be seen below.

EDIT 3-4-2013: Please note that I am *NOT* advocating that the AutoDiscoverServiceInternalUri is left at the default. It is here for explanation purposes, and to get into why it should be pointed to a load balancer and what issues that causes with certificates means I have to finish another one of those draft posts……

Please see the comments at the bottom of the post for full details. Thanks for the feedback!!

We can tell how Outlook located the Autodiscover endpoint by running a Test E-Mail AutoConfiguration, and looking at the Log tab. Note that the URL HTTP://Exch-1.tailspintoys.com/Autodiscover/Autodiscover.xml was located by SCP.

The SCP object can be found in AD at the following path:

CN=exchangeserver,CN=Autodiscover,CN=Protocols,CN=exchangeserver,CN=Servers,CN=Exchange Administrative Group (FYDIBOHF23SPDLT),CN=Administrative Groups,CN=org name,CN=Microsoft Exchange,CN=Services,CN=Configuration,DC=domain,DC=com

On the SCP object there are a couple of values that interest us. Firstly the attribute called serviceBindingInformation is where the AutoDiscoverServiceInternalUri data is stored. Secondly the attribute called keywords holds the AutodiscoverSitescope value.

For external domain joined machines, or those in a workgroup they both have no method to directly query AD for the SCP so they will only use DNS to locate the Autodiscover endpoint. Again this is mentioned in the previous Autodiscover post.

The Big Reveal

(well almost)

So as you can see everything is working fine without setting the InternalURL or ExternalURL on the Autodiscover Virtual Directory. Now that we have established, and proved by testing, that it is not needed let’s answer the burning question about why it’s actually there.

The reason for this is pretty simple. In the schema that defines Exchange virtual directory objects the InternalURL and ExternalURL are mandatory. So every object of class Exchange Virtual directory must have these attributes. Thus they are present on the Autodiscover virtual directory as they are inherited. Exchange does not use them on the Autodiscover Virtual Directory, but they are heavily used to configure proxy and redirection for the other Virtual Directories – OWA for example.

If you look at the Exchange 2013 Set-AutodiscoverVirtualDirectory cmdlet you will note that the InternalURL and ExternalURL attributes are not present.

Cheers,

Rhoderick

Technorati Tags: Exchange,Exchange 2007,Exchange 2010,Exchange 2013

Kicking It Old School - Outlook 2003 Partying with Exchange 2010

2013-03-26T12:58:26Z

Edit 23-5-2013: Added Headers as getting too long

Edit 23-5-2013: Added reference for 940012

While Outlook 2007, 2010 and now 2013 offer many, many, many * improvements over the older Outlook 2003 client there are still many, many, many * large enterprises that use Outlook 2003. At this point in the lifecycle of Outlook 2003, customers should be looking to migrate to a newer version. Most customers that I talk to are doing that; typically in conjunction with a desktop refresh. Exchange 2013 will not support the Outlook 2003 client, and in addition there are upcoming support expiration dates that we should all be familiar with:

Outlook 2003 will transition out of extended support on 8th of April 2014

Exchange Server 2003 will transition out of extended support on 8th of April 2014

Windows Server 2003 will transition out of extended support on 14th of July 2015

Windows XP will transition out of extended support on 8th of April 2014

The Lifecycle site’s FAQ has more information and details on support options if you are not able to complete your migration prior to the end of support dates. And while you are there also take a look at the date that Exchange 2010 SP2 will transition out of support: Exchange 2010 SP2 will transition out of support on 8th April 2014. Why you may ask? Well as per the lifecycle policy since Exchange 2010 SP3 shipped then there is a 12 month period for customers to move to the new service pack.

For those organisations that are still using Outlook 2003 there are some considerations when coexisting with Exchange 2010. They are listed in no order of priority, and I’ll come back and periodically update this listed based off comments to the blog and also add other issues that I see and hear about. Please do not read this as an definitive list, consider it more a public bookmark that we can share

"Cannot open your default e-mail folder" error when users try to open their mailboxes in Outlook after migration to Exchange 2010 – users unable to logon to Outlook after migrating their mailbox to Exchange 2010. Exchange 2010 OWA works OK. This is due to duplicated addresses.

Exchange 2010 Throttling Policies

Outlook 2003 connects to Exchange differently that later versions. So when running into issues try to isolate by comparing O2003 results with O2007, O2010 and OWA. For Example you may see Outlook 2003 running into issues with Exchange 2010 throttling policies.

Error message when an Outlook 2003 client tries to open multiple shared calendars in Exchange Server 2010: "The connection to the Microsoft Exchange server in unavailable. Outlook must be online or connected to complete this action"

This problem occurs because of Outlook 2003 dependencies on reference Mailbox Database support. This is not supported in Exchange Server 2010. Outlook 2003 clients must now reference the Exchange Server 2010 Address Book service when they open shared calendars.

In order to make Outlook 2003 connections easier to complete, we changed the mailbox server name to give the appearance of connections to different mailboxes on different servers. Only the AddressBook service understands this changed mailbox server name. Therefore, clients that try to connect directly to Active Directory will fail to make the connection.

However, if many delegate mailboxes are being used, clients that are accessing the Address Book Service will reach a limit on the number of connections any single user can have. This exhausts the maximum number of connections available (20) specified by the default throttling policy that is associated with the user mailbox. In this situation, Outlook 2007 clients and later-version clients do not open multiple additional connections.

The original release of Exchange Server 2010 allows a maximum parameter value for RCAMaxConcurrency of 100. Exchange Server 2010 Service Pack 1 increases the maximum value for RCAMaxConcurrency to 2147483647.

Exchange 2010 RPC Client Access

This was the #1 support call generator when Exchange 2010 was released:

Outlook connection issues with Exchange 2010 mailboxes because of the RPC encryption requirement - Discusses changes to RPC Client Access encryption requirements between Exchange 2010 RTM and SP1. Should never have been an issue as Outlook should be managed through GPO, right? Well not so much

On the Topic of GPOs, make sure that they are correctly configured as part of the planning process for deploying Kerberos authentication in Exchange 2010.

Exchange 2003 Updates

An error occurs when an Exchange server 2003 user tries to open more than one delegate mailbox of Exchange Server 2010 in Outlook 2003 - Delegate issue resolved with update for Exchange 2003.

A stub object is left behind in the source database for certain users after a move mailbox operation is complete in Exchange 2003 Service Pack 2 - Logs to Event Log when a stub mailbox is left behind when moved to Exchange 2010. This does not fix the underlying root cause, that is still to be done by the admin, but they now know details about the issue and the monitoring system can alert them to the alert.

Exchange 2010 UDP Notification Support

Folders take a long time to update when an Exchange Server 2010 user uses Outlook 2003 in online mode – Has the details around the changes introduced in Exchange 2010 SP1 RU3.

Note that the article states that *YOU* must manually create a Registry key to enable this feature and then restart RPC Client Access Service to kick the change in.

After you install this update, you have to create a registry subkey to enable the UDP notifications support feature.

Create the following registry subkey to enable the UDP notifications support feature:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\MSExchangeRPC\ParametersSystem

Subkey name: EnablePushNotifications

Type: REG_DWORD

Value: 1

Note If this registry key does not exist, or if its value is set to 0, the UDP notification support feature is not enabled.

“Unknown Error” In Outlook 2003. Work was done to improve the Outlook 2003 online mode experience in Exchange 2010 SP2. The Man (AKA Ross Smith IV) mentions this in the comments section and is also documented in KB 2579172 Items that are deleted or moved still appear in the original folder when you use Office Outlook in online mode to access an Exchange Server 2010 mailbox

“

The UDP notification work we delivered has been working correctly since its release in E2010 SP1 RU3. The underlying issue that many customers have seen with Online Mode clients has been due to view change notification issues; specifically that view change notifications are not returned in the same RPC buffer that included the move/deletion RPC operation response. This issue affected all Outlook versions operating in online mode. In the case of OL2003, this results in extra roundtrips for a client to pull notification information from the server as the original call has completed, so the RPC Client Access service has to fire a UDP notification to get the client’s attention that a change within the folder has occurred.

We have addressed this view change notification issue in E2010 SP2.

“

Outlook 2003 Issues

Concern: Is Having Outlook 2003 Clients Going to Prevent Me from Deploying Exchange 2010? TechNet Wiki page discussing coexistence issues.

Description of the Outlook 2003 hotfix package (Outlook.msp): July 1, 2010 Update to Outlook 2003 to resolve Exchange 2010 coexistence issue in body formatting.

Description of the Office Outlook 2003 hotfix package (Olkintl.msp, Engmui.msp): March 9, 2011 Update to Outlook 2003 to resolve Exchange 2010 coexistence issue where server name changes to a GUID.

Office Outlook 2003 does not connect to two or more additional mailboxes in a mixed Exchange Server 2007 and Exchange Server 2010 environment – Exchange 2007 legacy issue. Resolved in SP2 RU2 for Exchange 2007. This service pack is no longer supported, and all customers must now be on Exchange 2007 SP3.

Update Center for Office, Office servers, and related products central page containing links to latest Office product updates and assistance in installing them Distributing Office 2003 Product Updates

Common Client Access Considerations for Outlook 2003 and Exchange 2010 Exchange team blog with multiple client issues that have to be considered. Some are mentioned above but very worthwhile!

How to configure Outlook to a specific global catalog server or to the closest global catalog server - This is not supported when the mailbox is on Exchange 2010 as NSPI should be on the CAS server’s Address Book Service.

By design Outlook 2003 does not use Autodiscover. Only Outlook 2007 and newer are able to leverage the Autodiscover web service. This should not be a surprise, but like most elephants in the room let’s put it to bed…..

By design Outlook 2003 stores Free Busy information in Public Folders and does not natively use the Exchange Availability web service. Be aware of the replication latency that is inherent in Public Folder replication. This is typically an issue due to room booking conflicts.

Unable to view attachments in OWA 2003, when sent from OWA 2010 – Coexistence issue for Exchange 2003 OWA users. They will see the paper clip icon indicating an attachment is present but will be unable to view the attachment.

Comments

Please also do leave a comment of get in touch with via the “Email Blog Author” in the right hand side of the post if you have items to share or discuss.

Oh, and for the sharp eyed out there who were wondering about the * reference it is here as it did not fit into the flow above.

* To those who remember seeing Police Academy when it was originally released (yes I’m getting old, that was 1984 –eek! ) this was a reference to Commandant Lassard.

Cheers,

Rhoderick

Technorati Tags: Exchange,Exchange 2010,Outlook,Outlook 2003

Exchange 2013 Jetstress Now Available

2013-03-19T12:00:00Z

Reading and writing data to disk is one of the core performance aspects of the Exchange mailbox role. Exchange uses the Jet Blue Extensible Storage Engine (ESE), do not confuse this with an Access database else you will invoke the mighty wrath of the squeaky lobster!

ESE is responsible for the physical structure of the database on disk. ESE does not actually know or care that it is storing email, it is a B+ database structure that stores pages and records. An often missed but critical aspect of an Exchange installation is validating that the storage design as envisioned actually matches the physical, or virtual, reality. Issues can arise with gbics, cables, switch ports, disk firmware, array firmware, poor storage design, faulty array backplanes and a plethora of other issues.

What happens if you place a server into production with one of the above issues? In a nutshell, nothing good! Would it be better to know about this in advance? Oh yes, and JetStress is the tool that can help us.

JetStress is the official tool from the Exchange product group that is used to test and validate an Exchange server’s disk subsystem. By using Jetstress it is possible to place an artificial load onto a set of disks and to test their response. Note that there are versions of Jetstress for each version of Exchange. For convenience the download links are below.

Exchange 2013 Jetstress download
Exchange 2010 Jetstress download
Exchange 2007 Jetstress download

This is the blurb from the download page:

Use Jetstress to verify the performance and stability of a disk subsystem prior to putting an Exchange server into production. Jetstress helps verify disk performance by simulating Exchange disk Input/Output (I/O) load. Specifically, Jetstress simulates the Exchange database and log file loads produced by a specific number of users. You use Performance Monitor, Event Viewer, and ESEUTIL in conjunction with Jetstress to verify that your disk subsystem meets or exceeds the performance criteria you establish. After a successful completion of the Jetstress Disk Performance and Stress Tests in a non-production environment, you will have ensured that your Exchange disk subsystem is adequately sized (in terms of performance criteria you establish) for the user count and user profiles you have established. It is highly recommended that the Jetstress user read through the tool documentation before using the tool.

What does this really mean?

Well after you go through the Mailbox sizing exercise for the Mailbox Role Requirements Calculator (AKA Storage Calc), the number of databases etc. is then plugged into the Jetstress configuration. When defining the configuration, you want to validate that the storage will perform with the required latency for the designed IOPS. Additionally you should also test to find at what point the storage maxes out in terms of IOPS and latency so you know the performance ceiling of the storage. This is achieved by tweaking the thread count. Once you have determined what the configuration should be, and Jetstress will pass a short test run, then it is time to increase the test duration. My preference is that this should build up to a soak test that runs for 48 hours. That way you can work the storage controllers and cache for a realistic period of time. Also if the storage is shared with other applications of services you have a chance to see if this will introduce any performance issues or challenges. Once the test has finished then review the .Perfmon .Blg files and the HTML reports.

In addition to the inbox documentation, you must also take a look at the Jetstress field guide. This is an indispensable resource to assist with configuring and troubleshooting the tool.

Cheers,

Rhoderick

Technorati Tags: Exchange 2010,Exchange 2013,Exchange

Exchange 2010 SP2 RU6 and SP3 Unable To Delete Messages

2013-03-18T21:19:36Z

Quick heads up on an issue from Exchange 2010 SP2 RU6 and that is also in Exchange 2010 SP3. After installing either of these updates, users may report that they are unable to delete certain items when in online mode.

This issue does not surface when running Outlook in cached mode.

Workarounds

Workaround 1: Hard delete the message instead of soft deleting.
To hard delete email using Microsoft Outlook, select the message and then press SHIFT+DELETE to delete it.

Workaround 2: Use cached mode for Outlook.
When using the cached mode of Outlook, the message can be soft deleted.

Please see KB 2822208 for details and updates on this issue. In addition the community is active in the TechNet forums which can also be followed to stay up to date.

Cheers,

Rhoderick

Technorati Tags: Exchange,Exchange 2010,Exchange 2010 SP2,Exchange 2010 SP3

List Of Updates For Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V

2013-03-01T21:00:00Z

One of the best things about Microsoft products is the thriving community that drives a lot of articles outside of TechNet. For example there is a Wiki article that describes the Hyper-V updates for Windows 2008 and also for Windows 2008 R2.

The community has also started to publish the Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V update list.

Currently there are only a couple of updates, but this will be refined over time as updated KBs are released to remediate issues.

In addition to the Hyper-V list of updates you may also want to look at the update list for the cluster service in Windows 2012. For example this also covers the console crash issue caused by .NET update 2750149.

Cheers,

Rhoderick