May, 2010

I have been working with U of A on this for a bit of time and it was nice to see they decided to move with our cloud offering over Google Apps. They did a lot of deep analysis and determined our cloud platform was the better choice.  The press has been announcing this today and yesterday.  here and here.

Here are just a few of the benefits U of A received with our BPOS offering:

• Consolidated  and centralized email platform
• Integrated calendar – they had two systems before one for email and one for calendar
• 25GB mailbox quotas (the press release says 10GB but it is now 25GB quota)
• Full Outlook client, Full Entourage Web Services client, BES, mobile sync, and webmail (OWA)
• Instant messaging and presence
• Better privacy, security and compliance features for things like FERPA, ITAR, and HIPAA requirements
• Full offline sync
• AD sync
• Flexibility with on prem services like SharePoint, etc.
• Delegated calendaring

You can also track U of A’s BPOS project status here.

As we update our cloud BPOS offering, we will continue to enhance features and capabilities like federation, etc.  I will blog about those features in upcoming blog posts.

For more on our BPOS offering visit here or for 30 day BPOS trial visit here. I have also blogged about the end-user experience here.

I was asked this by a university in Missouri.  Here is the process:

Prerequisites you need before you start the provisioning process:

1) Download and read the OCS Federation provisioning guide here.

2) Next you will need only ONE of the following pieces of information (note: if you don’t know ask your Microsoft Account Manager or reseller):

Your Microsoft agreement number:

o Microsoft Volume Licensing Support: Microsoft Volume Licensing Agreement number

o Microsoft Partner Network: Headquarter partner ID

o Service Provider Licensing Agreement: Initial enrollment number

o High Volume Services: Product enrollment number

· Fully qualified domain name (FQDN) of the Access Edge service that you will be provisioning

· Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) domain(s)

· FQDNs of any additional Access Edge services

· Contact information

3) Visit this link here to submit your request.

What do I have to be aware of before I federate with AOL?

AOL requires the DNS A record of the Access Proxy service FQDN to be published in DNS in order to authenticate the public certificate.

What do I need to be aware of before I federate with Windows Live/Live@edu?

Note: The change below catches folks off guard during this process. It ONLY applies to users who have associated a domain to Windows Live ID which typically is not always a huge number of users.

Live@edu and Windows Live will require a change to existing IDs that are used to sign into Windows Live Messenger service if an ID that is associated with your Messenger service includes the same domain that you are provisioning. This change is required because by submitting a provisioning request for a domain, you are reserving that domain for your organization’s Office Communications Server instant messaging system. For example, if you request provisioning for contoso.edu and an existing Windows Live Messenger service account address is user1@contoso.edu, the owner of that account receives a notification from Microsoft that includes instructions for changing the account address. If the ID is not changed, the owner will not be able to sign in to Windows Live Messenger until this issue is resolved.

Important: This change is required for all Windows Live accounts that use the domain for which you are requesting provisioning, regardless of whether the users of those accounts actually use Office Communications Server public IM connectivity or whether you have signed up only for a trial of public IM connectivity.

For details about the requirements and process for changing a Windows Live ID, see Important Changes to Windows Live Messenger at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=157321.

Does everyone get notified of this change?

No, only users who have associated their domain (e.g. contoso.edu) to a Windows Live ID.

Can I get a list beforehand of who has associated their domain to a Windows Live ID?

No, your Windows Live ID is considered private and personal information.

After I submit a request what happens?

1. The public IM service provider completes steps specific to its service.

2. After a public IM provider completes the provisioning process for your account, the account is activated, and your eligible users are enabled for public IM connectivity with that provider.

3. When all requested public IM providers complete their provisioning, Microsoft sends a notice of completion to you.

How long does it take to complete a request?

Typically 30 days turnaround.

What I can I do with commercial IM federation?

Presence and Instant messaging currently.  Federated Video and audio do not work currently with commercial IM systems. It does work with other OCS federated entities.

What if I want to federate with Yahoo IM?

An Office Communications Server Public IM Connectivity license is required for federation with Yahoo!. Currently, Office Communications Server Public IM Connectivity licenses are available for purchase only on a Volume Licensing agreement under an Enterprise, Select, or Open Value program. For details and pricing information, contact your LAR or reseller.

I just did an Exchange 2010 architectural design session for a university in Ohio and this was a key question they asked me.  The answer is yes, you truly can leverage JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks) storage with large TB SATA drives for Exchange 2010 now. Microsoft IT has deployed Exchange 2010 with JBOD storage and we are benchmarked as some of the heaviest mail profiles available. This proves using JBOD storage with Exchange 2010 can handle even the highest of mail loads/stress and IOPS per user (.11+).

Why would I consider JBOD storage for Exchange 2010?

Storage is going to be your largest expense in deploying Exchange 2010.  If you can reduce your storage costs by anywhere from 90%+ to 40%, maintain the same performance, and significantly grow your mail quota per user it becomes a no brainer. This is the same conclusion MS IT came to. They also did not need to grow their storage staff to maintain JBOD.

How is this possible?

Cheap SATA and JBOD storage are possible since, with Exchange 2010, the product team managed to significantly increase and optimize database performance which resulted in reducing the IOPS per user by another 70% over Exchange 2007. This translates to the use of cheaper storage can be leveraged for equivalent performance of higher cost storage used with Exchange 2007.

For example, a 7200RPM 1TB SATA drive will provide an estimated 75-80 IOPS per spindle. This now becomes a viable spindle type for Exchange 2010 with the additional 70% IOPS/mailbox reduction. If you add in our new DAG availability, where we replicate and failover at the database layer, JBOD becomes a viable option as well.

What do I have to have in place in order to use JBOD storage?

The recommended DAG architecture for JBOD storage is a minimum of 3 mailbox server nodes with 3 database copies per database. You dedicate one spindle per database and associated transaction logs. If a spindle fails, since it is non-RAIDed, it doesn’t matter since you have TWO other good copies of the database to failover to on two other dedicated spindles. 

What does a sample JBOD storage look like?

This is just a sample architecture for reference. You could use larger SATA drives now such as 2TB SATA drives to lower your spindle count. If you look closely you will see, 3 copies of any given database spread across 3 servers.

Are there tools I can use to validate my JBOD storage?

Yes, first thing I would recommend would be to use the Mailbox Calculator to level set that JBOD is a good fit for your organization. Note: Make sure you specify 3 or more database copies or the calculator will not recommend JBOD as a viable option. The nice part about the calculator is you can play with different SATA spindles (7200 RPM, 3.5”, 1TB, 2TB, etc) to arrive at different results.

Sample Mailbox calculator data showing JBOD is a fit:

Once you have purchased JBOD storage, I would leverage the following stress tools:

JetStress

LoadGen

to benchmark your storage and hardware. Grab those tools here.

Is there a storage matrix I can use to reference?

I found this useful storage matrix put together from the product team:

More on storage planning here and here.

DAG samples here.