Johann's Unified Communications : exchange 2007

Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 2

jkruse — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 14:38:19 GMT

Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 2 (SP2) has been designed specifically to help meet the challenges of any business and the needs of all the different groups with a stake in the messaging system.

Exchange Server 2007 SP2 is a mission-critical communications tool that enables employees to be more productive and access their information anywhere and anytime while providing a messaging system that enables rich, efficient access to e-mail, calendar items, voice mail, and contacts.

For the administrator, Exchange Server 2007 SP2 provides advanced protection options against e-mail security threats, such as spam and viruses, as well as the tools to help manage internal compliance and high availability needs.

For an overview of the new features that are available in Exchange Server 2007 SP2, see "What's New in Exchange Server 2007 SP2".

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=4c4bd2a3-5e50-42b0-8bbb-2cc9afe3216a

Determining the Scalability of Combined CAS and Hub Roles in Exchange 2007

jkruse — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 01:24:33 GMT

Bill Thompson has written a great whitepaper on considerations for Exchange 2007 servers running both the CAS and Hub roles.

This white paper provides information about the scalability of computers running Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 with the Client Access server role and the Hub Transport server role installed on the same server. It also provides planning guidance to help you select the appropriate hardware platform(s) for an Exchange 2007 deployment where you are deploying the Client Access and Hub Transport server roles on the same computer.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd901772.aspx

Do You Really Need A SAN Anymore?

jkruse — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 12:46:00 GMT

I have had many interesting conversations about my post on Advantages of DAS over SAN storage in Exchange 2007 and the related session I delivered at Tech.Ed 2008… many sceptics have seen the light, although some remain sceptical.

It’s interesting to see that Forrester have published a paper titled “Do You Really Need A SAN Anymore?”.

An excerpt from the paper…

It's been the conventional wisdom of the past 10 years that to provide the best performance, protection, and capacity utilization for applications and databases, you need a robust storage array in a storage area network (SAN). But with low capacity utilization, the inability to prioritize application performance, long provisioning times, and soaring costs, SANs haven't lived up to their promise. SANs also leave application, database, and system administrators at the mercy of storage administrators for all their storage-related needs, such as capacity, data copies, and backups. To regain control and get better results, application vendors are starting to subsume more storage functionality into the application itself, giving IT buyers the option to spend less on commodity storage and get their high-value features from the application. The time has come for buyers to question the value of their SAN and consider simpler options that fit better with the applications they truly care about.

A very interesting read on allowing advanced applications (e.g. Exchange) look after storage. Unfortunately it’s not free, but you can purchase and read the paper at http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/Excerpt/0,7211,47089,00.html

Exchange 2007 SP1 Virtualisation and Licensing Announcements

jkruse — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 02:18:17 GMT

Two big announcements for Exchange 2007 SP1:

Microsoft now supports Exchange Server 2007 SP1 running on Hyper-V or other hypervisors validated under the Microsoft Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP).
Microsoft is waiving its 90-day license reassignment policy to enable customers who virtualise Exchange to move their licenses between servers within a data farm as often as necessary.

I recommend reading the following articles for all the necessary information:

Microsoft Virtualization and Licensing Announcements - http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2008/08/19/449621.aspx
Microsoft Support Policies and Recommendations for Exchange Servers in Hardware Virtualization Environments - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc794548.aspx

And if you're coming to Tech.Ed in Australia or NZ make sure you attend UNC306: Exchange Server 2007 SP1 and Hyper-V where we will be doing a deep-dive on this topic - all the official technical information, recommendations, and some of the gotchas.

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Hyper-V is here.. what about Exchange?

jkruse — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 00:58:00 GMT

In case you haven't heard the news, we have released Hyper-V into the wild. In fact did you know that 25% of microsoft.com is already running on Hyper-V VMs?

So what about Exchange Server?

As we recently announced at Tech.Ed USA, Microsoft will be publishing a support statement with respect to Exchange Server on Hyper-V within 60 days of today.

Some of the more noteworthy bits of info from the session are:

Within 60 days of Hyper-V's RTM, the Exchange team will publish a detailed support statement for Hyper-V, and a TechNet article with best practices.
Customers should not deploy Exchange on Hyper-V until our support guidance is available.
Early results show that performance of Exchange 2007 on Hyper-V is quite good, and that it scales very well from 1-4 processors per VM.

In terms of best practices and requirements, the following guidance was released:

We're only supporting guests running Exchange Server 2007 SP1 on Windows Server 2008.
We're only supporting fixed disks, and not dynamic disks.
Storage should be on spindles that are separate from the Guest operating system VHD physical storage.
Storage must be SCSI passthrough or iSCSI (with a preference of SCSI passthrough for queues, databases and log files).
All Exchange server roles, except for the Unified Messaging server role, will be supported.
There's a limit on VHD size of 2040 GB.

It was also mentioned that Hyper-V is a good fit when Exchange servers in branch offices cannot be consolidated to a central datacenter (for example, because of bandwidth or connectivity issues).

In terms of workload, not every workload is a candidate for virtualisation. For example, server roles such as Client Access and Hub Transport can be good candidates, but a more heavy hitter like the Mailbox role (which often uses all available resources on a physical server) might not be the best candidate for virtualising.

So what's the really great thing about this soon-to-be-released guidance?

60 days from now is just in time for Tech.Ed Australia and New Zealand!!!

So of course will be doing a deep-dive on running Exchange 2007 SP1 on Hyper-V based on the official supported guidance :)

In Auckland this will be presented by Sandy Millar, Lead Architect in APAC for MCS; and in Sydney it will be presented by Mario Tevanian and Sander Valkhoff, lead Exchange consultants for MCS Australia.

So make sure you're there to hear all of the official guidance and advice. The Auckland event is sold out, but there are still spaces left in Sydney. Come on kiwis, jump on a plane and visit us in Sydney! We've already committed to our USA speakers that the weather in Sydney will be perfect :)

(also, today (27th June) is the last day for early-bird registration which will save you $250!)

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Advantages of DAS over SAN storage in Exchange 2007

jkruse — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 02:16:00 GMT

You may have heard me talk about this at TechEd, and some of my customers will recall long discussions with me about the merits of using Direct Attached Storage rather than SANs in Exchange 2007.

Storage Area Networks (SAN) have become increasingly common in Enterprise environments in recent years, and in particular for hosting Exchange Server environments due to their space and IO requirements.

There are many advantages to using a SAN with Exchange:

Performance - Exchange 2003 is a very IO intensive application, and in any decent-sized environment disk IO is almost always the bottleneck
Scalability - we're storing more data than ever before and although technologies like Sharepoint relieve some of the burden from Exchange, the fact is that mailbox sizes continue to grow as we move into the age of UM and UC.
Availability - consolidating your storage provides a single system to maintain and backup, and allows you to build HA/DR into the storage system to protect all of your data.

However Exchange 2007 introduced some new concepts, which has changed things somewhat.

Performance - by moving to a 64-bit platform (which does not have the virtual memory limitations of its 32-bit predecessors) we have significantly reduced the IO impact in Exchange, by about 70% on a mailbox server! Modern DAS technologies such as Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) are capable of providing more than enough IO for Exchange 2007.
Scalability - SANs are expensive, so as storage requirements increase so does the TCO of the environment. For example, at Microsoft the high costs associated with shared SAN storage hindered MSIT from supporting employees with mailbox quotas of greater than 200 MB.
Availability - SANs don't fail often, but they do fail - and when they do it can be catastrophic. Three of my Exchange 2003 customers have had SAN failures this year, and in each case it took several days to return Exchange to full operation. Two of these customers were using SAN replication technology which actually replicated corrupt data to the DR site, taking it out and making the restore process much more complex (and defeating the whole purpose of the replication IMHO). Exchange 2007 introduced CCR and SCR, which provide software-based replication for HA and DR eliminating single points of failure, and providing simplified site resilience and DR.

Figure 1: a typical Exchange 2003 2-node cluster using SAN replication for DR

Figure 2: Exchange 2007 - CCR+SCR, using DAS storage

The two diagrams above, which are scanned from some scribblings on paper I drew in a recent Architectural Design Session with a customer (apologies for the messiness - I'm so used to keyboard/mouse than my handwriting skills have declined :)), show their existing Exchange 2003 cluster and a proposed Exchange 2007 cluster.

The advantages of the Exchange 2007 environment here are:

Increased availability in Prod datacentre - there are two copies of the database, with automatic failover, meaning no single point of failure. The SAN environment in Figure 1 has only one copy of the DB in Prod, meaning that any DB failure will result in a cutover to DR. CCR in Figure 2 provides fault tolerance in the event of server failure, storage failure and data corruption.
Enhanced Disaster Recovery - using SCR to replicate data to the DR site, there is now a fully supported and simple to manage DR process in place. In Figure 1, data corruption in Prod could be replicated to DR, meaning that restore from backup would be required. In Figure 2, SCR will not replicate corrupted data as it used transaction log shipping to replicate.
Reduced TCO - there may be more copies (3) of the data in Figure 2, but the usage of DAS disks will significantly reduce the cost of storage which will likely more than offset the cost of the additional disks required.

So how does it work in the real world? A great example of the benefits of moving from SAN to DAS is our internal MSIT case study.

We saw benefits such as:

Messaging service levels exceeding high-availability targets of 99.99 percent.
Cost reductions in excess of $10 million per year.
Increased mailbox quotas by up to a factor of 10.
Consolidation of the initial Exchange Server 2007 base by nearly a factor of two.

The MSIT whitepaper can be found at the Technet site, in Word format, as a webcast, or as a podcast (WMA, MP3).

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Technorati Tags: exchange 2007, storage, ccr, scr, san, das, planning, msit, download

Client network traffic in Exchange 2007

jkruse — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 02:18:43 GMT

We've had a whitepaper available for some time that allows you to work out the bandwidth and network requirements for clients running Outlook/Exchange 2003.

Great news is that we now have updated guidance for Outlook/Exchange 2007 - it is available at http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2008/04/10/448668.aspx

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IM me!

Technorati Tags: exchange 2007, outlook, bandwidth, network

A brief history of time

jkruse — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 00:53:51 GMT

From You Had Me At EHLO...

Ever wondered how Exchange Server evolved over the years? And how come Exchange Server 2007 shows "8.0" as its version number?

Here is a brief history of time... it might add a bit to the known history!

http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2008/01/02/447806.aspx

Technorati Tags: exchange 2007, history, exchange12rocks

Optimizing Outlook 2007 Cache Mode Performance for a Very Large Mailbox

jkruse — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 00:19:27 GMT

Over at You Had Me At EHLO Matt Gossage has written a great article on some ideas for large mailboxes and how to optimise your OST for performance.

Technorati Tags: exchange 2007, ost

Video: demo of upgrading a CCR cluster from Exchange 2007 RTM to SP1

jkruse — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 04:37:07 GMT

From You Had Me At EHLO...

To demonstrate upgrading a CCR cluster from Exchange 2007 RTM to SP1, I have created a video demo that takes you through the process of upgrading the passive node followed by upgrading the CMS to SP1 and finally upgrading the active node. This demo also demonstrates "Managing Clustered Mailbox Server" via the Exchange 2007 SP1 Exchange Management Console.

Watch it at http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2007/12/03/447658.aspx

Technorati Tags: exchange 2007, sp1, video

Exchange 2007 SP1 - now available!

jkruse — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 01:37:00 GMT

Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1 (SP1) has been designed specifically to help meet the challenges of any business and the needs of all the different groups with a stake in the messaging system. Exchange Server 2007 SP1 is a mission-critical communications tool that enables employees to be more productive and access their information anywhere and anytime while providing a messaging system that enables rich, efficient access to e-mail, calendar items, voice mail, and contacts. For the administrator, Exchange Server 2007 SP1 provides advanced protection options against e-mail security threats, such as spam and viruses, as well as the tools to help manage internal compliance and high availability needs.

In Exchange Server 2007 SP1, several new features and improvements will extend the Anywhere Access capabilities of Exchange Server 2007 to help make employees more productive on whatever device they’re using, provide additional Operational Efficiency tools for administrators seeking a streamlined management and deployment experience, and enable advanced Built-in Protection for more robust high availability and compliance scenarios.

Improvements in Exchange Server 2007 SP1 include:

Anywhere Access

Integrated Exchange Unified Messaging functionality with Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 and Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007.
Outlook Web Access additions, including public folder access, S/MIME support, personal distribution lists, and mailbox rules editor.
Webready document viewer supports Microsoft Office 2007 documents in addition to Microsoft Office 2003 documents.
Extended language support in Outlook Web Access with Arabic and Korean spell checking.

Operational Efficiency

Support for Windows Server 2008 deployments, including benefits in flexible clustering, native virtualization, advanced networking, and simplified management.
Additional tools in the Exchange Management Console, including public folder management and configuration options for clustering and POP/IMAP access.
Improvements to the Exchange Management Shell syntax and import-export PST in the move-mailbox command.
Wider variety of web services for application development, including public folder access, delegate management, and folder level permissions.

Built-in Protection

Addition of Standby Continuous Replication (SCR) for site resilient high availability deployments.
Extended Exchange ActiveSync policies for mobile policy enforcement.
Inormation rights management pre-licensing by the Hub Transport role.
Secure Real Time Protocol (SRTP) support in the Unified Messaging role.
Support for IPv6 when using Windows Server 2008.

Download it now at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=44C66AD6-F185-4A1D-A9AB-473C1188954C&displaylang=en

Also download the release notes at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=5770bd59-376e-42ec-b940-be6225cd97ff&DisplayLang=en

And download a slipstreamed trial edition at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=44C66AD6-F185-4A1D-A9AB-473C1188954C&displaylang=en

Technorati Tags: exchange12rocks, exchange 2007, sp1, download

Exchange Server 2007 Component Architecture

jkruse — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 01:26:10 GMT

This poster highlights the architecture and feature set of Microsoft Exchange Server 2007.

Aside from showing the high-level architecture, this poster highlights the feature set of Exchange Server 2007. Sections include:

Management and Monitoring
High Availability
Client Access, Edge Transport, Hub Transport, Mailbox, and Unified Messaging server roles

The poster is a .pdf file and you will need Adobe Reader to view it. When printed, this poster measures 30.5 inches by 20.5 inches.

Download it now from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=FDCDF6E5-DE47-4B58-8086-282101BCDDE9&displaylang=en

Technorati Tags: exchange 2007, download, poster

Exchange ActiveSync Certificate-Based Authentication Tool

jkruse — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 12:21:43 GMT

The Microsoft Exchange Server ActiveSync Certificate-Based authentication tool provides several utilities to assist an Exchange administrator in configuring and validating client certificate authentication for Exchange Server ActiveSync.

These utilities include:

A tool to assist the administrator in configuring certificate enrollment for mobile devices connecting to Exchange Server 2003 Service Pack 2. Specifically, the tool will help the administrator populate the Active Directory with the following information to be used by the mobile device when enrolling for a certificate:

Certification authority (CA) server name
Certificate template that will be used
Other settings, such as custom Web enrollment URLs

Because the tool writes information to the Active Directory, it must be run by someone with domain administrator privileges.

Additional tools to validate that a mobile device can successfully retrieve the above configuration information from the Active Directory.
Documentation outlining the server configuration steps necessary to enable & require certificate-based authentication for Exchange ActiveSync.

Download it now from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=82510e18-7965-4883-a8c3-f73f1f4733ac&DisplayLang=en

Technorati Tags: activesync, windows mobile, wm6, exchange 2007, tools, management, certificates, download

Significant update to the Exchange 2007 Mailbox Server Role Storage Requirements Calculator - v 11.8

jkruse — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 01:50:58 GMT

Please go on our Mailbox Server Role Storage Requirements Calculator updates tracking page to see what is in this new version!

A blog post explaining the calculator (updated for this new version) is here.

Technorati Tags: exchange, storage, tools

Video Series: Exchange 2007 SP1 Standby Continuous Replication (SCR)

jkruse — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 02:43:06 GMT

From You Had Me At EHLO...

Beta 2 of Service Pack 1 Exchange Server 2007 is available for public download and preview for MSDN and TechNet subscribers. As I wrote in my blog entry, Standby Continuous Replication in Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1, SCR extends the continuous replication technology in Exchange 2007, enabling new data availability scenarios for Exchange 2007 Mailbox servers. You can find product documentation for SCR in the recently refreshed TechCenter update at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb676502.aspx.

To demonstrate one of those scenarios, I have created a 5-part blogcast that takes you through the process of enabling SCR, monitoring SCR, and activating an SCR storage group copy using the Exchange Management Shell and other features, such as database portability. This scenario is based on the scenario detailed in the Help topic Standby Continuous Replication: Database Portability.

An example of using SCR with a standby cluster is detailed in the Help topic Standby Continuous Replication: Site Resilience with Standby Clustering.

Download the videos at http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2007/09/13/447006.aspx

Technorati Tags: scr, sp1, exchange 2007, dr, video