Nice tool to help you sort out problems accessing Exchange from out on the Internet.
For more information see the blog on You Had Me At EHLO.. here and there is a quick presentation on Edge.TechNet.com here.
Test EAS with Windows Mobile 5, EAS with Windows Mobile 6 (& autodiscover), OutlookAnywhere via Outlook 2003 or Outlook 2007 (& autodiscover) and inbound SMTP…
The tool will give you a pretty detailed report of where any failure might be and also links to TechNet in the way ExBPA does with some likely troubleshooting steps and\or fixes.
If you have any comments email: exrcafb@microsoft.com
This is a great blog if you are wondering about some unusual behaviour in Active Directory – specifically the following:
“- Why has my AD database size increased by 500MB in the last three weeks?
- I see lots of AD replication in Domain Controller monitoring. What are all these changes?”
Go to the Ask the Directory Services blog on Technet;
“In order to find the cause for the problems, you should find what has changed in the AD database recently. Now Active Directory assigns an "Update Sequence Number" (USN) to each change. These USNs are 64 Bit Integers and are specific to a Domain Controller. The DC GUID and USN together uniquely identify a database change. A USN is both assigned to originating changes and replicated changes. So even for read-only GC content, you see local USNs getting written.
You can use these USNs to identify recent changes in the database of each DC. ….”
“Based on this number, you can query for the most recently changed Objects using an LDAP query.”
Great blog!
Have had this discussion on many occasions and this 3Sharp whitepaper by Missy Koslosky would have proved very useful as an external reference point…
High Availability Choices for Exchange Server 2007: Continuous Cluster Replication or Single Copy Clustering
In conclusion… (this isn’t the only bit I read)
“Exchange Server 2007 is a mission critical application. Organizations rely on the services and data Exchange provides, and keeping these highly available is of the utmost importance. Native, application-specific data replication functionality is the proper solution to meet the needs of these organizations. There are several options within Exchange Server 2007 that provide failover and high availability services, and among these, CCR provides the most highly available, cost-effective solution to achieve low RTO and RPO while reducing costs and complexity.
SCC offers an incomplete solution; its fatal flaw is the lack of multiple database copies. Although multiple servers may be involved in an SCC cluster, if a problem occurs with a mailbox database, there is no alternate copy of the database without the use of costly and complicated additional products, requiring disaster recovery operations to be performed to restore service to users, and resulting in an unacceptable RTO/RPO.
CCR is a robust clustering solution that provides true high availability services for organizations. CCR is easier to implement, easier to manage and maintain, and provides better availability all at a lower cost, while allowing organizations to satisfy the needs of their users by deploying large mailbox quotas.”
If you’re considering SAN, synchronous replication and SCC over DAS, asynchronous replication and CCR I’d recommend reading this whitepaper…
Just found this DPM book: ‘Mastering System Center Data Protection Manager 2007’ by Devin L. Ganger (Author), Ryan Femling (Author) [..both 3Sharp, LLC]
Has anyone read it? Is it any good for Exchange?
This is worth a quick read if you are interested in what’s happening with Exchange in the cloud at Live@Edu and Google Apps…
“Both Queensland University for Technology (QUT) and Ohio State University (OSU) have now signed up to Live@edu, Microsoft’s online cloud suite designed for students, including Hotmail, SkyDrive and Workspaces.
Over 100,000 students from these two universities are now using Live@edu, after extensive testing resulted in Microsoft getting the deal and Google being pushed our of the picture.”
**UPDATE: forgot to reference the original source http://blogs.zdnet.com/igeneration/?p=1289. Very sorry Zack!
Go to VirtualizationFeed.com and get the latest on virtualisation in Microsoft and in the wider world.
Also worth keeping track of what’s happening in the #virtualization community on Twitter at the same place.
Exchange alternatives: Pros and cons
Testing shows Microsoft's Exchange still tops for features and management hooks @ http://www.networkworld.com/reviews/2009/030909-exchange-alternatives-test.html
“In this Clear Choice Test, we explore how Exchange alternatives stack up against Microsoft's offer, as well as each other.
Our testing focuses on products for midsized deployments of 1,000 mailboxes or less. We tested six Exchange alternatives: CommuniGate Pro (CommuniGate Systems), Kerio MailServer (Kerio Technologies), MDaemon Pro (Alt-N Technologies), MailSite Fusion (MailSite), Scalix Enterprise Edition (Scalix, a Xandros company), and Zimbra Collaboration Suite, Professional Edition (Zimbra, a Yahoo company).”
“While there are places where our Exchange alternatives outdo Exchange -- such as in price/performance, Macintosh interoperability, and manageability for mid-sized deployments -- Exchange still beats the competition in many areas because it offers a range of features that aren't easy to find in the third-party market.”
But no Notes\Domino?
..and whilst we’re on the subject:
Comparing Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 to Other Messaging Solutions
Case Studies About Microsoft Exchange Server 2007
Alternatives to Microsoft Exchange
Exchange Server 2007: First-Class Mail
VMWare Podcasts – VMWAre Infrastructure 3 Podcast: Disaster Recovery (DR) for Exchange using VMWare @ http://www.vmware.com/resources/podcasts/server_consolidation.html
by Scott Salyer, VMware Technical Solutions Architect
- Using VMWare infrastructure we can help increase the flexibility of your high availability solution for exchange
- Reduce cost
- Enhance availability of Exchange through VMWare and MS Exchange features
Scott makes a lot of the inflexibility of a non-VMWare Exchange design – you have to stick to your design decisions – using VMWare is more flexible if your original design requirements change. ..would still argue that getting your requirements straight to begin with and sticking to an environment lifecycle is pretty key to a successful Exchange deployment regardless of platform. ..good podcast and worth a listen although I’d love to see more detail about recovery processes for different scenarios and some expectations about data loss.
Secure and Consolidated 16,000 Exchange Users Solution on a VMWare/EMC Environment @ http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/resources/16000_exchange_on_vmware.pdf
(published May last year)
“The purpose of this white paper is to validate the building-block guidelines for virtualizing an Exchange 2007 Mailbox server role using a real-world deployment scenario. VMWare ESX 2.5 was used to host the Exchange Server 2007 virtual machines. All periperal (AD, HUB, and CAS) server roles were also hosted on VMWare virtual machines. EMC CLARiiON CX3-80 storage was used to host the Exchange database and log storage, and EMC Replication Manager software was used to test backup/restore functionality for the virtualized Mailbox servers.”
16,000 users, 0.32 IOPS per mailbox – Loadgen and Jetstress used to test the deployment.
“Conclusion
The solution validated the building-block approach to virtualizing an Exchange 2007 Mailbox server with VMWare and EMC CLARiiON storage”…
Good results but sounds like a pretty expensive solution for Exchange 2007 which would negate a lot of the benefits of deploying Exchange 2007 on VMWare in the first place. To me it doesn’t make a good enough case against making the most of your hardware and dedicating it to Exchange with more cost effective storage.
Deploy Exchange on a Dynamic Platform @ http://www.vmware.com/solutions/business-critical-apps/exchange/performance.html
“Increase the Capacity of Physical Servers by 100%
Double the number of mailboxes supported per physical host from 8,000 to 16,000 heavy mailbox users. Without VMware, a single Exchange mailbox running on a physical server can scale up to about 8,000 heavy user mailboxes. Using larger servers doesn’t help because the mailbox can’t leverage the additional capacity.
With VMware, Exchange mailboxes can be scaled out on multiple smaller virtual machines to maximize the throughput of the physical server. Using this approach, Exchange can be scaled out on 8 Virtual Machines, each supporting 2,000 heavy mailbox users, to support 16,000 users on one physical server.
This performance advantage will amplify over time with the introduction of larger multicore systems. Without VMware, Exchange will not be able to use the additional capacity of these servers. With VMware, Exchange will scale out linearly to efficiently use the additional capacity.”
Virtualization Performance Basics @ http://www.vmware.com/overview/performance/overview.html
“By running multiple virtual machines simultaneously, a physical server can be driven to much higher utilizations, albeit with some performance overhead.”
“Virtualization does not decrease the amount of RAM required to run an application and its host operating system, and like any software, the virtualization layer requires its own portion of RAM…”
When multiple virtual machines are consolidated on a single physical server, they can impact I/O performance with their combined file size and simultaneous need for rapid access to stored data.
“VMware solutions help to improve I/O performance through the VMware vStorage VMFS, which provides virtual machines with simultaneous access to shared data stores. Centralized storage helps reduce latency and increase throughput, and provides the foundation for unique capabilities such as live migration and consolidated backup.”
Where are the up to date performance benchmarks? They still don’t seem to exist.
..and some other links I’m sure you’ve already seen.
Should You Virtualize Your Exchange 2007 SP1 Environment?
Microsoft Support Policies and Recommendations for Exchange Servers in Hardware Virtualization Environments
Windows Server Virtualization Validation Program
Exchange 2007 System Requirements
Server Virtualization with Advanced Management (SVAM) Service Offering
‘Effective PowerShell: The Free eBook’ from Keith Hill available on Keith Hills’ blog here.
Definitely worth a look…
You gotta laugh…
Not something I would normally blog about but will be interesting to any of our partners who operate in this space.
Guide to Opportunity: Software-plus-Services
https://partner.microsoft.com/UK/productssolutions/40099765
This 16-page guide explains how partners can exploit our Software-plus-Services strategy. Microsoft executives and partners explain how Software-plus-Services can create major revenue opportunities for partners; and cost savings for customers, especially in the current economic climate.
Business Advisor Podcast series
www.microsoft.com/uk/partner/businessadvisor
The Business Advisor series is a set of podcasts featuring commentary from Microsoft executives, independent experts and partners discussing topical business issues. Available are podcasts dedicated to providing advice on: how to make cost savings; cost-effective marketing; sales; and business planning.
Let’s leave the “why would you?” to one side for the moment but is it actually possible or supported to defrag a continuous replication target database? Well not surprisingly er ‘No’. An offline defrag creates a new database with a new signature (“When defragmentation is complete, the original database is deleted or saved to a user-specified location, and the new version is renamed as the original.”) and therefore whilst it will be possible to defrag the database you’ll break replication.
So if you know that you have a large amount of whitespace that it is possible to claw back (maybe you have just reorganised your mailboxes across a larger set of mailbox databases?) and you want to run an offline defrag then you need to defrag the active database and reseed a replica…
In my experience there aren’t many reasons to perform an offline defrag and so the relative pain of this process should not be one that many administrators have to follow. And of course if your LUNs and disk set up allows it might be preferable to create a new database, seed it and then move all the mailboxes from the original database to this new one.
Try this article on Technet for the steps to see a CCR database; How to Seed a Cluster Continuous Replication Copy
