BES Enterprise Express released yesterday!

Blackberry Enterprise Express has released.

There is a great comparison matrix for BES Enterprise Express and other BES products here

Unfortunately, for customers who adopted and recently bought or renewed their Blackberry Professional licensing, I have yet to find information about migrations, or the future of the "professional" product line. There is not a clear delineation that professional became Enterprise Express, but it does appear that way. I did find the old BES Pro PDF comparison on their UK site and was able to make this comparison below:

Errors moving mailboxes to an Exchange 2010 DAG

I ran into this today, doing my first production DAG with a copy on a kind of slow connection.

Error: Move for mailbox '/o=First Organization/ou=First Administrative Group/cn=Recipients/cn=user' is stalled because DataMoveReplicationConstraint is not satisfied for the database 'Database' (agent MailboxDatabaseReplication). Failure Reason: Database a409ab86-ce24-4fcf-bd2a-14fd633090aa does not satisfy constraint SecondCopy. Some database copies are behind.

Sure enough, a quick check of get-MailboxDatabaseCopyStatus showed that my CopyQueueLength was fairly high on the server across the WAN. As a result, my mailbox moves were failing with the above error. However, they don't fail right away, the StatusDetail shows StalledDueToHA. Some stayed there up to two hours waiting for the log shipping to catch up on the remote server before failing.

To show a more detailed output on move progress, I was using:
Get-MoveRequest Get-MoveRequestStatistics | ft displayname,*stat*,perc*,totalmailboxsize

So what Exchange 2010 is doing here is smart. Exchange Active Manager doesn't want that CopyQueueLength to be over 10 files, or the replay queue length over 50. More constraints here.

The workaround is to disable this limit, so your moves can occur and the seeding can occur over time. This is one of three Microsoft recommended fixes. One is fix your database health, one is upgrade your WAN. This third one is a workaround that should be reconfigured after the initial mailbox moves.

Set-MailboxDatabase -DataMoveReplicationConstraint None

The default here is SecondCopy. More information on the other settings at the link above. This change DOES require a restart of the Exchange Replication Manager service. Be forewarned, if you have a queue length already, the replication manager will hang on stopping and attempt to complete the copies before stopping, so it might take some time.

Of course, once your moves are done, and your database's CopyQueueLength is normalized, you should re-enable this constraint using:

Set-MailboxDatabase -DataMoveReplicationConstraint SecondCopy

Exchange and the loss of single instance storage

Great post up on the Exchange Team blog about SIS. I have talked about this to many customers, and it's nice to have a link to refer people to for an explanation.

http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2010/02/22/454051.aspx

In short, single instance storage was invented when disks were expensive and massive amounts of storage cost companies a lot more money. It worked great on that scale. As Exchange gained in popularity, and those users gained data, the disk planning for Exchange became more important, as the random I/O that SIS wrote took more time to read in than a sequential I/O. By moving to a sequential read/write model, they were able to vastly improve IOPS. So now, disk space is cheap and plentiful. Server level 2TB disks are here/coming soon, and I have a few customers with plans to do DAG's on 2TB SATA's.

Normalizing Phone Numbers to E.164 format in Excel

Recently, I had the need to import some users for a large company. In order to populate as much of their Active Directory as possible, they wanted their phone numbers to be in a standardized format. Both Microsoft and Cisco have standardized on E.164 (additional information here) as a numbering standard, which basically starts with + [country code] + phone number.

This particular customer is US based only, so all the numbers in their spreadsheet had a US country code of 1. If I had a multinational organization, some additional coding would need to be done to account for other country codes.

My major need was to simply re-input all the different numbering standards the various internal organizations had inputted their phone numbers as. In other words, normalization. This helps to set up AD for later integration of OCS, or other VoIP systems, as well as Exchange 2007 or Exchange 2010 UM.

Either way, the Excel formula I was using here was the following:
=CONCATENATE("+1",SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE((SUBSTITUTE(A2,"(","")),")","")," ",""),"-",""),".",""),"x",";ext="))

In logical order..

1. Replace ( with null
   
2. Replace ) with null
   
3. Replace space with null
   
4. Replace hyphen with null
   
5. Replace period with null
   
6. Replace x with ";ext=" (which is the E164 standard for non-DID numbers)
   
7. Concatenate the +1 country code
   

Here again without the horrible color:
=CONCATENATE("+1",SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE((SUBSTITUTE(A2,"(","")),")","")," ",""),"-",""),".",""),"x",";ext="))

The end result, computer readable phone numbers!

Training and some personal updates

Been a very busy 2010 for me thusfar. After some long time off from work in December, I returned to our economy starting to turn around, and we are getting nice and busy again. I currently have three Exchange 2010 migrations, a few OCS related projects, and am in pre-sales with a bunch on new Exchange 2010 opportunities.

Last week, I went to Microsoft's Unified Communications Voice Ignite (UCVI 2.0) training in Dallas, TX. The class was really good, and I attended with one of our resident Cisco Voice consultants as well, so he was able to help bridge some gaps for me and vice versa me for him. Of course, while in Dallas they got a record breaking snowfall of 11" in 24 hours. Class wasn't canceled, but most everything else in Dallas was. Getting back to Austin felt great, and the next day it was 65 here, and I spent it in the hammock.

Well, this week, our MS UC partner sent us an offer for the beta exam for 71-404 - to go take it for free. If you are a Microsoft Partner, you should be able to take this offer. I am taking it next week, but I will be cramming for sure - there is a LOT of content from that class on this exam!

I also found this really cool OCS 2007 R2 PDF for wall display. So, will this mean more OCS blog entries? I think so. I usually blog based on things I am actually working on, as it makes the entries easier to write, and with all this new OCS knowledge, I don't see how it couldn't take us there some. However, don't worry, my Number One Subject Matter will stay Exchange for a long time I am sure.

Exchange 2010 Backup Product Support Matrix

Well, the #1 recent article here is my Exchange 2007 and Exchange 2010 Backup how to. The reason, of course, is that Exchange 2010 has been out since November 2009 and select few have yet announced or released Exchange 2010 support, and many companies are still trying to find how to backup Exchange 2010 in their production environment.

While I have not used many of these yet, I am hoping to try to demonstrate them all and update this post as new information comes. However, if you have made a significant investment in any of the below (or others, email me!) and are waiting for support, the best thing you can do is ask your vendor. The more input received, the more important you are making it for them!

Here is a chart of my findings thus far:

Vendor	Product	Exchange 2010 Support	Release Date	Version
Commvault	Commvault	Non-DAG in 8.0, DAG in 9.0	9.0 - 2nd 1/2 of 2010	8/9
Symantec	NetBackup	Yes	2/4/2010	7.0
Symantec	Backup Exec 2010	Yes	2/4/2010	2010
CA	Arcserve	Expected	Unknown	v14
EMC	Networker	Expected	May/June 2010
EMC	DataDomain	Unknown	?
EMC	Avamar	Expected	Q2 2010
i365	eVault	Expected	Q2 2010
Microsoft	Data Protection Manager 2010	Expected	?	2010
Microsoft	Windows Server Backup	Yes	11/09/2009	Windows 2008

By the way, if you know of ANY updates, feel free to comment, or email me directly at me@chrislehr.com. If I said Unknown above it's more likely that your web site didn't make this information readily accessible. If I receive emails from the appropriate domain names, I will post it as official, more so if you can provide a link!

Exchange 2010 Management tool start up problems

Something that has been posted a LOT on the Exchange 2010 Forums on Technet - people with issues starting the EMC or EMS in Exchange 2010. Many of these step from the slightly different management via WinRM. The Microsoft Team blog posted a GREAT write up on how to troubleshoot the different common errors and address them all!

http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2010/02/04/453946.aspx

Ways Outlook Web Access 2010 ROCKS - Part 4 of Many

Wow. Being able to delete 282 unread emails with the same subject has NEVER been so easy. OWA 2010 from Exchange 2010 includes conversation view, which allows you to do this� and yes, that is a right click context menu in IE, Firefox, or Safari.

Exchange 2010 � Enterprise Client Access Licenses

Some customers have asked about what an Enterprise CAL in Exchange 2010 grants you compared to the standard CAL. It is important to know that Exchange CAL's are additive (this was also true in exchange 2007) so an Enterprise CAL is not a "covers all" - you need the Standard and the Enterprise CAL.

The most complete licensing comparison on Exchange 2010 is here:
http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/2010/en/us/Licensing.aspx

And from the CAL chart there, we can see the detailed parts that are granted with an Enterprise CAL.

So let's detail these.

Advanced Activesync Policies
Within Organization Configuration, Client Access, Exchange ActiveSync Mailbox Policies, anything changes from the defaults on the Device, device Applications, or Other tab require an Enterprise CAL











You can see in these screenshots, that pretty much anywhere Enterprise CALs are being used there is an icon and a reminder.

Premium Journaling

If you have ever used an archiving product, you have probably used standard journaling. This is where every email written to a particular database is also copied to a single mailbox. Typically, then the 3rd part archive product picked up those emails and wrote them elsewhere. Premium journaling is under Organization Configuration, Hub Transport, Journal Rules. When you go to create a new journal rule, you see the same Enterprise CAL notification.

Unified Messaging

If you enable UM for a user, you need an Enterprise CAL.

Retention Policies

There are two different Managed Folders.. Default and Custom. Default folders are your Calendar, Contacts, Inbox, Draft, Sent Items, Tasks, Etc. Custom is anything you want to create and deploy to your users outside of this. When you create a new Custom folder policy, you see the Enterprise CAL notification.

Integrated Archive

Integrated Archive mailbox is new for Exchange 2010. When you attempt to enable archive for a mailbox, you get the Enterprise CAL notification shown below.



Multi-mailbox search and legal hold

This is the Discovery Management role within the RBAC (Role Based Access Control) that can be controlled via the ECP (Exchange Control Panel) This one does NOT give an Enterprise CAL notification when you add a user to the role group.

IPC, Transport Decryption, etc

This is a multifaceted one, that is not highlighted as Enterprise CAL required when you configure it either. I will default to Technet for descriptions of each of these features, as they have them neatly collected here:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd351035.aspx

Exchange 2010 and Blackberry Enterprise now supported

As seen at the MS Exchange Team Blog Blackberry Enterprise and Exchange 2010 are now compatible!

More information is also available at Research in Motion.

Requires BES 5.0.1 MR1
Exchange MAPI v6.5.8147
Exchange 2010 RTM RU1

Time to get patching!

Back from Vacation

Sorry for the lack of posting - we both took a much deserved 11 days in a row off.. Haven't blogged in a bit, so here are the big updates!

ExFolders, the PFDavAdmin replacement for Exchange 2010 was released over at the MS Exchange Team Blog. I have already had the opportunity to use this tool, and it works very well so far.

Speaking of the MS Exchange Team blog, they also released some very handy scripts for finding users with large item counts.

I have my 71-633 exam on Wednesday of this week, as long as it wasn't cancelled on me as some people are reporting.

Additionally, Office 2010's public beta launched. The Click to Run version is Hosted MS Office utilizing App-V technology!

Exchange 2010 - Moving mailboxes Video

I made this as a quick training piece internally and for customers.. Check it out!

Exchange 2010 High Availability and Disaster Recovery Video

Made this video for Simpler-Webb regarding Exchange 2010 Database Availability Groups and the differences between Exchange 2007 HA/DR planning and Exchange 2010 HA/DR planning - it's a little goofy and embarrassing, but have at it!

Outlook 2010 and Text Messaging

Again, this is not really an Exchange 2010 feature, but an Office 2010, Outlook Mobile 6.1, and Exchange 2010 Activesync feature. I blogged last week about this particular integration into Outlook Web App. This is what is looks like in the new Outlook 2010 Beta, included in the public Office 2010 beta program. The integration here is seamless, and while in meetings and roaming with my laptop, I am able to send and receive texts to my inbox!



Obviously, a majority of my contacts are on email, but one of the upsides of living in the middle of Texas is that I can get grass fed beef locally, and while I was in a meeting today, I was able to get this text message from my phone that I left in the car. And a nice little phone icon to differentiate from emails!

Exchange 2010, Outlook Mobile 6.1 and Text (SMS) Messaging

One of the new Client Access Role features of Exchange 2010 is SMS messaging. The first thing to know about this� Exchange did not learn to speak SMS. Exchange doesn't dial a modem. Exchange doesn't do SMS, per se. Exchange does do Activesync. And the Activesync and Windows Mobile team made this possible. Activesync actually sends/reads/synchronizes text messages to your phone. So when a text is sent, it's sent from your phone because Activesync told it to!

First, lets talk environment. Exchange 2010 RTM, Windows 2008 R2. Mailbox and CAS are 2010. The mobile device is a Windows Mobile 6.1 - This requires a Windows Mobile 6.1 or better device. No iPhone, no Blackberries have this functionality.

Install Outlook Mobile 6.1 on your WM 6.1+ device - Download from Microsoft at: https://update.outlook.com/cabs/OutlookLiveSetup.cab

Thanks to Mike here for this link: http://evangelyze.net/cs/blogs/mike/archive/2009/10/06/wm-6-1-outlook-mobile-update-for-exchange-2010.aspx

Configure Acticesync to your Exchange 2010 CAS server(s), and the next time you go into text messages, your device will prompt you asking if you want to sync texts with Outlook. When you accept this, you will get an email like this one:

The link for this is: http://help.outlook.com/en-us/140/dd251212.aspx

When you log into OWA (or Outlook 2010 when available) you can send texts to contacts from OWA:

Exchange uses Activesync to instruct your device to text on your behalf.

When a reply is received to your phone, the next activesync (aka, when you get an email) will pull that text into your inbox:

Users can disable/turn off/edit this feature in OWA options:

Of course, this can be disabled entirely for all users of a CAS server using:

set-owavirtualdirectory -TextMessagingEnabled:$false

Or this can be disabled per user using new Exchange 2010 OWA Mailbox Policies!

Implementing integrated OCS in Exchange 2010

This entry is to show you how to integrate OCS 2007 R2 into your Exchange 2010 OWA experience. This is based on the following Technet article:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee633458%28EXCHG.140%29.aspx

First, download and extract OCS 2007 R2 Web Trust Tool from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=ca107ab1-63c8-4c6a-816d-17961393d2b8 Running and installing this will only extract these additional files. Each of these will need to be installed on each CAS server in your environment that you are enabling OCS Messaging on. Remember, there is no right click run as Administrator for MSI's - so run from an elevated command prompt if needed!

• Install the vc_redistx64
  
• Install UCMAredist.msi
  
• Install CWAOWASSP.msi
  

On your Exchange 2010 CAS server(s), edit c:\program files\Microsoft\Exchange\V14\ClientAccess\Owa\web.config - look for the IMPoolName field. Update the webconfig file as follows:

Field	Insert Value From	Example
IMPoolName	FQDN of OCS R2 Pool	ocsr2pool.domain.local
IMCertificateIssuer	DN of Issuer	CN=DigiCert Global CA, OU=http://www.digicert.com/, O=DigiCert Inc,C=US
IMCertificateserialNumber	Serial Number	01 F9 4E 46 AA 3C 4C 9E BD 8F 2C (include spaces between octets!)

Look for this:


And based on this (where thumbprint is the certificate your CAS server uses for IIS)
Get-ExchangeCertificate -Thumbprint BJBHDS78FG6D8GFYH49SDF34TH9 | ft Issuer, SerialNumber, subject

Change to this:


The "subject" gives us the common name that we use in a bit to configure OCS.

Additionally, if your Issuer has funky characters, you need to replace them as they will break your web.config file, causing generic IIS errors. Just removing those characters will make for application event log errors that the certificate was not found in your certificate store.

Since the web.config is an XML file, and you need to use XML character special escapes

entity	character	meaning
"	"	(double) quotation mark
&	&	ampersand
'	'	apostrophe (= apostrophe-quote
&lt;	<	less-than sign
&gt;	>	greater-than sign

So if your SSL provider's issuer field causes you a problem here, this should help you work around it.


In Powershell, configure OCS:
Get-OWAVirtualDirectory -server SERVER | set-owaVirtualDirectory -InstantMessagingType 1

(The above line *did* say -InstantMessagingType OCS, but RTM documentation says 1 for OCS - thanks to Brian Day for this!)

Restart IIS (IISreset is fine)

On your OCS R2 Pool server, under the server properties of your pool, on the Hosts Authorization tab, you need to add the Client Access server. This can be FQDN or IP. If you use FQDN, OCS will additionally authenticate the FQDN against the certificate names - the FQDN here has to match the "subject" we found above (NOTE: Not the whole string, just the FQDN common name given in the subject) Additionally, you can choose to use FQDN and then use a hosts file to ensure that OCS is communicating with the correct server/IP.





Now I am able to log into OWA 2010 and get the light CWA client as well:


Upper right allows me to see and update my presence, as well as see how many IM conversations I have active and switch between them as well.

Exchange 2010 Storage Calculator released!!

YES! For those planning on moving to Exchange 2010, you can now begin planning your infrastructure's hardware plans!

Exchange team has the latest:
http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2009/11/09/453117.aspx

I personally have 3 clients awaiting this - very excited to run through it!

I haven't read all of it yet - will re-post tomorrow with any findings of note.

Exchange 2010 General availability announced!

Exchange 2010 120 day download (can be activated with your keys)
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=05741f65-2a7b-4070-879f-d74208d6171d&displaylang=en

Main Exchange 2010 information portal:
http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/2010/en/us/default.aspx

I saw it first over on Bink:
http://bink.nu/news/exchange-2010-is-general-available.aspx

Team blog on the general availability:
http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2009/11/09/453096.aspx

Licensing and pricing (this includes CAL differences)
http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/2010/en/us/licensing.aspx

Exchange 2010 - Certified!

Yay.

935/1000 on the 70-662, Configuring Microsoft Exchange 2010. I didn't really think it was very difficult. I think I only marked 5 questions for review, and I would say most of the knowledge tested was existing 2007 knowledge, which I found surprising. I did have one odd question that I commented on being misleading, but it didn't make the question hard to answer, it just stated something that sounded incorrect.

New cubicle decoration!

Exchange 2010 - Recovery Scenario #2 - Recover from a DAG member loss

In this scenario, I have a 3 three server DAG, and I use Windows Server backup to backup my Exchange 2010 Active database. On the server with the active copy, I hit the virtual power button. The Exchange services fail over to another server in the DAG right away.

The Microsoft documentation:

Recover a DAG member Exchange Server

Remove the copy of the Database in a DAG:

This will warn that it cannot communicate with the server. That is expected.

Then, you can remove the server from the DAG:

Reinstall Windows 2008 R2 from DVD (remember, DAG requires Enterprise!)

Reset computer account in Domain (Right click Reset in AD Users and Computers)

Name and IP the server, confirm the date/time is correct (since in a DAG, I also needed to IP my DAG network)

Install Exchange Pre-Requisites

Install Exchange 2010 using:

setup /m:recoverserver

If you skipped the DAG removal steps above, setup will fail with:

Once setup succeeds, you need to reboot the server (at this point, I would also patch as needed - at the time of this writing 2008 R2 and Exchange 2010 RC have no additional patches)

Since I have a DAG, I am able to re-add it to the database availability group and allow the database to reseed. If you were in a single server environment, this is where your backup would come into play. This might be scenario #3

Add the recovered server back to the DAG


Add a mailbox database copy to the recovered server.

Assuming you have a real DAG and you might have 300GB of data to re-seed by adding a copy, this is where the Windows Server Backup may play part. You may be able to restore the Exchange data to an alternate location, and before you add the database copy, move the restored EDB to the folder path for the database. This would allow you to skip time consuming reseeding, as long as your restored EDB was the most recent backup taken of the database.

Optionally, you can activate the database on the recovered server as well.

Exchange 2010 - Recovery Scenario #1 - Mailbox or items

In this post I wrote about how you can now backup Exchange 2007 SP2 and Exchange 2010 mailbox databases with Windows Server backup.

Since them, word of Exchange 2010's release has come, and with that, the question of "when will my backup vendor provide updates that are compatible with Exchange 2010" and "what can I do in the meantime"

One of the easiest solutions is using Windows Server backup, and then allow your existing backups to do file level backups of that data. The question once this is in place, of course is how do I recover from that?

So I intend to cover three scenarios:

1. Single Item or Mailbox recovery - accidental delete, assuming you passed or misconfigured deleted item and deleted mailbox retention.
   
2. Loss of a DAG member - How to recover from losing a single member of a DAG.
   
3. Entire Server recovery - Building/site failure, need to return to service and restore data from backups. (this will be single server from backup)

Additionally, I am using a database that is in a DAG for this, but am writing it as if it was standalone, as the #2 and #3 scenarios would be addressed by the Database Availability Group.

So, on to scenario #1 - I have disabled my mailbox in the EMC, and run the below powershell to force the database clean:

Clean-MailboxDatabase geodb1

Now I see my mailbox under "Disconnected Mailbox" in a normal scenario, this is what Exchange 2003 and up has offered, where I could right click my mailbox and choose to re-connect it to my user account:

Of course, I want to go to backups so I reset my database to have a 0 day deleted item mailbox retention and refreshed this screen and my mailbox was no more!

Do note, the settings in the above screenshot are NOT recommended. Default is 30 days, and I recommend leaving it there or higher!

Next, we must recover the data "to an alternate location" using Windows Server Backup
Choose your Backup Date, then your recovery type should be "Applications"

Choose Exchange:

(I included the show details, which is the store GUID)

I chose here to recover to another location (Note: c:\RDB1 is NOT where my RDB's EDB/logs/anything are)

Do note that "this option will copy just the application data" - there are additional steps after this!

Finally, launch the recovery.

Once completed, you will have the file structure of the database in the path specified:

Now that we have our data files, the recovery is similar to Exchange 2007 SCR's database portability.

Run ESEUTIL /R from the log file directory

Then we can run:
Eseutil /mh geodb1.edb

And determine the DB is healthy:

Next few steps edited on 11/3/2009 for missing content:

Now we can create our new Recovery mailbox database using:
new-MailboxDatabase -Recovery -Name rdb1 -Server exch2010 -EDBFilePath "c:\rdb1\rdb1.edb" -LogFolderPath "c:\rdb1\"

Then we need to allow Restores:
Set-MailboxDatabase -AllowFileRestore:True

Copy the EDB file to the path EDBFilePath of the RDB1 Database, renamed it appropriately, and then it should mount successfully (NOTE: Logs didn't need to be copied since ESEUTIL /R replayed them into the EDB, however if you do copy them into place, Exchange will see they are replayed and move on)

Once mounted, we can use

get-MailboxStatistics -database rdb1

to see that the data is there:>

Now, in the Exchange documentation, it states that:

Restore-Mailbox -Identity chris -RecoveryDatabase rdb1

would recover the data into the mailbox. The problem is, we don't have a mailbox with that GUID any more. If I re-enable a new mailbox for chris, he will get a new mailbox GUID.

Enable-Mailbox chris
Restore-Mailbox chris -RecoveryDatabase rdb1

I get:

This makes sense, it cannot match GUID's and stops - more on this in a second.

However, you are able to run a recovery operation (similar to Export-Mailbox in Exchange 2007)

Restore-Mailbox -RecoveryMailbox chris -Identity chris -RecoveryDatabase rdb1 -TargetFolder "Recovery"

And the results, all of the content in a subfolder named "Recovery"

I attempted a few other things to see if I could restore directly into the mailbox, but was not able to find any luck.

Important to note - if I was recovering for a user that missed their deleted item retention time, I can use the restore-mailbox to specify by subject, dates, folders and more. Because I mail disabled the user, I am not able to restore directly.

Exchange 2010 Standard to support High Availability DAGs

From the Unified Communications blog, there is this post on 2010 licensing.


From there:
"On the server side, Exchange Server Standard will now support high availability, so all customers can take full advantage of the new database availability group capabilities. Exchange Server Enterprise enables configurations with up to 100 databases per server."

Still looking for some documentation on the maximum number of databases in a DAG that Standard edition will support, but my presumption is 5 (Similar to the 2007 Standard limitation on DB's)

Update: Scott Schnoll has confirmed this is accurate. Exchange 2010 Standard can have up to 5 DAG databases!

This is HUGE news for small customers wanting HA (the difference between $550 per Exchange Standard and $3200 for Enterprise) - for a 3 server DAG, that's $8k in licensing savings on Exchange ALONE.

Awesome news for small businesses wanting HA and DR for Exchange!

Exchange CAS and the DMZ

This is really just to promote this posting on the MS Exchange team blog, which highlights planning for Client Access Roles and why MS no longer supports the "front end" in the DMZ. I have had several customers that have configured Exchange 2003 and prior with their CAS in their DMZ, and while it makes for an overcomplicated firewall configuration it is supported, however, support for this ended with Exchange 2003, and Microsoft finally wrote up some very good talking points on why this is no longer supported in Exchange 2007 and 2010.

Exchange 2010 - Database Availability Groups - Part 2

In Part 1 of my DAG coverage, I gave some generic design considerations, and the how to configure a 2 server DAG. In part 2, I will cover adding an additional DAG copy of a database.

Before you begin, you need to rapidly deploy your OS and pre-requisites, and then you can deploy an additional DAG copy, with a few mouse clicks!

First, add your new server to the DAG group:
then, add the server we are adding to the DAG:

Then, add a database copy in the database management section of Organization Management:



And after some time seeding:

Now, let's test that UK server! First, I used OWA to send myself a recent email.

Then activate the EU server:

Choosing a lossless activation:

Now, this being a different AD site, I saw this:


Which was very concerning at first, but after some time (I have my VM's scaled down quite a bit) it synced up:


Confirming via the OWA CAS on EXCH2010EU, my latest email was intact:

That's it. We seeded, and failed to the UK site. Now we can seed back to the main server:

I performed another lossless activation, and it worked perfect:


And before I end part two, let's try and BREAK it � here I am hitting the hard power button on the activated DB server for geodb1.


After re-attaching RDP to the next server, and refreshing the view:


The local server mounted, and the UK site is healthy still. OK, let's plug in the power cord I "tripped" over and see how things go.
Few seconds after boot up:

At which point we can choose to move it back, or let Exchange manage it autonomously.