Exchange

VMworld Speaking Session Schedule

Chris Haaker — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 18:04:40 GMT

As mentioned in a previous post, I have been accepted to speak at VMworld2011 the week of August 29 in Las Vegas. Since that time I have been working on my presentation with my speaking partner and VMware SE Jeff Szastak. We have submitted the first draft of our deck in for comments and gotten some good feedback. I have now begun to incorporate those changes in to the deck as the final version is due in early August. I am excited to be going to this conference for the first time and especially so in a speaking capacity.

Right now we are slated to deliver two times, Monday and Tuesday. I wont post the times as I doubt they are final yet. We are in the live session catalog as:

BCA1360 How A Global Enterprise Virtualized Exchange 2010

Some of the hardest things for me to balance have been how much of each type of content to deliver. I could easily talk for two hours on the Exchange aspects of the migration alone, or on the virtualization aspects, especially concerning all of the new features in vSphere 5. I know Jeff plans on covering this for sure. In the end I know there will be a lot of good information out there for parties interested in both subjects.

If you work with Exchange, or are considering virtualizing Exchange 2010, please make sure you stop in for our presentation.

Technorati Tags: Exchange, Exchange 2010, VMworld2011, VMworld, Virtualization

Apple WWDC Keynote Highlights - My Observations

Chris Haaker — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 14:54:40 GMT

I wanted to take a moment and jot down some of my initial impressions on the announcements coming from the Apple hype machine today at the keynote. Not being able to attend - largely due to it selling out in two hours - made me especially bitter that Apple would not allow the event to be streamed live. Steve said during the keynote that if they sold more tickets he didn't know where they would hold it. Considering it takes place at Moscone West, the smaller of the two centers, try moving it across the street to the full sized Moscone Center. So I scrambled around the web watching small feeds here and there until each was suddenly dark after being discovered by the roving Apple police at the keynote.

New in iOS 5:

Notification Center – this is a very welcome addition and one that people have been asking about for quite some time. I cant say I always understand the priority Apple gives to improvements in the iOS. I had jailbroken my iPhone for a while for this one function alone. I hated having to unlock my screen each time to see who an email was from or its importance. PS This has been in WP7 since day one.

iMessage – I didn’t see this one coming since the phone has the ability to SMS text – although those of us with unlimited texting probably take this for granted. And I know my kids hate not being able to text from their iPod Touches. Users of Blackberries love this feature on their devices as well so I will be curious to see how it goes on the iPhone. Apparently the different chats (iMessage and SMS) are color-coded. Hopefully iMessage won’t be limited to Wi-Fi like FaceTime is.

Newsstand – I think this feature will go over very well and is essentially iBooks for magazines and other periodicals. For this to work though the pricing has to be right. Hopefully the publishers will be smart enough to realize they can go to a lower price point without all the massive physical infrastructure needed to print and distribute a paper edition. Volume should allow them to make the same or more margins without gouging the customer for fear of lost ‘print revenue.’ If I have to pay the same price I do for Men’s Health on the newsstand, I am not buying.

Twitter – Integration of Twitter in to the iOS was something leaked early and turned out to be true – a rare win for the prognosticators. Basically, Twitter identity is a system setting and then Twitter integration is set throughout the iOS blurring the need for a separate Twitter ‘app.’ Hopefully they included all the functionality a good app does. PS Also available in WP7 since day one.

Reminders – This is a home run for me and my, honey-do, er, wife. Since I got the iPhone many years ago I have been looking for a good ‘to-do’ app. Having it built-in may be just what I was looking for. Previously I was using Google Tasks, but always had to launch and go to the web to get to it. Built-in alarms and reminders are just my cup of tea. Does it go to the iCloud? That would be another big bonus so I could access it, or my wife could add to it, from anywhere.

Camera – Apple added the ability to access the camera without unlocking the phone (yet another feature in WP7 since day one – sorry I cannot resist when Apple takes such pleasure in bashing MS and Google). They also added a suite of additional photo enhancing tools like cropping and auto-enhance..

Safari Reader & Tabs – The introduction of tabs was a welcome one in mobile Safari for iOS. Apple also introduced a streamlined ‘reader’ view that allowed all the other parts of a website to be stripped away making reading of articles or other stories more easy and enjoyable. You can also create a list of articles to read later on and it will sync across iDevices.

All in all, a good set of feature improvements. I have to say though, as a person who uses his device to a large extent for email I am still mystified by the lack of view filters for email. You can show only unread or only flagged\important messages. Perhaps we will see this in iOS 10.

Technorati Tags: iOS,iOS5,Apple,iPhone,WWDC

Speaker Session Accepted for VMWorld 2011

Chris Haaker — Sat, 04 Jun 2011 19:24:20 GMT

I was pleasantly surprised by my inbox yesterday to find that my session submission for VMWorld 2011 had been accepted! I had been trying for many years to break in to doing some sessions at Microsoft's TechEd - always to no avail. It always seemed like you had to know the secret handshake, be an MVP or work for Microsoft. I felt like I was destined to settle with speakling at user groups, no matter how badly I tried to get more experience in front of larger groups. So when my local VMWare account team approached me about submitting a session documenting our migration from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2010 100% virtualized on VMWare vSphere I jumped at the opportunity. We sat down as a team to write a descriptive and compelling case presentation - you don't get to explain your idea to anyone - the write-up has to stand on it's own and be compelling to voters. I can't say I understand any of the process apart from there being 'nominations' and 'voting'. I am just thrilled I made it and will finally get a chance at the bigs. I've been called up to the show! My session is:

Session ID: BCA1360

Session Title: How A Global Enterprise Virtualized Exchange 2010

Track: Enterprise Applications

I don't yet know where it slots in the schedule but when I do I will be sure to post it. I will also try to do some posts on the process leading up to the event if I am not sworn to secrecy. Boo-Yah! If any previous year's speakers read this and have any tips, please feel free to chime in below in the comments. I am all ears!

Microsoft TechEd 2011 Day Two

Chris Haaker — Tue, 17 May 2011 15:59:43 GMT

I know – where the heck is the Day One post? I will have to post that legacy post later. I am moving on with the current day. Day one was packed with activities to say the least, capped off with a wonderful dinner sponsored by @BetsyWeber of @TechSmith fame.

Day two began with the death march out to the dining hall in the remote wild of Hall C. Luckily, apart from meals, I haven't had any reason to venture all the way back out to Hall C. Being an Exchange-focused geek I have been able to spend all of my time in the same room. Every session has been in B206 or thereabouts. The day has begun with Rand Morimoto’s excellent “EXL305 – Best Practices for Successfully Transitioning to MS Exchange 2010.” Now being 50% of the way through my own Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2010 migration I knew a lot of the information but I was still able to walk away with 4 or 5 new nuggets which is all I ask for. Rand was very in-depth, helpful and at the end pointed us to a number of resources for further learning.

Rand was then able to assist me in the Exchange TLC booths with some DAG quorum scenarios I have been looking at.

I then hit the Expo Hall to collect my free 15 minute massage from the Exchange team. Show them that you follow @MSFTExchange and you can pick one up too. I plan on getting de-stressed right before the Expo Hall closes at 5pm today.

I had to miss the 10am sessions due to some conference call obligations with my job damn you! But hey, they are footing the bill for me to be here. I plan on catching the web replays as soon as they are available. Now it is off to lunch (grab a water for the walk) and then to the 1:30 sessions. I plan on hitting: “EXL307 Load Balancing with Exchange Server 2010.”

Technorati Tags: Exchange2010,MSTechEd

Office 2010 Technical Preview

Chris Haaker — Tue, 19 May 2009 20:47:02 GMT

Microsoft is accepting submissions for the waitlist for the Office 2010 Technical Preview. This is an especially great opportunity if you are already running Exchange 2010 in the lab and want to see how using Outlook 2010 will enhance the experience with things like mail tips, conversation view and universal inbox. The preview is slated to kick off in July. If you attended TechEd 2009 this year, you get priority seeding in to the preview. Sign up in one click at the TechEd event site with your login.

TechEd 2009 Updates

Chris Haaker — Sat, 09 May 2009 03:40:51 GMT

I am going to be blogging the sessions I attend at TechEd 2009 in Los Angeles right here on my humble blog. They will be almost exclusively messaging and mobility related - ‘cause that’s how I roll!

I will also tweet as much as I can (I only have two arms) under @ntpro. You can also follow general TechEd 2009 tweets by searching hash tags #teched and #tela09.

Great blog post from the team the runs the hands on labs (HOL) at TechEd.

Three days away – it is almost time.

Technorati Tags: Twitter,tweet,Exchange 2010,Exchange,HOL,TechEd. TechEd2009,TELA09

Designing Exchange 2010

Chris Haaker — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 08:28:53 GMT

As I contemplate the design that was going to be an organizational upgrade to Exchange 2007 – I am now shifting gears towards skipping to an upgrade of Exchange 2010. Some things that are influencing my decision:

The ability to use lower tier storage without compromising performance on the mailbox server. Thanks to all of the database optimizations like sequential writes, db schema re-design and table optimization, cache changes, etc. The database is now truly a portable and replicable object.
Now that the target for replication is the database and not the server, my high availability options are greater and my need for engineers with specialized clustering experience is removed. I can spread my database replicas over all of my data centers as long as I have 250ms round trip latency or less.
I can move user’s mailboxes and not affect their uptime or my SLA’s. Since mailboxes are now moved asynchronously in the background loads can be adjusted as needed without downtime.
My database is now self-healing – enough said.
My users can do more self-administration through the Exchange Control Panel (ECP).
My transport servers now have resiliency as well through the shadow queue. If a server with the transport role goes down, the other transport servers have a “shadow” of the queue and can re-send the messages.
The Outlook client (or any other client for that matter) no longer communicated directly with the server holding the mailbox role. All connections are now proxied (in a much more efficient manner) through the Client Access Server role.
I don’t have to wait for Exchange Server 2010 sp1 before I deploy. Microsoft is already running close to 6M mailboxes on Exchange 2010. That’s beta testing that you cannot sneeze at!
Now that I have 4-5 copies of every database (and the data contained therein) in all of my different data centers, there is no more need for me to take daily backups to tape (or disk for that matter) of my databases. I can use replication and replication lag\truncation to protect me from physical and logical database corruption.
My Mac and Linux users now have a rich web client for accessing email now that the premium Outlook Web Access experience is supported on Firefox and Safari.

So I now have about six months in which to test all my scenarios in the lab, confirm everything will work the way I dream it will and then get in some load and performance testing. The lab will be virtual as will the deployment so things will work out nicely in that regards. I am curious to see if I can support the new CAS role requirements on a virtual guest.

There is also the option of doing a hybrid approach with Exchange Hosted Services (EHS). EHS is the ‘cloud’ offering from Microsoft. This is a shared services environment that has hosted mailboxes, mail hygiene edge services, hosted archiving among other things. I have been working on a model where we move all of our commodity mailboxes (customer service, administrative assistants, task workers and service desk) to the cloud and keep the 40% high-risk\value mailboxes (executives, research, sales and legal) on-premises where they are under our control for legal hold, quota management, etc. The beauty of hosted mail hygiene in the cloud is that the traffic never sees your LAN – it is all discarded ahead of time. You also then have a great deal of flexibility in the case of a disaster or virus outbreak. EHS can queue your mail up for X number of hours\days while you sort out recovery issues or decide on a strategy for tackling an outbreak.

Technorati Tags: Exchange 2010,E2K10,Exchange,EHS

Exchange 2010 Mailbox Configuration Scenarios

Chris Haaker — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 04:12:06 GMT

So I am trying to sketch out some mailbox server scenarios for my Exchange 2010 design. I think I am leaning towards iSCSI or perhaps direct-attached SAS drives, but since I am doing virtualized Exchange servers, I don’t think I can load all the storage I need in to the ESX chassis. That leaves me with iSCSI. I am looking at three models to ‘standardize’ on for the business:

Config 1:

1Gb mailboxes x 1000 mailboxes max = 1Tb database

Config 2:

1Gb mailboxes x 500 mailboxes max = 500Gb database
3Gb mailboxes x 100 mailboxes max = 300Gb database
5Gb mailboxes x 40 mailboxes max = 200Gb database
Total = 1 Tb databases

Config 3:

1Gb mailboxes x 500 mailboxes max = 500Gb database
5Gb mailboxes x 100 mailboxes max = 500Gb database
Total = 1Tb databases

If you were to then populate each server configuration in to a Database Availability Group (DAG) spanning three different data centers, you would require a total of 3Tb for each server – not counting OS and log file space requirements. Remember that the rule of thumb is 240ms roundtrip networking latency between any server in a DAG to another server in the same DAG. Also remember, that while servers in a DAG can span Active Directory sites, they cannot span Active Directory domains.

Technorati Tags: Exchange 2010,E2K10,DAG

Mac OS X Snow Leopard

Chris Haaker — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 06:46:20 GMT

Announced today were the new features for the next OS version release for the Mac OS X – 10.6 – code named Snow Leopard. Each of the previous seven released over the last eight years since OS X was introduced ushered in over 1000 new features.

Number of new features being slated for introduction with Snow Leopard? Zero. None. Nada.

Okay, wait, there is one. Native OS integration with Microsoft’s Exchange server. Apple publicly acknowledged the market share Exchange server holds and has built native integration in to Apple Mail, iCal and the address book.

Snow Leopard (10.6) is slated to be released some time next year. Pre-release developer builds were handed out to attendees today. Exchange support requires Microsoft Exchange 2007. The presenter quipped that Microsoft should be happy with Apple for driving Exchange 2007 sales and adoption.

Palm Smacks RIM

Chris Haaker — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 20:11:35 GMT

LOL. Cute image from Palm highlighting RIMs service outage last week.

Technorati Tags: Palm,RIM,Blackberry