Exchange

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

PostPath Email and Collaboration Server

Chris Haaker — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 12:16:31 GMT

I have recently been introduced to a company called PostPath. They are a new technology company that have created a Linux-based alternative to Microsoft's Exchange. Their proposition is that Microsoft Outlook is the killer application. As long as users can run Outlook and have all the features and functionality that they are used to, it shouldn't matter what is serving it up on the back end. And if that back end can run on cheaper hardware and storage with a highly-flexible open source OS, all the better.

I have been working with the latest version of the PostPath server and it is pretty amazing. It does deliver as promised - full Outlook functionality at a fraction of the software, hardware and storage costs. PostPath has also signed a partnership with VMWare and is fully supported as a virtualized platform. This gives you tremendous flexibility when it comes to disaster recovery and business continuity. They fully (and seamlessly) support Blackberry clients and the Blackberry Enterprise Server. They have enhanced the open source version of Zimbra for their web-based client and added several enhancements. They also offer a mobility server called Sync Server which supports Windows Mobile 6 clients.

The PostPath server can run in a Microsoft Active Directory environment by itself or in co-existence with an already installed Exchange organization. If Exchange is not already present, it can perform a full forest and domain prep to add the correct schema extensions to Active Directory. Once installed, when viewed within ESM, it looks like any other Exchange server. You can create mailboxes on it using ADUC just as you do with any other Exchange server. Users can be migrated to and from the PostPath server using the traditional ADUC move mailbox process. The one downside is, since it is running Linux, it does not respond to WMI calls. Therefor, you cannot administer or browse its resources through ESM and there are some workarounds for commonly performed Exchange tasks. However, enhancements to the product are being added at a rapid clip and the engineering team is very responsive to customer feedback and suggestions for engineering enhancements.

So far it has been a pleasure to work with the product and I look forward to learning more about it and its capabilities as an alternative to Exchange.

Technorati Tags: PostPath,Exchange Alternative,Exchange,Microsoft,Active Directory,Zimbra,Linux

Microsoft Releases Four New E2K7 (Exchange) Whitepapers

Chris Haaker — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 02:41:52 GMT

Microsoft has released four new whitepapers detailing how Exchange 2007 is used internally. I am a big fan of these papers. I like to see how the maker designs, uses and maintains its own software. You always find some good tips and previously unknown tricks. Some of the best sessions I have ever been to at TechEd have been the "how we do this at Microsoft" ones.

Technorati Tags: Exchange 2007,Microsoft IT,TechEd,Exchange

Tip of the hat to You Had Me at EHLO

Exchange 2007 Design and Architecture at Microsoft

Chris Haaker — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 06:49:19 GMT

I love these white papers from "How Microsoft Does IT." Obviously these guys are very skilled and knowledgeable when it comes to deploying their own technology. The insight you get is invaluable and really comes in to play when designing your own installations.

From the web site:

Ever wondered how a large enterprise plans and implements design and architecture of its next generation of messaging system? View this content to find out how engineers from the Microsoft IT messaging team will uncover the details on how Exchange 2007 infrastructure was introduced and fully deployed in a 120,000+ mailbox production environment. Topics will include: messaging topology design, hardware planning for various Exchange server roles, Client Access Server and Mobility scenarios, Transport architecture, Mailbox server and storage designs, backup, restore and high availability strategies.

Technorati Tags: Exchange 2007,Microsoft IT,How Microsoft Does IT,Exchange Design,Exchange Architecture