Definitely a must read for Exchange admins.
The larger the organization the less it seems that the Exchange Administrators talk to or work with the Active Directory Administrators. This is usually a two-way street. This lack of understanding can severely impact your Exchange environment. The purpose of this blog post is to educate YOU the Exchange Administrator on what you need to understand about Active Directory (AD), a few AD basics, and a few tips. Hopefully this knowledge will allow you to proactively talk to your AD Administrator(s). It would be great if you read this before you implemented Exchange Server 2007, but we can’t have it all, can we? Finally, I hope by the end you will understand why we need Active Directory (we already know they need us – everyone needs email right?).
via You Had Me At EHLO… : Why you need Active Directory for Exchange Server 2007.
Good article, worth a read for any Exchange admin.
Top 5 Exchange mobile tips of 2008
Kevin Miller just wrote a very informative post on failing over from a 2007 CCR cluster to the SCR target. I would recommend reading through it when you get the chance. The time to learn how to failover to your disaster recovery systems is before the disaster happens after all. :)
There are two ways to configure the SCR failover:
- Standalone Server Configure the failover SCR server as a standalone mailbox server. When you will fail to it you run Move-Mailbox –ConfigurationOnly for all of the users in the failover database to tell users that they have moved to a new server. When Outlook 2007 connects to Exchange AutoConfigure will reconfigure Outlook to point to the new SCR server.
- Passive Cluster Node Configure the SCR failover sever as a passive cluster node. When you fail to it you run Setup.com /RecoverCMS and seize the Cluster name. There is no further user configuration needed after this.
For my test I used the second option and configured the SCR failover server as a passive cluster node. This was simple to do, all I did was pick Passive cluster node during setup and then configured SCR and I was good to go. The following sections cover the steps that I took to Fail to SCR, Fail Back to CCR then reestablish SCR.
Data Protection Manager 2007 SP1 was released yesterday. It’s a nice early christmas present for any DPM admin, as it will make your life just a little bit easier. Jason Buffington is the Senior PM for the DPM group and has listed out some of the new features including SQL 2008 Support, SharePoint optimizations, Exchange SCR support (I’m really interested in that one) and Hyper-V support in a new blog post. This is definitely a big milestone for DPM and we’ll be doing significant testing in the coming weeks, rolling out to our customers as soon as it passes our QA lab.
I’ve seen a number of questions in the past few months concerning NDRs – it appears many don’t know how to read them. (Un)fortunately I spend a good portion of every day dealing with e-mail issues so I’ve become fairly adept at it.
Here are six that I’ve seen in the past two weeks along with explanations of what they mean. This is by no means an exhaustive list of all possible NDRs but should prove to confer a basic knowledge of NDRs.
Postini #554 One or more of the sender or recipients in your email are invalid and not accepted. ##
Either your e-mail address is invalid (this is unlikely but possible, ask in comments if you’re curious) or one of the e-mail addresses you have entered is invalid. If you’re using Outlook it’s possible, and likely, that you have an invalid address in the nickname file. The nickname file is what auto completes e-mail addresses when you start typing the recipient’s name. If this is the case it can be resolved by starting a new message, beginning to type the recipient’s name and then hitting the down button to highlight the invalid address and pressing the delete key on your keyboard.
This message has too many recipients. Microsoft Exchange will not try to redeliver this message for you. Please try resending with fewer recipients, or provide the following diagnostic text to your system administrator.
This means just what it says – there are too many e-mail addresses on the To, Cc or Bcc line. Send the message multiple times to a smaller number of recipients in each message if needed.
>>> user@domain.com (after RCPT TO): 550 Invalid recipient
>>> (#5.1.1)
There is a good chance that the recipient no longer has an e-mail box on the remote mail server. Perhaps they’ve left their job or changed ISPs. The phone comes in handy here.
The recipient’s mailbox is full and can’t accept messages now. Microsoft Exchange will not try to redeliver this message for you. Please try resending this message later, or contact the recipient directly.
Most Exchange servers limit the amount of mail that an individual can store on the Exchange server. This can be alleviated through archiving, but in the meantime you’ll need to wait until the recipient cleans out their mailbox before you can e-mail them again.
dalesmta-5.messageone.com <user@domain.com> #550 5.7.1 … Relaying denied ##
There are a number of reasons for this but it’s most likely a misconfiguration of the remote mail server or MX records. I would recommend calling the recipient and asking them to forward the issue on to their IT department of Exchange service provider.
Postini #550 5.1.1 User unknown ##
Similar to the invalid recipient issue above, Postini (in this case) no longer recognizes the recipient’s e-mail address as a valid user.
It appears Microsoft has updated their best practice on this subject. Here are a couple articles from the TechNet article Understanding the Performance Impact of High Item Counts and Restricted Views. I’ve bolded a few sections I think especially important.
With Exchange Server 2003, the recommended maximum item count per folder was 5,000 items. In Exchange 2007, improvements in I/O, larger page size, and increased cache can help enable an increase in the recommended maximum item count. With properly architected hardware, an acceptable user experience can still be maintained with item counts as high as 20,000 items.
| Note: |
| An acceptable user experience for common operations means 100 milliseconds response from click to action. For rarely used operations, response times of up to one minute are acceptable. |
This is a recommended maximum which can vary depending on the performance capability of your Exchange environment. Your specific hardware choices may result in lower maximum numbers. Ideally, it is best to keep the Inbox and Sent Items folders less than 20,000 items, and the Contacts and Calendar item counts less than 5,000. Even when maintaining item counts that are at or under the recommended maximum values, there are some operations which may still take noticeable time (usually this is approximately one minute). These operations include new sort orders and selecting folders for the first time. First time views of a folder can take even more time to generate the view. High item counts in critical path folders have an adverse effect on server performance because they are the most frequently accessed folders in a user’s mailbox. Other folders, especially custom folders that are created by end-users, can handle having larger numbers of items without having an adverse effect on the user experience because they are accessed less frequently. Be aware that, although the performance effect of having higher item counts in less frequently accessed folders is reduced, high item counts in these folders can still present intermittent performance issues as the number of folders like this increases, and the number of active users on the server increases.
| Important: |
| First time views of a folder can take even more time to generate the view. Therefore, move mailbox operations will result in first view performance degradation for all folders that have high item counts. This can result in intermittent performance issues while users who have been moved to new servers access their folders and re-create the folder views. Following operational best practices for moving mailboxes by spreading the moves across multiple servers, and by decreasing the number of mailboxes moved at the same time to the same server, can help minimize this issue. |
I’ve written about this before and don’t believe I’ll be changing my opinion until I get to do some testing. The article also has a nice section on understanding the performance impact of hardware choices. I would recommend reading the whole article if you happen to be an Exchange admin.
I was excited to see a post entitled “Planning for an Exchange 2007 Migration” pop up in Google Reader this morning. I clicked through a couple of hours ago but the article sat idle in a semi-hidden background tab as I did not have the time to read what I expected to be a very lengthy article.
Finally I clicked over to the tab thinking that I could carve out 15 minutes to read at least the introduction, reading the rest at a later time. Turns out it didn’t take me that long as the whole article is less than two pages long. Seriously, how can one talk about everything needed for planning an Exchange migration in less than two pages?
As this is most definitely not the first time I’ve been disappointed by an Exchange ‘expert’, I believe I shall start producing some content of my own and see if I really can do a better job. Time will tell.
UPDATE: I somehow missed the last sentence, evidently this is the first article in a series. Still disappointing though.
As some know I’ve recently turned my life around and joined the church of RIM and shown my devotion by purchasing a Sprint BlackBerry 8830 World Edition. CDMA/EVDO in North America, GSM/GPRS elsewhere in the world. I love it so far. In that light I recently came across this post by Omar Shahine – a Microsoft employee – entitled Windows Mobile Shortcomings vs BlackBerry.
After reading the articles he linked to (The Motorola Q: A Field Report & 24 Hours With The Samsung BlackJack – First Impressions) it turns out that Omar’s favorite quote is mine as well…
I find myself wondering if anyone who designs these “Blackberry killers” has ever used a Blackberry for any amount of time. A good friend of mine has a Windows Mobile based Treo, which he uses to sync to his own corporate Exchange system. When speaking of the dissatisfaction that he had with that device, and the same displeasure his wife had with her Q, he suggested that “those guys in your company’s Windows Mobile group need to (1) have their desktop Outlook turned off; (2) be issued Blackberry devices and have to use them for 30 days; (3) have the their Blackberries taken away and issued Treo or Moto Q devices for 30 more days. If that doesn’t cause a light bulb to go off in their heads, then nothing will.”
Prior to purchasing my 8830 I had not spent a significant amount of time (read: nil) actually using a BlackBerry device and most of my hatred came from being a ‘Microsoft guy’ and just following along with the crowd.
Thankfully, I’ve come to realize the uselesness of liking a technology or product simply because someone tells me I should, so I’ve decided to try out new technologies. I’ve even got a 120GB Zune on the way supposedly and will be happy to report on my experiences with that if it ever arrives.
For now there is one thing I can definitely recommend; if you’ve never actually used a BlackBerry device for any amount of time, give it a shot with an open mind. It’s designed differently than Windows Mobile and as such you will have a different experience. You may like it, you may not. For example, my wife doesn’t like the BlackBerry OS so far and is very happy with her Q9c running Windows Mobile 6.1. However, she is not what I would call a ‘power user’ by any means. For her purposes (E-Mail, Calendar, Games, Phone) Windows Mobile is excellent. For me, it’s just not cutting it at the moment. I never knew that before I switched though.
Wow, yet another cool feature of having an Exchange server in my garage. I setup transport rules so that any e-mail to or from my kids is BCCd to my wife and I. :D
I just recently came upon this issue while editing some documentation and figured I should spread the word on what is needed when your SCR source is a clustered mailbox server.
Part of failing over to your SCR target environment when coming from a CMS (Clustered Mailbox Server) is executing the following command to move the cluster name:
setup.com /RecoverCMS /CMSName:EXCLUSTER /CMSIPAddress:172.16.1.1
Well, in order to do this you need to have at least a single node mailbox cluster in the SCR target environment. However, you also need HT & CAS roles in your SCR target environment – and you can’t install the HT/CAS roles on a clustered mailbox server.
So in order to be able to actually recover to your SCR target when your SCR source is a CMS you will need to have at least two physical boxes in your DR environment.
Box 1 = Single Node CMS & Box 2 = Combined HT/CAS
As always, please feel free to contact me if you have any questions.
EDIT: As a couple people have pointed out, you can failover a cluster to a standalone server but it is most definitely not the optimal solution. Per TechNet:
“If the SCR source is a clustered mailbox server, the optimal target configuration would be a standby cluster.”
…
“For example, if the SCR source is a clustered mailbox server and the SCR target is a standalone mailbox server instead of a standby cluster, the full server recovery process takes longer. The reason for this is that a standalone Mailbox server has its own Mailbox server identity which must first be removed (by uninstalling Exchange) so that Setup /RecoverCMS can be run.”