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Exchange 2010 SP1 Rollup 4 re-released

Categories: Exchange Server Microsoft Related
July 28th, 2011 by

As many of you know the Exchange team released Exchange 2010 SP1 Rollup 4 back on June 22nd.  Well, on July 13th there was a bug identified with the release and they had to pull the release.

Last night the Exchange team re-release Rollup 4 for Exchange 2010 SP1.  Following the release they also posted a update on what happened with the recall of Rollup 4 and what they are doing to help reduce the likelihood of this happening in the future.

As for me, I may wait a week or two before applying it just to be sure it is working correctly.  Not to say I doubt the Exchange team but if you recall Rollup 3 for Exchange 2010 SP1 went through three revisions before they got it right.

Here is a quick read of the Q&A of the update on Rollup 4:

  • Q: What actually triggered the recall?
  • A: While fixing a bug that prevented deleted public folders from being recovered, we exposed an untested set of conditions with the Outlook client. When moving or copying a folder, Outlook passes a flag on a remote procedure call that instructs the Information Store to open deleted items which haven’t been purged. Our fix inadvertently caused the RPC to skip all content that wasn’t marked for deletion because we were not expecting this flag on the call from Outlook on the copy and move operations.
  • Q: Why didn’t you test this scenario?
  • A: The short answer is we thought we did. We didn’t realize we missed a key interaction between Exchange and Outlook. The Exchange team has well over 100,000 automated tests that we use to validate our product before we ship it. With the richness and number of scenarios and behaviors that Exchange supports, automated testing is the only scalable solution. We execute these tests in varying scenarios and conditions repeatedly before we release the software to our customers. We also supplement these tests with manual validation where necessary. The downside of our tests is that they primarily exercise the interfaces we expose and are designed around our specifications. They do test positive and negative conditions to catch unexpected behavior and we did execute numerous folder copy and move tests against the modified code which all passed. What we did not realize is that our tests were not emulating the procedure call as executed by Outlook.
  • Q: Exchange has been around a while, why did this happen now?
  • A: In Exchange 2010 we introduced a feature called RPC Client Access. This functionality is responsible for serving as the MAPI endpoint for Outlook clients. It allowed us to abstract client connections away from the Information Store (on Mailbox servers) and cause all Outlook clients to connect to the RPC Client Access service.    As part of our investigation, we discovered that there was some specific code added to the Exchange 2003 Information Store to handle the procedure call from Outlook using the extra flag. This code was also carried forward into Exchange 2007. But when the Exchange team added the RPC Client Access service to Exchange 2010, that code was not incorporated into the RPC Client Access service because it was mistakenly believed to be legacy Outlook behavior that was no longer required. That, unfortunately, turned out not to be the case. The fact that we were not allowing a deleted public folder to be recovered was masking this new bug completely.
  • Q: Are there other similar issues lurking in RPC Client Access?
  • A: We do not believe so. The RPC Client Access functionality has been well-tested at scale and proven to be reliable for the millions of mailboxes hosted in on-premises deployment and in our own Office 365 and Live@EDU services.
  • Q: What are you doing to prevent similar things from happening in the future?
  • A: We have conducted a top-to-bottom review of the process we use to triage, develop and validate changes for Rollups and Service Packs and are making several improvements. We have changed the way we evaluate a customer requested fix to ensure that we more accurately identify the risk and usage scenarios that must be validated for a given fix. Recognizing the diversity of clients used to connect to Exchange, we are increasing our client driven test coverage to broaden the usage patterns validated prior to release. Most notably, we are working even closer with our counterparts in Outlook to use their automated test coverage against each of our releases as well. We are also looking to increase coverage for other clients as well.

 

 

 

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If you’re running Exchange 2010 and have a DAG install one of the following Hotfixes

Categories: Exchange Server Microsoft Related
July 12th, 2011 by

I came across an interesting Tweet yesterday from Scott Schnoll which said “If you have a DAG, install the cluster hotfixes from MSKB 2549472, 2549448 or 2552040. Only need to install one (same files in each hotfix).”

The Hotfixes can be found here:

Why any one of these KBs?  Well each KB has the same files required to repair the issue that Microsoft has discovered with Exchange 2010.  As Scott put it, “These packages contain the same cluster fixes, which address some issues that can affect network connectivity in a cluster.”

Thanks Scott!

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Exchange 2010 OWA redirection causing a forever loop

Categories: Exchange Server Microsoft Related
June 22nd, 2011 by

I ran into a problem last week where a client wanted to have all http traffic into an exchange 2010 server get redirected to https.  While there are a number of ways of doing this I found a nice article by Brian Desmond  on how to configure doing IIS redirects using IIS 7 instead of creating Custom Code, which is what I used to do.  The article proved to be a great find however there was an error that occurred as a result of configuring the Redirect.

While stepping through the article I did exactly what the article said to do however as part of the process of assigning the redirect to go to /owa for the Exchange, ExchWeb, and Public Folders the OWA virtual directory also inherited the /owa redirect.  This basically caused a loop whenever a user went to https://owa.domain.com/owa.  The URL kept doing a forward which caused the loop.

In my research I was able to find the problem, as I mentioned, the OWA virtual directory inherited the loop.  If I went to the OWA virtual directory and cleared the check box to do the Redirect it would clear the redirect for all the required virtual directories!  When I would re-enabled the redirect for the Exchange virtual directory it would enable the redirect on the OWA virtual directory.

As it turns out when making the modifications to the Exchange Redirects the web.config file also gets a line added to the configuration for redirects.  The first step to resolve this issue is to remove the httpRedirect in the web.config file located in “C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\V14\ClientAccess\Owa”.  Once in this directory I oped the web.config file and looked for the redirect reference which appeared like this: <httpRedirect enabled=”false” destination=”/owa” childOnly=”false” />

By removing that above line and saving the Web.Config I was then able to use appcmd to set the config of the /Exchange, /Exchweb, and /Public virtual directories.  To enable the redirection type the following:

C:\Windows\System32\inetsrv>appcmd set config “Default Web Site/Exchange” /section:httpredirect /enabled:true -commit:apphost

C:\Windows\System32\inetsrv>appcmd set config “Default Web Site/Exchweb” /section:httpredirect /enabled:true -commit:apphost

C:\Windows\System32\inetsrv>appcmd set config “Default Web Site/Public” /section:httpredirect /enabled:true -commit:apphost

And then this to disable redirection for /owa:

C:\Windows\System32\inetsrv>appcmd set config “Default Web Site/owa” /section:httpredirect /enabled:false -commit:apphost

And done, the redirects work correctly and the /owa loop is removed!

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Kemp Technologies LoadMaster Sizing Guide for MS Exchange 2010 (Beta)

Categories: Exchange Server Kemp Technologies Microsoft Related
June 9th, 2011 by

I was out looking at Kemp’s site today looking at Kemp devices for a client of mine.  The request was to determine a proper Load Balancer for my client based on their organization.  While I was on the Kemp site I came across a new tool Kemp currently has in Beta.

The tool is called the “LoadMaster Sizing Guide for MS Exchange 2010”.  The tool itself is pretty cool and is exactly what every Exchange guru should be aware of!  The tool is capable of making a recommendation of what Kemp LoadMaster you should get for your organization.

In order to determine the size of the LoadMaster (LM) you are able to enter in the following information based on your organization size:

  • Total Mailboxes
  • Percent Concurrent Connections
  • Percentage of HTTPS services
  • Avg# of Messages/Day/Mailbox
  • Avg.Message Size (KB)
  • Hours/day
  • Busy Hour Multiplier
  • Max Virtual Services (VIP)
  • Max Exchange Servers
  • Select SSL Key Length

The options have either a direct entry where you can put a number or slide bars to adjust the setting.  Pretty sweet tool!  You can have a look for yourself.  You can find the tool by following the URL:  http://www.kemptechnologies.com/fileadmin/templates/sizingDoc/lme_calc_2k/lme_calc_2k.htm

Great Job on this one!  PERFECT!

Questions, Comments?  Please Share!

 

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Exchange 2010 SP2

Categories: Exchange Server Microsoft Related TechEd
May 16th, 2011 by

I am here in Atlanta at TechEd 2011 and just finished the session on whats new in Exchange Service Pack 2. Good session. During the session it was brought up when SP2 would be released and what some of the new features will be.

The first thing to talk about is SP2 is currently in DF1 mode meaning it is currently being tested internally. The update will fix an estimated 500 bugs and carry some new features. For the user community the update will be released in the second half of 2011. Sorry, that is all the info I have there. I was hoping for third quarter personally. The update will require a schema update to active directory so be ready

During the sessions a few of the new features were presented for the first time. Those features include GAL Segmentation, OWA Cross Site Redirection, and OWA Mini.

GAL Segmentation is what it sounds. It will allow an exchange admin to have multiple GAL that are filtered to users based on a new feature called Address Book Policy (ABP). The ABP allows an administrator to assign to a user which address books, GALs, rooms, and users they can see. I say users because if a person looks at an distribution list that contains users from different GALs and the user doesn’t have permission to see that GAL the ABP will filter out those users. Make sense? In order for this feature to work the users have to be on Exchange 2010 SP2 and be accessing their mailbox through a CAS 2010 Sp2 server. This is a big plus to organizations where they do not want other users to see each other if in different address books. I should point out that with the Distribution List being filtered to only users you can see you will still send to all users in he DL. So be careful!

The next big feature was the OWA Cross Site Redirection. As it stands now when a user hits OWA and logs in to their mailbox, if that user resides in another Internet facing AD Site they will be presented with a link to click to get to their OWA URL. Once they click that link the user will need to enter their username and password again. With the new feature in Exchange 2010 SP2 this will no linger be the case! Users will now automatically be logged in to the redirected site. This gives the users a single sign on experience!

The final feature that was discussed was OWA Mini. OWA Mini is basically OMA brought back using new code. The URL will reside as a virtual directory under OWA/OMA. If you are in an organization that requires OWA policies have no fear. OWA Mini will use the OWA policies! Basically when a user logs in they will get their FBA and supply their credentials. The screen that the user receives is basic and will be used on their device or phone.
The menu looks something like this:
1)Inbox
2)Calendar
3)Contacts
4)Tasks – yes tasks!
5)Find Someone
6)New
7)Search Mail
8)Browse Folders
9)Options
0)About

This feature was brought back because of user demand. I should also point out that ActiveSync Policies are not applied to the OWA Mini.

Some pretty cool features. My favorite is the GAL Segmentation using Address Book Policies. I did manage to take a picture of one of the slides. Take a look and let me know if you have any questions!

20110516-043913.jpg

Finally look for a blog post huge Exchange Team tomorrow for more details on Exchange 2010 SP2. I would post a link but typing this blog post from my iPhone is pretty limited.

Update – The MSExchange Team has posted an update regarding Exchange 2010 SP2.  You can read it here.

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Microsoft TechEd 2011!

Categories: Exchange Server Microsoft Related TechEd
May 15th, 2011 by

I am down here in Atlanta getting ready to attend TechEd 2011.  While I am down here I will be sure to blog about anything I find interesting.  Last year I got some pretty good information to share and I am planning to find more good information to share!  If you want you can follow me on Twitter #sfeltmann or simply keep checking back with this blog.  I usually don’t tweet too much but I’m trying to make a better effort since I’m down here at TechEd.

On today’s agenda is the pre-conference Mastering Microsoft Exchange Server 2010: Notes from the Field in High Availability and Disaster Recovery.  Hopefully it will be a good session.  I do a lot of Exchange deployments and I’m pretty familiar with it.  I usually pull a few good things out of these sessions so I’ll be sure to post an update once I get back to my computer.

 

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KEMP Announces the First Server Load Balancing Appliance, Specifically Designed for Microsoft Exchange 2010.

Categories: Exchange Server Microsoft Related
April 5th, 2011 by

As many of you know I have been working with a lot of Exchange 2010 deployments and leveraging the CASArray feature in Exchange 2010.  As a result I have been using the KEMP load balancers for my small to medium size business clients.

Having said that you will recall a few months ago I posted an article about the KEMP Technologies being certified for Exchange 2010 CASArray.   I just received a press release stating that KEMP has introduced a server load balancing appliance designed specifically for Exchange 2010. 

Here is the press release:

—————————————————————————————————————

KEMP’s LoadMaster Exchange comes pre-configured and ready to deploy for instant redundancy and high availability of critical Exchange 2010 services

 Yaphank, N.Y. – April 5, 2011 – KEMP Technologies today announced the availability of its new LoadMaster Exchange (LM-Exchange) server load balancing and application delivery appliance. The newest member of its family of affordable load balancers, the KEMP LoadMaster Exchange is designed to address high-availability and scalability demands of Microsoft Exchange 2010 deployments for businesses up to 250 users. 

 While all of KEMP’s server load balancing and application delivery controller (ADCs) products currently support and are approved by Microsoft’s Exchange Server 2010 qualification program for hardware and software load balancers, the LM-Exchange is the first product of its kind that was specifically designed and purpose-built for Microsoft’s Exchange 2010. “For the smaller business that may not be familiar with load balancing technology, ease-of-use and speed of deployment was our top priority in the design and development of this product,” said Peter Melerud, vice president of product management at KEMP. “For the vast majority of smaller enterprises, which will consolidate the primary Exchange 2010 server roles onto a pair of servers, the LM-Exchange can be deployed in less than five minutes, providing instant redundancy and high-availability for client access server (CAS) and other critical Exchange 2010 services.” 

 The LM-Exchange supports up to 13 virtual services and six real (physical) servers. To simplify installation, the LM-Exchange is pre-configured and optimized for the most commonly deployed Exchange 2010 server roles. Moreover, the appliance is designed out-of-the-box to support Outlook Web Access, Outlook Anywhere and ActiveSync. The LM-Exchange will include all the key functionality that the typical Exchange 2010 deployment will require, including distribution of Exchange 2010 traffic load across and up to six servers, CAS server affinity (persistence), SSL offload and application service and server hardware health checking with automatic failover upon detection of outages. The LM-Exchange scales to support up to 250 Exchange 2010 users, with performance capacity of 920Mbps of layer-seven (L7) throughput, SSL offload of up to 200TPS and can support up to 25,000 L7 connections per second. 

 The LM-Exchange is currently available for shipping and has an MSRP of $1,590 including first-year hardware maintenance and support. 

 About KEMP Technologies

KEMP Technologies is a leader in affordable server load balancer appliances and application delivery controllers tailored to meet the needs of businesses that rely on the Internet for e-commerce and business-critical applications. KEMP helps companies rapidly grow their business with 24/7 high-availability, better web infrastructure performance, scalability and secure operations – while streamlining IT costs.

 Thousands of KEMP LoadMaster products are in use today to improve customer satisfaction by accelerating user access to business-critical web applications. Service providers also rely upon KEMP products to enable fast time-to-market and cost-effective operations for new and existing managed services.

 KEMP’s highly affordable LoadMaster products include Layers 4-7 load balancing, content switching, server persistence, SSL offload/acceleration, and application front-end capabilities (caching, compression, intrusion prevention system), plus one full year of product support – delivering industry leading price/performance value.

 The company is headquartered in Yaphank, New York. For more information, visit www.KEMPtechnologies.com, or call at +1 631-345-5292.

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 If you don’t have a NLB for Exchange 2010 I would suggest looking into the Kemp Technologies solution.  They are affordable and work well.   I have a few clients that have purchased them and so far so good!

Questions, comments?  Please share!

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Update Rollup 3 for Exchange 2010 SP1 and Exchange 2007 SP3

Categories: Exchange Server
March 8th, 2011 by

The Exchange Team today released two new Rollups for Exchange 2010 SP1 and Exchange 2007 SP3.  More detail can be found here - Released: Update Rollup 3 for Exchange 2010 SP1 and Exchange 2007 SP3.

One thing to note are fixes for memory leaks in 2010 which I have seen in the wild.  This has caused some Exchange Servers to crash.  Glad to see this was addressed.   You can find a description of the rollup for 2010 here: http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=2492690

For the release notes for Rollup 3 for Exchange 2007 SP3 you can go here: http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=2492691

Have a great day everyone!

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Riverbed Network appliance and Exchange 2010 DAG replication

Categories: Exchange Server Microsoft Related Riverbed
February 28th, 2011 by

I had a colleague come up to me the other day talking to be about an issue he ran into regarding Exchange 2010 DAG and Riverbed WAN acceleration.

The setup was like this.  The client had a DAG setup that spanned across two sites.  This gives them site resiliency so they have their data in two datacenters.  The two sites were connected via wire with Riverbed appliances acting as a WAN acceleration between the two sites.  This means that the DAG was log shipping over the wire which was managed between two riverbeds.

Ok, so since the traffic was passing through the Riverbed appliance the compression ratio was only 24% and the traffic was going SLOW.  Why?  Well, by default log replication in a DAG employs compression and encryption!  Basically what was occurring is the Riverbed was trying to compress traffic that was already compressed causing slow network performance.

The solution?  Disable both compression and encryption on the DAG servers.  I’m not sure why you need to disable encryption, I was really surprised to find this out but the solution didn’t work with encryption is enabled.  And yes, this came directly from Riverbed support where this is a known issue, but not documented (it is now J).

How do you disable network encryption and compression on the DAG?  We will use the Set-DatabaseAvailabilityGroup command:

Set-DatabaseAvailabilityGroup -Identity <DatabaseAvailabilityGroupIdParameter> -NetworkEncryption Disabled

Set-DatabaseAvailabilityGroup -Identity <DatabaseAvailabilityGroupIdParameter> -NetworkCompression Disabled

By doing this you will optimize the WAN acceleration traffic between the two Riverbeds.  I was told the compression was at 74% and functioning properly!  Network communications were flying and problem solved!

Thanks Dan for sharing! 

Comments?  Please feel free to share!

Thanks!

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Looking for a list of NLB certified to work with Exchange 2010 CASArray?

Categories: Exchange Server Microsoft Related
January 28th, 2011 by

People often ask, hey Scott, when I’m doing an Exchange 2010 CASArray what are some of the hardware load balancers users can use.  Well, Rajith Jose Enchiparambil over on HowExchangeWorks.com has the list of the certified load balancers that work with Exchange 2010! 

You’ll notice that the Kemp NLB has been added recently, which is pretty sweet considering they are afforadable and get the job done for the small to medium size business.  In most large enterprises I will recommend a Cisco or F5 if they don’t already have one, but the Kemp is perfect for those small to medium size businesses that are looking for HA and don’t want to spend a ton of money. 

You can find more on the information here: http://www.howexchangeworks.com/2011/01/kemp-technologies-new-addition-in-list.html

Enjoy!

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