Tags » ‘Service Packs’Exchange 2010 SP1 officially released!
Categories: Microsoft Related
August 25th, 2010 by Scott
Well, the MS Exchange team announced today that Exchange 2010 SP1 has now been officially released! You can go out and download it here: Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Service Pack 1 (SP1) For more information on the features included in SP1 you can go here. Enjoy!
BES 5.0 SP2 – reduction to disk I/O on Exchange!July 30th, 2010 by ScottAs you may or may not know about 3 weeks ago RIM released SP2 for BES 5.0. Since I have some clients that run BES I thought I would read through the release notes for SP2 and came across an interesting bullet:
What does this mean? Well, my guess is it reduces the disk I/O impact on Exchange servers! As you may know in previous articles when building an Exchange environment you need to factor in an additional I/O on the disks of 3.64 (I like to round up to 4) for each BlackBerry Device in your organization. Meaning if you have 100 BlackBerry’s you can expect to have an extra demand of 400 IOPS on your Storage platform. Well, with this new fix with the “does not write updates for user statistics to mailboxes” I would have to assume that this would reduce that 3.64 number. I have heard a rumor that this number has been reduced to 1.85 IOPS per device. Considering I don’t have easy access to BES 5.0 SP2 I’m curious if anyone out there can confirm this? Please comment if you have tested and confirm!
New feature in Exchange 2010 Service Pack 1 regarding cross-site database failover
Categories: Exchange Server Microsoft Related
June 10th, 2010 by Scott
I am currently down in New Orleans attending TechEd 2010 and was able to attend a session by Ross Smith IV. During the presentation Ross brought to our attention a new feature in Exchange 2010 SP1 regarding Outlook behavior is a cross-site (two datacenters) database failover. As it stands now in the event that a failover would occur in a DAG the outlook client will connect directly to its preferred CAS server which is set at the RPCClientAccessServer property. So for example, say you have two AD sites. Each site contains a CAS Array, CAS1 in Datacenter 1 and CAS2 in Datacenter 2. The preferred CAS Array in this scenario is CAS1 (RPCClientAccessServer). So, what this means is that the outlook client is going to default to CAS1 and then to its local database in Datacenter 1. Now, in the event of a Database failure and the Database fails over to a mailbox server in Datacenter 2 the outlook client will have a direct connect to CAS1 and CAS1 will have a direct connect to the mailbox server in Datacenter 2. In RTM you can only get a redirect to CAS2 by changing the RPCClientAccessServer property on the database. In Exchange 2010 SP1 you can choose to enable or disable cross-site direct connect. You can also define an activation preference for a database which determines whether to perform a direct connect or a redirect. What this means is that if you consider our scenario above where we have two datacenters and two CAS Array’s CAS1 and CAS2 we can control the cross-site failover event. In the event where Cross Site Connections are allowed the RPCClientAccessServer remains CAS1 and CAS1 will connect the user to their mailbox server in Datacenter 2. However, say we wish to disable Cross Site Connections, in the event of a failover Autodiscover detects the profile change and updates the client to point to CAS2 (requires restart). CAS2 then will provide the mailbox access to the mailbox server in Datacenter 2! This behavior in SP1 is based on three properties. Now, keep in mind that since the Autodiscover service is being used this feature will not work well with Outlook 2003. Actually during one of the session it was strongly encouraged that if you are still using Outlook 2003 you should move off of it prior to moving to Exchange 2010. In the event that you have disabled Cross Site Connections and have outlook 2003 when outlook attempts to connect to CAS1 it will detect the failover via ecWrongServer and redirect to CAS2. However, in the event that CAS1 goes down, Outlook 2003 can’t update if the source CAS goes down. Don’t ask me how to configure, that part wasn’t convered and I haven’t had a chance to play with SP1 in a lab yet. Hope you enjoyed this article, I will continue to work on getting more for everyone! Have a great night!
Datacenter Activation Coordinator Changes in Exchange 2010 SP1!
Categories: Exchange Server Microsoft Related
June 8th, 2010 by Scott
For the past few days I have been down in New Orleans taking in all the valuable information at TechEd and meeting some great people. So far it has been a great experience. Last night I happened to go to the Exchange Round table that was hosted by Jeff Guillet from EXPTA.Com (Great guy btw). While at the meeting some of the Microsoft Exchange Team happened to come to participate in the discussion. I had the privilege of speaking with some members on the Exchange team (Smart Guys, if I get nothing more out of TechEd it was worth just the time to hang out with some of the guys on the Exchange Team) and they shared some information with me about Exchange 2010 Service Pack 1, which was totally legal since it was released to the public yesterday. As you recall I wrote an article back on November 18th called “Managing Split Brain in Exchange 2010 DAG with Datacenter Activation Coordination Mode” and as mentioned in that article there was a restriction on how to use DAC in an environment. If you look back at the article you will note that you can only use DAC if the following is true: 1. You need to have at least three database copies to use DAC. This means that you would require three separate servers. 2. That you could not leverage DAC if the DAG members existed in the same Active Directory Site. Well, after my conversation last night it was mentioned to me that the requirements above are no longer requirements in Exchange 2010 SP1! What this means is that with Exchange 2010 Service Pack 1 you can now leverage DAC with only two database copies (2 servers in a DAG)! He also mentioned to me that on top of that neat feature above that you can also leverage DAC within a single Active Directory Site! Whoa, Even better! This now will give organizations the ability to deploy a HA environment with 2 database copies AND leverage DAC thus preventing a split brain scenario which was a risk with the RTM version of Exchange with two database copies. Now that is awesome! What I was not able to find out was the release date of Exchange 2010 SP 1. I am well aware that the beta is out (Exchange Server 2010 SP1 Beta Now Available for Download) but it is not quite ready for production. Hope this helps!
Exchange 2010 SP1 Teaser
Categories: Microsoft Related
April 7th, 2010 by Scott
The MS Exchange team has posted a great blog article pertaining to the release of Exchange 2010 SP1. This is actually great to hear. I love the fact that the Exchange team is listening to the users in the community and implementing some of their ideas into Exchange. The biggest new feature I see mentioned is being able to create a user’s archive Mailbox in a different database. Currently the archived content of a user’s mailbox is stored in a separate archived mailbox in the same exchange database. There have been many times where I have been meeting with clients and the question came up, why do I have to store a user’s archive content in the exact same database on my SAN? (Yes, clients still prefer to use SAN disk) To answer their question I say, that’s the way it is designed, but I have heard rumors it will not be like that in the next service pack. It sounds like those rumors are correct! That is totally awesome. And to sweeten the deal it sounds like Microsoft is going to allow access to the archived mailbox via Outlook 2007! How sweet is that?! I actually have had a number of clients say they do not want to use Exchange Archiving because they are not ready (nor is it available) to move to Outlook 2010. Well, no longer an issue. I’m glad to see users will be able to use Outlook 2007. I heard rumors around that as well but nothing solid until today. There is also going to be the ability to create Retention Tag Policies in the Exchange Management Shell. It will be interesting to see this interface. As you know to enable Archiving you mostly have to go through the EMS. For some more info on the Archiving take a look at my Archiving post here. There are also some changes to Outlook Web App and Mobility. Honestly I’m more excited about the changes to the archiving piece then anything because that is where I have a lot of hang ups. One other piece to mention is the New Management UI available in both the Exchange Control Panel (ECP) and the Exchange Management Console (EMC). The additions are:
For more information on the changes including the OWA and Mobility you can take a look at the original article @ http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2010/04/07/454533.aspx
Exchange 2007 SP2 Failed because of ‘beremote’
Categories: Microsoft Related
November 6th, 2009 by Scott
I was upgrading Exchange 2007 with Exchange 2007 SP2 on a client exchange server this evening and came across the error “Setup cannot continue with the upgrade because the ‘beremote’ () process (ID: 1876) has open files. Close the process and restart Setup. The problem was a result of having Veritas Backup installed on the Exchange 2007 server. The service “Backup Exec Remote Agent for Windows Servers” was locking the process and preventing the Exchange 2007 SP2 setup from running. I had to go into Services and stop the “Backup Exec Remote Agent for Windows Servers” service. Once I stopped this service I was able to proceed with the installation of Exchange 2007 SP2.
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