The event I attended today is called Community Day (the 5th edition already) and given the name it won’t come as a surprise that it’s basically a gathering of most of the Belgian ICT user groups.

Opening Keynote

We started off in the biggest room reserved for the event with a fun movie the @ComDayBe team made in Leuven. They were basically asking some random people which versions of windows and office they were using and whether they knew what Cloud Computing is all about.

Session: What if disaster strikes – Failover clustering explained

I have worked in an operational team that supported multiple fail-over clusters so I’m familiar with most of the concepts, except for the “Dependency Report” that  is. I did have the impression that there was some mix-up between shared storage and Majority Node Set (MNS) clusters though.

It was also stated that deploying such a cluster is pretty straight forward. That might be true from a technical point of view, but it’s an entirely different story if you have to start dealing with server, network and storage teams. Additionally, It has proven difficult to ensure people are using the correct network name to connect to their database or application.

Session: Communication Enabled Business Processes using Lync 2010

Next up was the first of 2 sessions of the community I’m most involved with myself; Pro-Exchange. Johan Delimon showed us some demos and examples of applications that are build on top of the Lync client or server APIs and Exchange Web Services (EWS).

Lunch

IT-Pro Chalk Talk

My colleague @MVanHorenbeeck used all his credits during this interactive Q&A session. Hence we mostly discussed about “the cloud”:

• Cloud vs. Jobs
• Cloud vs. Security
• Cloud vs. Monitoring (both SLA & security)
• ADFS not feasible for small companies

On a side note; this VIP room was really nice. I can certainly see my self watching a movie in this environment. Lots of leg room! No that I have such a long legs, but I’m not very good at sitting still for a longer periods of time. Ask my wife ;-)

Sponsor Presentation: From Box to Solution in one session with the HP/Microsoft Business Decision and Messaging Appliances

We kicked of the afternoon with a session hosted by sponsor HP. They talked about joint effort from Microsoft and HP in combining their technologies. The result is a kind of purposely built appliance. Apert from 3 SQL server related appliances there’s also one related to Exchange Server; the E5000 Messaging System. Obviously I was more interested in the latter.

Some notes:

• load balancer required (read: not included)
• meant for SMB; the entry-level model supports about 500 mbx of 1GB while the largest one supports 3000 users of 2,5GB
• HA out-of-the-box; no active component which is not redundant, but then again both servers are still in the same rack/data center.

It certainly looks interesting at first sight. We will need to investigate and compare prices to decide whether this could be a useful for our customers.

Session: Roll-out and Manage Multi-Platform Mobile Devices using some simple tools… and Exchange 2010

Second Pro-Exchange session of the day. Wim Borgers kicked of with a bit of history on the evolution of the smart phone platform and discussed some of the issues with managing lots of mobile devices with different operating systems, versions and makes.

Ruben Nauwelaers took care of the second part and discussed what can be done when using native Exchange 2010 features and/or some 3rd party tools:

• Apple Push notifications services
• SCCM
• Exchange Server 2010
• iPhone Configuration Utility

Session: Operations Manager 2012 Overview

A bit unfortunate, but only 6 people showed up for the SCOM session. We were kindly invited by @AlexVerkinderen to come and sit on the first row, which results in huge slides. Anyway my notes for this session read:

• SCOM 2007 Management Packs will be compatible with SCOM 2012
• New functionality will require deploying “feature packs” thus allowing customers to upgrade their monitoring infrastructure without to big of an impact.
• SCOM vs. cloud
• An MP for monitoring Azure already exists.
• Project Concero will allow monitoring of infrastructure deployed in the cloud and on premise
• Root Management Server (RMS) is replaced with a peer-to-peer architecture of management servers
• In depth network monitoring and SNMP v3

We ran out of time and didn’t get to see the entire presentation. I’m certainly interested to see the remainder of it, be it with or without a Duvel.

Closing

We ended the evening with some, mainly developer oriented, price draws. I quickly returned home to put the kids to bed, but not before doing some sight-seeing around the construction works in Vilvoorde.

Note: I hope the mango update for Windows Phone 7 comes quickly because not being able to turn of the shutter sound is getting annoying, especially for the other people in the room…

Here’s a twitter-style overview of the stuff we discussed.

1. ExMon: community member wondered why he couldn’t see the client latency anymore when using exmon
2. Somebody else explained a complicated (from the admin side) Public Folder based system for an end-user to be able to manage distribution lists themselves. Additionally this very same customer also used some public folder based contacts to hide recipients in some cases (if I understood the story correctly). Suggestion from the product team was to use ECP for most of this functionality. This would however require a lot of effort in training the end-user.
3. MS IT DB Design
4. DAG takes care of switching mbx db to another instance, but the default PF store is still hard-coded. So you’re in trouble if that one went down togheter with the active mailbox database. Probably fixed in next roll up, but no guarantee.
5. MS IT Storage design: 300mbx/db on a single physical disk containing both the database it selves, the content index and the transaction logs. In case of hard disk failure another copy of the database in the same datacenter is activated. MS IT refreshes hardware every 3 years. During this refresh the mailbox quota is doubled. However they use thin provisioning for their mailboxes, while mailboxes have a 5Gb quota only 3Gb is available for them. When designing their solution they take 10 years of trending into account. PTSs are still allowed at Microsoft because of legal requirements around the Globe. Retention policies do exist but are opt in.
6. Archiving in E2K10. Read only access does not exist as such. Suggestion was to use either single item recovery or delegation hold. Quota’s do exist in the dumpster. 20Gb warning & 30Gb error.
7. Single Instance Storage: SIS is removed in E2K10. When moving from E2007 to E2010 that should not be an issue as SIS is nowhere taken into account when showing mailbox size. The counter that existed was inaccurate. SIS has been removed in favor IO improvements: search, sort, mailbox move etc. A sort of the inbox takes 1 IO operation as opposed to 7 in previous versions.
8. MS IT Backup strategy: Ross discussed the case where they lost 3,5 days worth of email for 8000 users because of a SAN crash. Documented the evolution of the strategy over time.
9. Storage calculator. (Ross is the author of this tool).
10. CAS HA on VM; multiple CAS or rely on vmotion? MS obviously recommends setting up multiple CAS servers. Use HLB to reduce number of machines required. Aim for 80% CPU. Look at Kemp for cheap hardware load balancers.
11. X500 & LegacyExchangeDN: chicken vs. the eg. Kept for backwards compatibility.
12. UAG vs. TMG. White paper available. TMG mainly for outbound traffic. UAG for inbound traffic, but built on top of TMG. TMG is the way to go if you only need to publish exchange. If you need/want more than use UAG. However it cannot do certificate based mobile devices!
13. Recovering entire folder structures is not possible anymore. Will probably not change.
14. Outlook 2007 archiving add-on <=> No date.
15. EAS mbx policy difference in RTM vs. SP1: “allow block quarantine” brought to ECP
16. Outlook anywhere client certificate authentication. Smart card authentication will be possible when using Outlook 2010 SP1 + Exchange 2010 SP1 + … Will be IPSec based. White paper on the way.
17. Vanity domains (as Greg called it): there’s only one common OWA legacy URL however. Use multiple OWA virtual directories or servers.
18. Renaming forest with exchange server present. Not supported and never will be. Risky. Also consider SMS, SAP etc.
19. Select from address; no plans. Add-ons do exist however. (e.g. http://www.howto-outlook.com/tag/mail-composing)
20. HT tries to collapse multiple meeting requests. Think of an original followed up by a number of corrections.
21. Operational improvements is E2010: PowerShell, ECP, out of office etc.
22. Sent/deleted items in the wrong folder. I personally have a case where I cannot get the steps explained by Ilse to work.
23. Recovery database
24. Some more storage calculator discussions and a little demo.

Somewhere in between these friendly people from MS were kind enough to answer a number of questions provided to me by some colleagues:

1) Retiring/uninstalling the fist CAS server in a domain/site has effect on the RPCClientAccessServer attribute which can affect/interrupt mailbox access. Are there other issues we can encounter while retiring a/the first CAS or HUB or MBX server?

==> Recommendations is to always create a CASarray even when there’s only one CAS server. Other impact may be PF, OAB generation+distribution, Routing table, arbitration mailboxes, …

2) We would like to separate the traffic between our  regions  NA – EU (North America – Europe) and the traffic in the regions, (NA= E2K7 and  EU = E2K10) is it possible to force the hub transport traffic between those sites over a/2 dedicated hub transport servers as this is easier to troubleshoot. We did it in e2k3 with routing groups.

==> Not possible

3) We want to achieve the pic below… so Outlook/mapi traffic is always connected to CAS1 and CAS2 but not to CAS3 and CAS4 as we want to separate our intern mapi traffic from owapp traffic.

All server are in the same site. CAS1 and CAS2 are in one nlb Cas3 and 4 in another NLB.

The clientaccessarray has the fqdn of the nlb of cas 1 and 2. And rpcclientaccessserver points to the clientaccessarray.

Get-clientaccessarray although gives the 4 Cas servers as members… does this also means that Outlook can connect to cas 3 and 4 as they are NOT in the nlb(which we  do not want)?

==> This is possible by proper configuration of DNS aliases and NLB setup. Generally not a good idea however. I CAS2 fails or is in maintenance then CAS1 becomes a single point of failure

Last but not least there were also a number of questions I had of my own. Most of them are coming from discussion with customers in the past. They mostly confirmed my answer, which is always a good thing :-)

1. Routing intra exchange org e-mail over the internet? Possible by using Riverbed for instance. Not supported. (Note: most of the comment came from the community, not from MS.)
2. “Something” inbetween ISA (DMZ) & CAS (LAN). ==> you could put e.g. Cisco firewalls in front of the ISA but there’s not really any advantage in adding something between ISA & CAS.
3. Secondary address resolved to primary in older versions? ==> Has always shown this behavior.

More Labs – Self Paced

All Labs are self-paced so you have more freedom and options to choose from.

No Session Registration

No need to pre-register this year. You’ll have ample opportunity to attend the sessions of your choice as each one will be repeated at least twice.

Knowledge Experts

Collaborate with industry leading subject matter experts in sessions, discussions and one-on-one meetings.

There wasn’t any session that closely matched my core business. In the end I selected one solely based on the speaker:

Meet WAIK 2.0 and Volume Activation 2.0 (Rhonda Layfield)

I’m not very familiar with workstation deployment processes but Rhonda tried to change that. She covered most of the tools provided by MS in their Windows AIK (Automated Installation Kit):

• WinPE
• WPEUtil
• ImageX
• DISM: service images offline
• WSIM: deploying the image
• USMT

Breakout: NetApp

Too much background noise. Marketing.

Direct Access Part 1 (John Craddock)

Well, what can I say. I certainly didn’t expected a IPv6 “deep dive” (relatively speaking). IT was kind of fun nonetheless.

Moving to Exchange 2010 (Scott Schnoll)

Implementing Exchange 2010 will be the thing I’ll be putting in practice in the near future. So I chose this session over Direct Access part II. There wasn’t anything terribly new but certainly a nice review.

Introduction to OCS 14 (Francois Doremieux)

The interest in this session was a bit underestimated apparently as people had to sit on the stairs. The presenter expected a more developer oriented audience to apparently. There came no reaction at all when the speaker asked:

Who’s a developer? Please raise your hand.

There were some demo’s of the newest communicator but I guess there’s I can think of to remember.

Breakout: Social Networking with SharePoint (Mike Martin)

A “concullega” at my current assignment did a little presentation on a social networking solution they build on top op SharePoint. He had a hard time competing with the Public Address (PA) system in the exhibition hall.

Planning and Deploying VDI (Corey Hynes)

The key message Corey tried to pass was to check make sure your needs cannot be covered by ordinary Remote Desktop Services (RDS) rather than jumping to VDI.

The level of the presentation was just about right for me. We’re nearing the end of the conference after all.

A true geek moment when Cory showed off a youtube video he shot on Citrix Provisioning Server:

New voice capabilities and infrastructure in OCS 14(Francois Doremieux)

W14 was only announced last week @ voicecon? I had the impression the speakers was avoiding a number of subjects he could not discus yet. Important to remember:

• Survivable Branch Appliances
• PowerShell support

That’s it for this year

Here’s a shortlist of the items touched upon:

KeyNote: IT in a Transformative Time

You can watch see this KeyNote @ TechNet Edge.

Arlindo Alves

First of all Arlindo Alves makes some publicity for this own shop and introduces the material available for it pro’s:

• New TechNet website
• Communities etc…

Luc Van De Velde

Next we’re being introduced to the NUI (Natural User Interface e.g. voice) as oppose to the GUI.

Via the 1pad, a HP Compaq TC100 slate pc introduced in 2003, we end up in a discussion about the W7 acceptance rates.

You can’t go anywhere without hearing about “the cloud”; so on premise, private and public clouds lead us to the Azure.

Tony Krijnen, Daniel van Soest & Arlindo Alves

Arlindo called in his colleagues from the Netherlands for some help with a couple of demos:

• W7 deployment demo: manual vs. using the deployment toolkit
• Outlook 2010, Outlook Web App
• Windows phone 7
• Direct access: Especially the search connectors, which offer you an integrated search experience, looked interesting.
• Network Access Protection (NAP)
• Some Hyper-V stuff

Followed by a little Exchange Server demo to end the party.

Managing W2K8R2 and W7 with PowerShell V2 (Corey Hynes)

I still remember Corey from his presentation from last year. It’s one of those guys that give you the feeling they could talk for hours.

He quickly explains why you would want to use PowerShell for your management tasks. After quickly touching upon Sapien PrimalForms and the Core Configurator we look into one to one remoting, what are the differences between

invoke-command

and

new-pssession

and how can these be combined with the PowerShell modules available on a system:

• TroubleshootingPack
• ActiveDirectory
• ServerManager
• GroupPolicy

The next step is one-to-many remoting which can either be done by specifying multiple computer names separated by comma for the “-computer” parameter of looping through a input list or the results of an AD-query using a foreach statement.

Chalk Talk

We popped into a Chalk Talk session from the community after a quick sandwich. The part we attended to mainly covered cloud computing.

What’s W2K8R2 gone do for your AD (John Craddock)

John resorts to the start-demo script powershell script to show off some of the new ad cmdlets. We get to look at the AD Admin Center and the AD Best Practice Analyzer.

The remaining improvements brought to us by Windows Server 2008 R2 are

• AD Admin Center
• AD Best Practice Analyzer
• Managed Service Accounts
• Offline Domain Join
• Authentication Mechanism Assurance: higher (or lower) permissions depending on your method of authentication
• AD Recycle Bin

Building your virtualization infra in a ideal world (Kurt Roggen)

The first presentation of the afternoon is always seems the hardest to stay focused on. In this case it felt like a wall of sound was coming down on me. I had to make an effort to filter the message out of it.

Content wise we discussed the hardware features to pay attention to in a Hyper-V deployment. Guess most of it also applies when using any other Hypervisor.

Recovery of AD deleted objects and W2K8R2 Recycle Bin (John Craddock)

Wake up call! John starts with dumping and AD database and opening it with notepad. He goes on with deleting and restoring a user object in AD only to show us the problem with linked attributes:

• “Manager” vs. “Direct Reports”
• “Membership” vs. “MemberOff” In the process he reaches for a couple of tools to provide us with a couple of different views:
• LDF
• Sysinternals ADRestore
• REPAdmin Requirements for implementing the AD Recycle Bin introduced with Windows Server 2008 R2.

Managing your identities with ForeFront Identity Manager 2010 (Jorge De Almeida Pinto)

Never had the chance to work with this type of solutions myself but as an administrator who typically has to keep track of rather large number of accounts in different systems I certainly see a number of interesting use cases in it.

Using this kind of technology for syncing GALs for instance. Or having a consolidated workflow which tackles the process of generating the accounts in different forests, incident management tools, access badges etc etc…

The sessions in the IT Pro-track focused on Exchange Server 2010 exclusively and are presented by Ilse Van Criekinge and Scott Schnoll. Here’s the stuff that I found most interesting:

Managing Exchange 2010

I was waiting in front of the wrong“Room 2” together with a lot of the other attendees. So  Ilse had already started with her first session concentrating on the new and improved management features of Exchange Server 2010.

We had an internal presentation last week were most of the stuff was covered, she did mention a couple details that we didn’t mention explicitly:

Exchange Control Panel (ECP)

Remote Shell:

During a internal presentation the question was specifically raised whether it would be possible to use remote PowerShell from a x86 workstation given that the Exchange binaries are only available in 64bit versions. I don’t exactly remember who came up with that one, but it is possible.

Exchange Management Console (EMC)

There were 3 things that i didn’t explicitly mentioned:

Exchange High Availability

Scott starts with outlining the HA goals and vision for E2K10, then covers the evolution of the HA options in the history of Exchange Server.

Key takeaways in this session:

• Datacenter level events (switchovers) always require manual action (we had an animated discussion)
• GUI for DAG defaults to DHCP. If you prefer fixed IP-addresses you need to use EMS. Multiple ip’s for different subnets can be separated by a comma.
• Larger DAG = greater resilience. Don’t be afraid to go big.

We shortly touched the topic of transitioning to E2K10 but a dedicated presentation will follow on day 2 of the main conference.

Exchange Information Protection & Control (incl. RBAC)

These features might not be used very frequently in the deployments we see, it’s always good to know what’s possible:

Intro

The goal is to protect your organisation against information leakage and at the same time provide a balance between soft & hard controls.

MailTips

Mailtips have partial offline support via the Offline Address Book (OAB)! Group metrics, on the other hand are gathered overnight and cached.

Given the difficult political situation in Belgium it was not to hard to relate to the demo about mailtips in different languages.

Transport Rules

Ilse showed off Dynamic Signatures. Trying to get end users to standardize e-mail signatures is an eternal battle for every organization. I wonder is exchange administrators will be tasked manage convincing marketing and/or communications departments to not overdo it!?

Moderation

Set E2K10 server as expansion server when using moderation in a mixed environment.

We ended with a discussion and demo of Information Rights Management (IRM) and ethical wall.

Exchange 2010 Client Side

What’s new when talking about client access/Web services

• Multi browser support
• Outlook-on-the-middle-tier: all outlook clients connect to CAS also 2K3 etc. Provides a better end user experience during *overs, but not a 100%. CAS-array keeps the CAS server from becoming a single point of failure.
• Outlook Web App (OWA): suggested contacts replaces NK2 nickname cache. Multiple mailboxes easily accessible.
• Exchange Active Sync (EAS)
• AutoDiscover

UM: not covered because of time constraints. Ilse promised a blog about it.

Exchange Performance/Scalability

This presentation was less a “what’s new”-type of presentation and went a bit further into the technical details=

Product team scalability & testing

• Scale up vs. scale out; msx team recommends scaling out
• Disable hyperthreading bacause it monitoring & capacity planning challenges

Guidelines & Ratios

• CPU: more cores result in reduced gains because of the overhead associated with it
• Memory; too much memroy won’t hurt but does cost money
• mailbox scalability for HA; size for double failure
• network load balancing; RPC required! Not just http

Toolkit for planning

• LoadGen
• JetStress
• Requirements Calculator
• Profile Analyzer

My netbooks battery status at the end of the day was still 48% so I actually had a good experience with digital note-taking.

You can compile your own agenda here. The tools allows you to actually mark the sessions of your interest and then hide all the others:

I will obviously focus on Exchange Server related sessions and fill the blanks with some other stuff that carries my interest:

On top of that there are also a couple of sessions organized by various user communities during the lunch breaks. I might attend one or the other too:

I have the intent to blog about this event like I did last year. I’m thinking of bringing my netbook with me. It would be nice not having to type over my paper notes and save some time.

Pro-Exchange: Exchange 2007 Notes from the Field

I’ve always wanted to attend an event organized by the Belgian Exchange Community. With 2 very small children there’s always something that seems to pop up last minute however.

Well not this time. The invitation mentioned “lessons learned” and “Exchange 2007 implementations” in one sentence, which sounded like a good combination to me.

Indeed, in a presentation that lasted about 2 hours Tonino covered his personal experiences with Exchange implementations. Both general recommendations concerning the management of an implementation project and technical solutions were discussed. The level of the presentation was just about right. No too technical (don’t want to discus reg keys for 2 hours) but not too much sales pitch either.

I had an interesting evening and will certainly attend some more events in the future!

Note: I’ll add links to the presentation and the Chopsticks video when they become available online.

• TechNet Webcast: Exchange 2010 High Availability (Level 300) Monday, June 1, 2009 9:00 A.M.–10:00 A.M. Pacific Time
• TechNet Webcast: Exchange 2010 Overview (Level 200) Wednesday, June 3, 2009 9:00 A.M.–10:00 A.M. Pacific Time
• TechNet Webcast: Forefront code name “Stirling” – The next generation of Forefront Security for Exchange Server (Level 200) Thursday, June 4, 2009 1:00 P.M.–2:00 P.M. Pacific Time
• TechNet Webcast: Exchange 2010 Management Tools (Level 300) Monday, June 8, 2009 1:00 P.M.–2:00 P.M. Pacific Time
• TechNet Webcast: Microsoft Exchange Hosted Filtering is now Forefront Online Security for Exchange (Level 200) Tuesday, June 9, 2009 1:00 P.M.–2:00 P.M. Pacific Time
• TechNet Webcast: Exchange 2010 Archiving and Retention (Level 300) Wednesday, June 10, 2009 9:00 A.M.–10:00 A.M. Pacific Time
• TechNet Webcast: Exchange 2010 Outlook Web Access (Level 200) Monday, June 15, 2009 9:00 A.M.–10:00 A.M. Pacific Time
• TechNet Webcast: Exchange 2010 Architecture (Level 300) Wednesday, June 17, 2009 9:00 A.M.–10:00 A.M. Pacific Time
• TechNet Webcast: Federation in Exchange 2010 (Level 300) Monday, June 22, 2009 9:00 A.M.–10:00 A.M. Pacific Time
• TechNet Webcast: Exchange 2010 Voice Mail enabled by Unified Messaging (Level 300) Wednesday, June 24, 2009 9:00 A.M.–10:00 A.M. Pacific Time
• TechNet Webcast: Exchange 2010 Information Protection and Control (Level 300) Monday, June 29, 2009 9:00 A.M.–10:00 A.M. Pacific Time
• TechNet Webcast: Exchange 2010 Transition and Deployment (Level 300) Wednesday, July 1, 2009 9:00 A.M.–10:00 A.M. Pacific Time

Bart kicked of the last day of this event with a session on PSv2. After outlining the PS mission (as integrated with the OS as bash, as programmatic as Perl/python, as …) he explained the deliverables for PSv2:

• Make it easier to use and learn
• Layer apps on top of PS
• Managed everything, everywhere

The demo’s of Graphical PowerShell, Debugger, new Cmdlets, modules, Native Code and remoting were enough to make me start thinking about installing Win7 on my personal laptop ;-)

Session 2: Sysvol replication – FRS vs. DFS-R (Rhonda Layfield)

Rhonda discussed the strengths and weakness of both FRS (File Replication Service) and DFS-R (Distributed File System – Replication), the benefits of using the latter for sysvol replication and the procedure to migrate from one to the other.

Session 3: Object Recovery in AD (Jorge de Almeida Pinto)

Prior to this session there was a general power cut. The speaker announced a delay of half an hour. But when we returned the presentation had already started. We missed the first couple of slides. Jorge basically covered the solutions for restoring accidentally deleted items from Windows 2000 up to Windows Server 2008 R2, including the new AD Recycle Bin feature.

Session 4: Exchange Server 2007 High Availability (Ilse van Criekinge)

Yet another presentation by Ilse. This time covering Continuous Replication. After uncovering the 4 High Availability methods in Exchange Server 2007 (LCR, SCC, CCR & SCR) she went into a more detailed comparison of SCC (Single Copy Cluster) and CCR (Cluster Continuous Replication).

Last but not least we got into a bit more details about lost log resilience, log roll, reseeding and the transport dumpster.

Session 5: Patching Sharepoint (Sam Hassani)

This session was way to specific for me as I don’t have any particular knowledge about the Product.

Session 6: Network Monitor (Rhonda Layfield)

Rhonda entertained us with with a session about net latest versions of Network Monitor 3.2 & 3.3 beta.

Back to work now…