http://www.pro-exchange.be/blogs/exchange2010/archive/2011/08/26/applying-housekeeping-retention-policies-to-the-end-users.aspx

Read the remainder of this post @ http://www.proexchange.be/blogs/exchange2010/archive/2011/08/11/basic-housekeeping-with-exchange-2010-sp1-retention-policies.aspx

However for troubleshooting/validation purposes you may want to know the exact host you’re connected to. There are a number of solutions for this but the easiest one by far is using Help > About in Outlook Web App in Exchange Server 2010:

A new pop-up appears to get you started;

Happy Christmas!

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.

Full database backup/restores were working fine and we deployed the mapi toolkit as documented in the IBM Tivoli Storage Manager for Mail: Data Protection for Microsoft Exchange Server Installation and User’s Guide V6.1.2. Didn’t work. The customer subsequently contacts Tivoli support and comes back with the answer “install the CAS role on your MBX servers”.

That let to kind of a “huh?” moment as we used the Exchange Server role based architecture in our deployment. A clever colleague of mine came up with a document confirming that statement:

In order to perform Mailbox Restore (IMR) operations on Exchange Server 2010, the Exchange Server that you are performing the mailbox restore on must have the Mailbox Server Role and the Client Access Server (CAS) Role.
Workaround: Perform the mailbox restore operation on an Exchange server that has the Mailbox Server Role and Client Access Server (CAS) Role.

Source: Known Issues and Limitations: Version 2.2 FlashCopy® Manager for Microsoft Exchange & V6.1.x Data Protection for Microsoft Exchange Server

What we did not find were any “design” guidelines. So a couple of questions remain:

• Do we need to install the CAS role on every MBX server?
• Do we need database copies (we’re talking DAG here) on the server with MBX+CAS roles? Do they need to be active?
• Can we use a “management” server with an empty db, outside of the DAG for this?
• How are we going to shield this CAS from users and applications?
• …

Al lot of questions and few answers in a project that is nearing completion. Hence we recommended the customer to use the recovery database feature and restore-mailbox management shell cmdlet to restore individual items. Worked perfectly.

Anyway, I’m still interested to learn how IBM thinks we should set this up in an environment that does not deploy all roles on a single server. Which is not the type of customers that would pick TSM as there backup software of choice in the first place.

Great article

but I’m not sure I agree. From my point of view the article reveals nothing that isn’t known for months. Exchange 2010 is RTM for half a year already. What I really would like to see (and so are others) is a detailed comparison between both Enterprise Vault and Exchange Server. So far I’ve not been able to find such a comparison anywhere on the public internet, so let me have a shot at it myself:

Note: This info is preliminary. Both products are in need for E2K10 SP1 before they can be taken seriously. Enterprise Vault 9 is still in beta at the moment and will only support E2010 from SP1 onwards. Exchange Server 2010 will allow separating primary and secondary mailboxes starting with SP1. This highly anticipated Service Pack will probably be released somewhere around Q3 of this year.

Apart from that I’m convinced we’re actually seeing the trusted Microsoft strategy of entering the market with a basic feature set. They feel the temperature and then gain market share gradually. Release after release.

Whether you agree or not, or just want to contribute to the discussion; feel free to comment.

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.

The number of subfilters exceeds maximum allowed number of 100. Processing stopped.

Apparently an e-mail address policy cannot contain more than 100 address templates. Read on for more details: Watch those recipient Policies!!!

Note: an individual recipient cannot have more than 100 e-mail addresses either.

The contents at a glance:

Planning the Exchange Server 2010 Infrastructure
* Design the Exchange Server 2010 installation.
* Design message routing.
* Design the mailbox server role.
* Design client access.
* Plan for transition and coexistence.

Deploying the Exchange Server 2010 Infrastructure
* Prepare the infrastructure for Exchange Server 2010 deployment.
* Deploy Edge transport server role.
* Deploy client access server role.
* Deploy hub transport server role.
* Deploy mailbox server role.
* Deploy server roles for coexistence and migration.

Designing and Deploying Security for the Exchange Organization
* Design and deploy messaging security.
* Design and deploy Exchange permissions model.
* Design and deploy message hygiene.
* Design and deploy client access security.
* Design and deploy Exchange object permissions.

Designing and Deploying Exchange Server 2010 Availability and Recovery
* Design and deploy high availability and disaster recovery for Exchange dependencies.
* Design and deploy high availability and disaster recovery for CAS role.
* Design and deploy high availability and disaster recovery for mailbox server role.
* Design and deploy high availability and disaster recovery for hub transport role.
* Design and deploy high availability and disaster recovery for Edge transport server role.

Designing and Deploying Messaging Compliance, System Monitoring, and Reporting
* Design and deploy auditing and discovery.
* Design and deploy message archival.
* Design and deploy transport rules for message compliance.
* Design and deploy for monitoring and reporting.

The first exam Exam 70-662: TS: Microsoft Exchange Server 2010, Configuring is already available for a month or 2. For some reason it seems to have slipped through my RSS feeds without me noticing it. Guess I’ll need to add another one.

Time to start preparing.

One of the first warmly welcomed new features included with the next release of Microsoft Office Outlook, being 2010, is the ability to open up multiple mailboxes (up to 3 by default, and up to 15 using a registry entry) and the fact that when you send a message using one of the accounts the mail will be saved in the Sent Items folder of the sender’s mailbox. When opening a shared mailbox in Microsoft Office Outlook 2007, it required you to create at least a rule to have the message moved from the primary mailbox its Sent Items folder, to the shared mailbox its Sent Items…

But…it seems that ever since June 2009, 30, this isn’t necessary anymore!

Read on…