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Today Microsoft released Update Rollup 6 for Exchange 2007 Service Pack 3. After installation your Exchange version will be 8.3.245.2. A list of all included fixes can be found in KB2608656.

Don’t forget to always install updated on different servers in the order CAS/HUB/MBX and use a account with delegated Exchange permissions!

I’m writing on a blog about restore of Exchange databases using lagged copies. It will bring up the pros and cons about lagged DB’s and I would very much like to hear from you who have used a lagged copy for restore in real life. My main questions to you are:

• What does your environment look like?
• Are you running traditional backups?
• Why did you decide to use your lagged DB for restore?
• What was your experience like? Easy? To hard? Did you succeed?

Please get back to me on this, using the contact page! I will not use any names unless you agree to, you can be totally anonymous if you like to.

Thank you!

With a few more hours left of 2011 I wanted to thank and wish all of you that reads my blog and give me great feedback a Happy New Year!

On a personal level 2011 was a fantastic year! I got to travel and meet amazing people that shares my passion for Exchange, I had the privilege of working with exiting customers and last but not least I was rewarded MVP for the third time.

To summarize 2011 when it comes to Exchange is a challenge, event though the was no new version,  it’s a product that is very much alive and constantly develops (even within the same version) but here’s my (very unofficial) list of things that happened and you are more than welcome to add comments if you think my list lacks something.

I think the number one question I got was “When will we get address list segregation?”. Well we never got it right? But in Service Pack 2 we got Address List Policies.

The guys who admins the blog I read most frequent fired up a PS prompt and wrote:
New-Moverequest –Identity msexchangeteam.com –TagetSite http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/ –ImproveSearch  $True –MakeBlogReallyMSOfficial $True

Office 365 was officially launched! I’m in the cloud and I think it’s a huge step forward from BPOS

A few “glitches” was found in Rollup updates… The winner of the not so flattering “glitch list” was 2007 SP3 RU3, released three times.

/Hosting had a hard time explaining why people should use it…

EMC has a equal hard time to shut down

A great number of DAG’s where created and saved peoples mailboxes from outages

A PST Capture Tool was announced…

Ross gave us seven updated versions of the excellent Mailbox Server Role Requirements Calculator 

And as I mentioned first, we got Service Pack 2! A great ending of the year and some really nice functions including OWA Cross-Site Silent redirection, Hybrid Configuration Wizard and OWA mini.

No OWA mini is not OMA! You should be fooled by the URL (/OWA/OMA) or the look or the feel!

Happy New Year!!!

In my previous blog I went through how to install Exchange 2010 Service Pack 2 a Exchange server. In this post I will show how to install SP2 on a server that is a member of a Database Availability Group, DAG. The setup is pretty much the same but there are some things to keep in mind before installing.

Note! Service Packs should be installed on the different server roles in this order: CAS, HUB, MBX

Before we start installing we want to move databases that are mounted on this server to another server in the DAG.

To do that go to the /Scripts directory, you could do that by simply write

cd $exscripts

StartDagServerMaintenance.ps1 –Servername “Name of server to install on”

After the script has run, you can check that all databases on the server are passive copies by running:

Get-MailboxDatabaseCopyStatus

It says status Healthy witch means it’s a passive copy, a mounted copy would state Mounted

So let’s close Exchange Management Shell and start an elevated cmd.exe

From the cmd run:

setup /m:upgrade

Almost exactly half an hour later I see the this:

So the final step is to put the server out of maintenance by running:

cd $exscripts

StopDagServerMaintenance.ps1 -Servername “Name of server to install on”

And finally we see that the AdminDisplayVersion on the mailbox server I just updated (LAB-MBX-E2K10-1) is Version 14.2 (Build 247.5)

Time to do it all over again on the other servers in your DAG!

Happy patching!

As you probably know Service Pack 2 was released today and I wanted to let you know what the install process is like so here’s the “Unboxing SP2” (I know I have been watching to much new gadgets getting unpacked on YouTube).

GUI Setup

I always recommend starting the install of a hotfix (Rollup update) or service pack from a elevated (run as admin) cmd to avoid trouble with UAC. Don’t forget to be logged on as a account with Exchange rights!

Navigate to the directory where you got your SP2 install files.

I will start by showing how to run the setup with the GUI, command line version is described later on.

Simply type setup in your cmd prompt and hit Enter

My first server to get Exchange 2010 Service Pack 2 is a combined CAS and HUB server and you should always start by installing SP2 on CAS then HUB and last Mailbox.

It will bring up this screen and you just click “Install Microsoft Exchange Server upgrade”

Hit next on the into page.

After carefully reading,  accept the License Agreement

Now the setup will check if your organization and your server is ready for upgrade. If you are upgrading a Exchange 2010 Client Access Server you will probably hit this:

Error:

The ‘IIS 6 WMI Capability’ component is required. Install the component via Server Manager

So to solve this we fire up PowerShell (run as admin)

Type:

Import-Module Servermanager

Add-WindowsFeature Web-WMI

Return to the SP2 Setup and click Retry and you should end up with a happy Readiness Check like this:

Hit Upgrade and you are on your way to build number 14.2.247.5

Installation is done! On a virtual server with 3 GB RAM it took less than an hour to install.

As you can see below the AdminDisplayVersion on the server LAB-CASE2k10-1 is now Version 14.2 (Build 247.5) meaning Exchange 2010 Service Pack 2!

Command line Setup

The command line setup is really simple and you start off the same way as above:

Start a elevated cmd

Navigate to your Exchange 2010 SP2 files and run:

Setup /m:upgrade /InstallWindowsComponents

By adding /InstallWindowsComponents you don’t have to add the Web-WMI component manually.

Then setup will check you organization and your server and if no issues are detected it will install SP2.

I left out the Office 2010 Filter Packs on this server but as you can see the setup will continue without them installed, though is a good recommendation to install them!

The install in this case was done on a virtual server with 2,5 GB RAM and took 48 minuets so very equal to the GUI version.

And now the second server (LAB-CASE2K10-2) also has a AdminDisplayVersion of 14.2 (Build 247.15)

Happy patching!

Just hours ago Microsoft released SP2 for Exchange 2010. Here’s a link for the download.

Service Pack 2 includes hotfixes as usual and some new features mentioned in Announcing Exchange 2010 Service Pack 2 as:

• Outlook Web App (OWA) Mini: A browse-only version of OWA designed for low bandwidth and resolution devices. Based on the existing Exchange 2010 SP1 OWA infrastructure, this feature provides a simple text based interface to navigate the user’s mailbox and access to the global address list from a plurality of mobile devices.
• Cross-Site Silent Redirection for Outlook Web App: With Service Pack 2, you will have the ability to enable silent redirection when CAS must redirect an OWA request to CAS infrastructure located in another Active Directory site. Silent redirection can also provide a single sign-on experience when Forms-Based Authentication is used.
• Hybrid Configuration Wizard: Organizations can choose to deploy a hybrid scenario where some mailboxes are on-premises and some are in Exchange Online with Microsoft Office 365. Hybrid deployments may be needed for migrations taking place over weeks, months or indefinite timeframes. This wizard helps simplify the configuration of Exchange sharing features, like: calendar and free/busy sharing, secure mailflow, mailbox moves, as well as online archive.
• Address Book Policies: Allows organizations to segment their address books into smaller scoped subsets of users providing a more refined user experience than the previous manual configuration approach. We also blogged about this new feature recently in GAL Segmentation, Exchange Server 2010 and Address Book Policies.
• Customer Requested Fixes: All fixes contained within update rollups released prior to Service Pack 2 will also be contained within SP2. Details of our regular Exchange 2010 release rhythm can be found in Exchange 2010 Servicing.

Happy install!

Due to changes at my ISP you might need to update the link to my RRS-feed.

The link is http://mailmaster.se/blog/?feed=rss2 

http://www.mailmaster.se/blog/?feed=rss2 and that does not work anymore!

As Kevin Allison mentioned at DevConnections Exchange 2010 Service Pack 2 will arrive in Q4 this year. The team has also announced some the stuff that will be in SP2 like Address Book Policies, OWA Mini and of course a bunch of fixes.

But if you are as curios as I am and want information about more things that will come with SP2 there are some more sources to use…

A look at the Exchange Server Active Directory Schema Changes Reference, October 2011 for example.

It will reveal things like:

• new custom attributes added so now a total of 45
• new attributes to Mail-Recipient (company and department)
• a great number of attributes to support Address Book Policies

Feel free to download the changes above, I just want to point out that it’s a .doc file (actually two, including the license) and will not to anything to your schema. Yes I was asked that question!

Microsoft has just released Update Rollup 6 for Exchange Service Pack 1. You can find all details in KB 2608646. I really like One of the includes fixes (A user cannot add or remove delegates from a mailbox by using Outlook in an Exchange Server 2010 environment) since I’ve seen that my self at customer site recently.

Happy patching and remember to install updates in the right order and with the correct permissions!

Today I got a comment on my blog about “How to bulk create and add copies of mailbox databases” from Shazaib. Shazaib wrote:

I have a doubt here , more like a missing piece of information. I understand that since you have 4 servers, you would like to have the copies of databases distributed evenly on all servers , such that incase of failure of any one server, things are still up and running.

What I dont understand is, what is the reason or logic for deciding the number of databases per server. Why cant we just have one database per mailbox server and have copies of it on the remaining servers?

Kindly guide me into the right direction.

Thanks

Since I totally agree with that fact that I didn’t explained that in detail and it’s a great question, here’s my answer:

Hi Shazaib

You question is absolutely valid! The reason I chose to go for three copies where the fact that it was the case in the blog I was referring to. So that was more of a coincident then a “design decision”. So your right, I didn’t explain why in detail! So I take this opportunity to explain a little bit more on why…

A reason not to go for all databases on all servers are perhaps more obvious if we say that we have 16 servers (maximum members of a DAG). 16 copies of each database will probably be overkill for most of us and raises a question, how many copies will be enough? I think three copies will be enough for a couple of reasons:

· You can “survive” double failures, a server down for maintenance and a failure on one other server at the same time for example.

· Three is kind of the magic number of databases when it comes to go JBOD

· Three is also kind of the magic number of databases when it comes to go Exchange Native Data Protection

· You don’t gain that much of going from three copies to four (given the fact that you have four servers) since you still need majority in the cluster to have your databases online and that requires at least two servers up and running.

· Three is less than four… Although the disks normally used in these kind of deployments are relatively cheap there is still a cost associated to them and cost is normally something you want to minimize.

This said I’m not suggesting that everyone should go for three copies! The number of copies is something each organization should decide on with their given conditions.

Did you know that the Exchange team has a YouTube channel?

Check it out at http://www.youtube.com/user/MSExchangeTeam%20

Microsoft has just released Update Rollup 5 for Exchange Service Pack 1. You can find all details in KB 2582113 and read more on the Team blog. As mentioned in that last link there are some important steps you need to do if you run Forefront Security for Exchange. The text below is copied from http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2011/08/23/released-update-rollup-5-for-exchange-2010-sp1.aspx

Note for Forefront users: For those of you running Forefront Security for Exchange, be sure you perform these important steps from the command line in the Forefront directory before and after this rollup’s installation process. Without these steps, Exchange services for Information Store and Transport will not start after you apply this update. Before installing the update, disable ForeFront by using this command: fscutility /disable. After installing the update, re-enable ForeFront by running fscutility /enable.

I just received the magic email again!

Dear Magnus Bjork,
Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2011 Microsoft® MVP Award! This award is given to exceptional technical community leaders who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with others. We appreciate your outstanding contributions in Exchange Server technical communities during the past year.

I’m happy and very proud to be awarded MVP for the third time. So I keep this post short because the next thing I’m going to do on this sunny day on my favorite island in the archipelago of the west coast of Sweden is open a bottle of champagne.

Cheers!

Today Microsoft released RU4 for Exchange Server 2010 Sp1. The list of included fixes are quite long so I’m not going to comment on all of them. As some of my customers have noticed there has been some issues around free/busy in mixed Exchange 2003/7 and Exchange 2010 environments and as far as I can tell these are now solved.

As always it’s a good thing to test updates before the are put into production but I’m sure the team as done their very best to make sure your experience with the update is as smooth as it possibly can be.

For the complete list of updates see KB 2509910.

Update Rollup 4 for Exchange Server 2010 Service Pack 1 is available for download here.

As you might have read I do a lot of mailbox moves right now and today I needed to find all remaining users in Exchange 2007 and create my last batch of moverequest.

To find all users in Exchange 2007 that had no moverequest associated to them and create a new moverequest I used:

Get-Mailbox -ResultSize Unlimited | where {$_.MailboxMoveStatus -eq "None" -And $_.Database -like "Exchange2007server\*"} | New-MoveRequest –BatchName LastBatch -BadItemLimit 5 –SuspendWhenReadyToComplete

As you can see I create suspended moverequests that will be resumed later on but that is of course optional.

Happy moving!