If you didn’t make it to TechEd in Berlin this year I strongly encourage you to watch the keynote. Besides interesting information from Stephen Elop and others there is a great demo of Exchange by Julia White that I mentioned before.
That’s it from TechEd this year. It’s been a great week, lot’s of information, great meetings with people from all over the world, some German beer and way to little sleep.
This week alone I have heard from two different companies that their Exchange servers didn’t work. In both cases it’s been due to the fact that someone has patched Exchange. Patching/updating is a good thing but there are some things to think about!
I know this is old info but when people are on vacation and someone else is running the systems things like this happens so I thought a little reminder was in order.
You can find more info below about installing updates:
I’m very glad to see (and hear) that there are a lot of readers of my blog. I get some feedback but I want more and I would like to know what you guys are curious about. So please send me a mail or register here and submit a comment.
To make it a bit more fun for you I have some Exchange-giveaways for you and I will be happy to send them to you!
Below you see the “next-gen” Exchange-consultant (my son) wearing one of the possible gifts.
My email address is magnus at mailmaster dot se
Today is a big day for me! One of the greatest days yet…
I am out sailing with my dear family in the archipelago at the west coast of Sweden and when text messages started to drop in on my phone with congratulations I had to check my mail and to my great surprise I found that I have been awarded with the MVP award!
I want to thank a lot of people for the opportunity to work hard and now finally reach one of my goals in my career. I must start with my wife, Sofia, she has been a great support and one of the biggest reasons for me to be able to achieve this! For the rest of you this will be namedropping and I hope I don’t forget anyone of you but if I do I just want to say THANK YOU!
Liselotte, Martin, Göran, Christer, Jon, Max, Bitte, Tommy, Joachim, Paul, Lasse, Michael, Anders, Per, Ulf and many more!
I would also like to congratulate some other friends of mine who was awarded or renewed, Martin Lidholm, Anders Bengtsson, Stefan Schörling, Marcus Murray, Patrik Lowendahl, Christoffer Andersson, Björn Axell, Andreas Stenhäll, great work guys!
You find my MVP profile here
Big thanks to all attendees at Techdays in Västerås, especially you who attended my sessions about disaster recover in Exchange 2007! From the feedback I’ve got so far some of you liked it. As I mentioned I will make a decision tree for disaster recover and it will be published here on the blog. Hopefully it won’t take forever (this post is here to remind me of that) but right now I’m in the middle of a couple of parallel projects so you will have to hold on a week or so. Thanks again and I look forward to meet you all guys again!
Great day 2 in Barcelona!
Today was a really good day from an Exchange-perspective in Barcelona! If you find the power to read all of this blog-entry you will also find a brand new (and really useful) calculator at the end!
The first session with John Rodriguez was “Exchange Performance Demystified” and I really enjoyed it. Here I will give you some of the key takeaways from the session:
· Whatever you do don’t use SSD-disks for Exchange!
· A new tool for me is Relog, you can use it to Convert a log from one type to another, such as a Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 log to a Windows XP log, or a binary log file (.blg) to a comma-separated values (.csv) file. And to my surprise it’s included in Windows. I think this is a great way to display your monitoring in a much more “user friendly” way, just covert it to a csv-file and let Excel do pretty chats out of it.
· If you’re going to use a SAN use the following “rules”
o Allign your disks if your not running on Windows 2008
o Use 64 kb disk size allocation when you format your disks
o As we all know, do not share spindles with other applications in that SAN
o Use RAID 1+0
· A Edge-server with dual-core CPU and 4 GB of RAM processed 10.000.000 messages without any problems in a very short period of time, no worries about thouput!
· Always include RPC Averaged Latency, RPCOperations/sec and RPCRequest in your baseline.
Sure, some of the points above are “common” knowledge but always good to keep in mind.
One of the most common questions I get is “Why is Store.exe consuming so much memory” and my answer is always the annoying “It’s by design”… And it ‘s in a way. But Exchange is also very polite to release memory is another application wants a piece of RAM. This can in fact cause some problems.
Because when Exchange releases RAM the Information Store cache shrinks and has to be written to the pagefile, other application usually give away some memory too and this causes a storm to the pagefile. To avoid this you could tweak your server and Mike Lagase has written a great article about this, you find it here, http://blogs.technet.com/mikelag/archive/2007/12/19/working-set-trimming.aspx
Note: Microsoft no longer recommend setting the database cache minimum size to alleviate working set trims! Thanks for the input John!
John Rodriguez talking Exchange 2007 performance
And for those of you who think your large mailbox is a bit slow when you use cached mode in Outlook, be patient, today I saw SP2 for Office and it’s a huge improvement in performance for the OST-file! A folder with 10.000 items in it opened instant on a regular laptop. I want SP2!
Probably the best news today was the Exchange Server 2007 Mailbox Server Storage Cost Calculator! If you like me do a lot of design and comparison of different solutions in Exchange you will love this tool. It’s done by Ross Smith IV (yes it’s his name!) and it went public just a couple of hours ago. You find it here, http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2008/11/04/450039.aspx
And for those of you who couldn’t come to Barcelona this year (especially if you’re from Sweden) doesn’t miss the Techdays in Västerås! You find more info about it here: http://www.microsoft.com/sverige/techdays09/
I hope to meet a lot of Exchangepeople at TechEd in Barvelona next week. If you will be there don’t hesitate to send me a mail or call me and we talk Exchange over a beer or two…
Are you a hockeyfan like us at mailmaster?
Take a look (in Swedish) on our website to see how you can come with us to watch a game!
Of course beer is included and a former hockeypro will give us expertcomments!
See you there!
I bet you all heard about size recommendations about the paging file in a Exchange 2007 server (generaly the amount of RAM + 10 MB) and I know I’ve been telling this about a thousand times by now… And for you who wants to know more about how Exchange uses it’s paging file, read this
Due to my very own misstake most comments to earlier entrys are gone. I’m very sorry about this and I hope you will sign up and give me new once!
And by the way, don’t forget that backup is a good thing…
/Magnus
mailmaster bloggen har fram tills idag varit på svenska, efter förfrågningar och övervägande från min sida kommer den framöver att skrivas på engelska. Jag hoppas att detta inte gör er återkommande läsare mindre frekventa här.
Ha en skön sommar!
Untill this day this blog has been in Swedish only. After requests and my consideration I will from now on mostly write in English. I hope you guys will still come back to read about Exchange here!
Have a nice summer!
Glöm inte att registrera er till Windows 2008 community launchen på Labcenter på fredag.
Ni behöver va medlem på Itproffs.se, vilket är helt gratis. Så kom och lyssna och se Micke Nyström berätta om W2k8
Medlemmar på Itproffs kan läsa mer här:
http://www.itproffs.se/forumv2/tm.aspx?m=139956
Inte helt ny men inte mindre kul för det, njut av Bills sista dag på jobbet och ett bra gäng skådisar mm
Efter att ha spenderat en vecka i sällskap med ett gäng Göteborgare (mycket trevliga fd kolleger) så haglar ordvitsarna än.. Så rubriken antyder ett nytt utseende på bloggen!
Synpunkter mottages tacksamt!
Att det kan va så kul med nya prylar…
Men min nya kompis från New York heter U810, en minimal PC med Vista, 1 GB RAM och ett tangentbord som man inte får ha druckit för många Bud om man ska kunna använda. Kommer mer strax men nu är det dags för american breakfast
Efter att ha använt denna burk ett tag nu har jag ett par reflektioner…
This blog is brought to you by Magnus Björk, MVP Exchange. Everything you read here is my own personal opinion and any code is provided "AS-IS".
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