Microsoft

With the release of Exchange 2010 SP1, administrators can now use separate Mailbox Databases to store the Personal Archives of users – this is particularly useful if you have some larger, slower (and probably by virtue, older) storage that’s not really up to the I/O of your Exchange Server (that old SAN/NAS sitting in the corner of the server room?). It’s also useful if you just don’t have the capacity on your main storage.

Exchange SP1 has now been released, so I thought I’d document the upgrade process for my small Exchange 2010 organisation, consisting of one CAS/Transport/Mailbox server, and an Edge Transport server. References The starting point is always working out if you *need* to upgrade – what’s the business argument. For that you need to look at what’s new in Exchange 2010 SP1, the release notes and prerequisites. Finally, the installation instructions for upgrading from Exchange 2010 RTM to SP1.

This should be a simple update of some hotfixes, but there were a few tripping points along the way that I had to stumble past. As reference I used the CU2 update page and I also a Kevin Holman technet article. So, I’m going to assume that a) you’re installing the update for a reason, like one of the bugs it fixes and b) you have taken a backup of your OpsManager databases.

The NT Testing TCP Tool is a handy little tool for testing the throughput between two servers – and it’s free! It’s available to download here: http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/network/TCP_tool.mspx First, you need to install the MSI on both ends – for the sake of this, say SERVER1 and SERVER2. Once you’ve installed it on the server, navigate to \Program Files\Microsoft Corporation\NT Testing TCP Tool, you should see a few copies of the tool for different architectures.

I am mid-migration, in a co-existence setup with Exchange 2010, 2007 and 2003. So far the roles installed for Exchange 2010 are CAS, Hub and Mailbox on a single server. Into this mix I need to introduce an Edge Server, with message hygiene in the form of Forefront Protection for Exchange (FPE) and Threat Management Gateway (TMG) as a reverse proxy to publish OWA, ActiveSync et-al. Since Edge, FPE and TMG can now all exist on a single 64-bit server, I will start with a clean installation of Windows Server 2008 R2, up to date with all the latest hot fixes.

If you’re having trouble accessing OWA after updating Exchange 2010 with any of the Rollup packages, try this: Uninstall the update package from the Programs and Features control panel Download the package file directly from Microsoft, don’t use Windows Update Open a command prompt or PowerShell prompt as Administrator Navigate to the location of the package (.msp) and run from the elevated command prompt. Apparently when Windows update installs the package it doesn’t run it with the elevated privileges to write to the folder in the Exchange program files – why, I have no idea!

On Monday I took the two Exchange 2010 exams, “70-662 TS: Microsoft Exchange Server 2010, Configuring” and “70-663 PRO: Deploying Messaging Solutions with Microsoft Exchange Server 2010” and I am pleased to say that I passed both of them, scoring an 812 on the 70-662 and 960 on the 70-663. I am especially pleased with the score on the PRO exam! Overall, there’s quite a lot of overlap between the two exams, with the more heavily theory and design based PRO exam being a “high-level” of the more hands-on management and cmdlet based TS exam.

This is a pretty specific set of instructions for a specific environment: If you are using Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 and you have a Microsoft Certificate Services 2003 Certificate Authority on your domain and you have non-domain Windows Server 2008 servers you wish to monitor or set up as a gateway server. Getting a certificate for either a Gateway Server or remotely monitored Server can be a touch vexing.

I’m currently testing an Exchange 2010 server for the organisation prior to a migration project, specifically testing moving mailboxes backwards and forwards. Something that confused me slightly for a few minutes was this: if there is an existing Move Request (pending, in progress, failed or completed) you will not see the “New Local Move Request” or “New Remote Move Request” - Fortunately this is very simple to counter – simply clear the old “Move Request” and the options will be back in the Mailbox options:

If you have a Windows Server 2008 box in a workgroup that you require access to one of the admin shares, it can be a little more complicated than with Server 2003. In my case, we had a SQL server on the back end which was trying to access the web server in the DMZ using PSExec.exe to remotely run a process. Executing PSExec and passing the correct credentials failed with “Access is Denied”.