Often Exchange administrators will receive escalated help desk tickets from users complaining that Exchange is “slow” and demanding resolution. These sorts of tickets (slow being at best a relative term, and never specific enough about what precisely is considered to be slow) can be extremely challenging to work, since the subjective nature of slowness is often combined with an inability to replicate the problem, or the problem is intermittent. The Exchange admin can take a look at the server(s) for high CPU utilization, low memory conditions, disk and network queue lengths exceeding the norm, and finding nothing, shrug it back off to the desktop support team as a client issue. While it is often a client issue, there are several places between Outlook and a user’s mailbox that can cause intermittent slowness, and are fair to call networking bottlenecks. In a six part series of articles, we’ll look at how Exchange interacts on the network with various other services to help you identify network issues, and troubleshoot them when they occur.

In many cases, troubleshooting Exchange network bottlenecks will require a network trace, and may also require performance monitor counters. This series of articles will talk about both of those in general terms; how to use NetMon or Wireshark, and PerfMon are out of scope. In Part 6 of this series, we’re going to troubleshoot client connectivity issues to Exchange. Continue reading Troubleshooting Exchange Networking: Client Connectivity (Part 6)

Often Exchange administrators will receive escalated help desk tickets from users complaining that Exchange is “slow” and demanding resolution. These sorts of tickets can be extremely challenging to work on, since the subjective nature of slowness is often combined with an inability to replicate the problem, or the problem is intermittent.

The Exchange admin can take a look at the server(s) for high CPU utilization, low memory conditions, disk and network queue lengths exceeding the norm, and finding nothing, shrug it back off to the desktop support team as a client issue. While it is often a client issue, there are several places between Outlook and a user’s mailbox that can cause intermittent slowness, and are fair to call networking bottlenecks. In a six part series of articles, we’ll look at how Exchange interacts on the network with various other services to help you identify network issues, and troubleshoot them when they occur.

In many cases, troubleshooting Exchange network bottlenecks will require a network trace, and may also require performance monitor counters. This series of articles will talk about both of those in general terms; how to use NetMon or Wireshark, and PerfMon are out of scope. In Part 5 of this series, we’re going to discuss how Exchange is dependent upon and uses Remote Procedure Calls (RPCs) on the network. Continue reading Troubleshooting Exchange Networking: RPCs (Part 5)

Hot on the heels of last month’s release of Exchange 2010 SP2, Microsoft has released Rollup 1. Available to download now, KB2645995 updates Exchange 2010 SP2 to address several issues that could impact certain customers in very specific situations, and also includes some other updates for Exchange.

This 30MB release is an update only; unlike Exchange 2010 SP2 it does not contain the files necessary to install Exchange, so for each new SP2 server you deploy, you need to then apply RU1. Before we list the fixes contained in RU1, let’s look at some special situations that can affect your deployment of RU1. Continue reading Microsoft Releases RU1 for Exchange 2010 SP2

One of the things that I get a lot of questions about when I start leading people down the CLI path is whether or not the Exchange Management Shell is just PowerShell with a fancier icon. We frequently open the EMS in order to perform certain managerial tasks in Exchange, and we hear more and more coming out of Redmond regarding PowerShell. So let’s discuss it.

As it turns out, the Exchange Management Shell is PowerShell (big surprise there) but it’s a more specialized environment than you get when simply running PowerShell.exe, with a lot of specific settings to make it talk to Exchange. In this post, we’ll go over the differences, and when you want to use one or the other. Continue reading Exchange Management Shell vs PowerShell

Often Exchange administrators will receive escalated help desk tickets from users complaining that Exchange is “slow” and demanding resolution. These sorts of tickets can be extremely challenging to work, since the subjective nature of slowness is often combined with an inability to replicate the problem, or the problem is intermittent. The Exchange admin can take a look at the server(s) for high CPU utilization, low memory conditions, disk and network queue lengths exceeding the norm, and finding nothing, shrug it back off to the desktop support team as a client issue.

While it is often a client issue, there are several places between Outlook and a user’s mailbox that can cause intermittent slowness, and are fair to call networking bottlenecks. In a six part series of articles, we’ll look at how Exchange interacts on the network with various other services to help you identify network issues, and troubleshoot them when they occur.

In many cases, troubleshooting Exchange network bottlenecks will require a network trace, and may also require performance monitor counters. This series of articles will talk about both of those in general terms; how to use NetMon or Wireshark, and PerfMon are out of scope. In Part 4 of this series, we’re going to look at the humble physical layer (DoD, not OSI) and discuss troubleshooting NICs. Continue reading Troubleshooting Exchange Networking: NICs (Part 4)

The Exchange Team first indicated it was coming back in July 2011. We’ve been anxiously awaiting it ever since, and it has finally arrived. Microsoft’s free PST Capture Tool is available for download now.

This tool is designed to hunt down PSTs on your network and provide administrators with a management console which will enable them to either migrate the content to Exchange 2010 on premise, or to Office 365. It uses a client-server approach, requiring a management console to be installed on a server, and agents to be deployed to all systems which you want to scan for PSTs. Continue reading Rejoice, for the PST Capture Tool Has Been Launched!

Back in early December, I wrote an article called A Deeper Look into Exchange 2010 SP2 where I discussed some of the new changes being added to Exchange and to the Active Directory schema. If you didn’t read that article, click the link above, and then come back here. It’s okay, I’ll wait. Back and ready to go? Good. In that article I indicated that the new extension attributes could be available for customers who want to store additional information in Active Directory but don’t have suitable attributes already in place, and don’t want to roll their own schema extensions.

In a new post over at the Exchange Team Blog, You Had Me at EHLO, Nino Bilic wrote an article a couple of weeks ago that has prompted me to update you about this, and to revise what I said, in his post on Custom (aka. Extension) attributes in Exchange 2010 SP2 and their use, Bilic talks in detail on the two additions to the object class ms-Exch-Custom-Attributes. Continue reading 30 New Custom Attributes? Not So Fast

Often, Exchange administrators will receive escalated help desk tickets from users complaining that Exchange is “slow” and demanding resolution. These sorts of tickets (slow being at best a relative term and never specific enough about what precisely is considered to be slow) can be extremely challenging to work, since the subjective nature of slowness is often combined with an inability to replicate the problem, or the problem is intermittent. The Exchange admin can take a look at the server(s) for high CPU utilization, low memory conditions, disk and network queue lengths exceeding the norm, and finding nothing, shrug it back off to the desktop support team as a client issue. While it is often a client issue, there are several places between Outlook and a user’s mailbox that can cause intermittent slowness, and are fair to call networking bottlenecks. In a six part series of articles, we’ll look at how Exchange interacts on the network with various other services to help you identify network issues, and troubleshoot them when they occur.

In many cases, troubleshooting Exchange network bottlenecks will require a network trace, and may also require performance monitor counters. This series of articles will talk about both of those in general terms; how to use NetMon or Wireshark, and PerfMon are out of scope. In Part 3 of this series, we’re going to discuss the connectivity you need to permit through firewalls for Exchange to function properly on the network. Continue reading Troubleshooting Exchange Networking: Firewalls (Part 3)

Customize the Exchange Management Shell as an Exchange administrator, it’s only a matter of time before you embrace the dark side and come to know the true power of shell. The Exchange Management Shell is the direct interface between you and the underlying PowerShell cmdlets that are used to query, configure, and manage Exchange. Getting comfortable with a command line interface after years of GUI work is a big shift for many admins, but if you start out slow, and work your way through things step by step, you’ll soon find that you are a PowerShell Jedi. Making something your own is the first step towards getting comfortable with it, so in this post, we’ll see how to customize the Exchange Management Shell to make it your own. Continue reading Customize the Exchange Management Shell