Using the Microsoft Exchange Replication service can sometimes mean that administrators must determine which occasional errors to fix later and which errors need correction as soon as possible.

Administrators will usually have the Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Management Pack for Operations Manager (MOM) running which can relieve them of constantly having to monitor the Windows Application log on systems that run Exchange Server 2007.

If the following event or events are logged in the Details table then the Management Operations Manager will generate an alert such as: ‘A directory required by the Microsoft Exchange Replication Service does not exist.”

The event which causes this alert is as follows:

Product Name:    Exchange
Product Version:    8.0 (Exchange Server 2007)
Event ID:        2074
Event Source:        MSExchangeRepl
Alert Type:        Error
MOM Rule Path:    Microsoft Exchange Server/Exchange 2007/Mailbox/Continuous Replication
MOM Rule Name:    A directory required by the Microsoft Exchange Replication Service does not exist.

When this event occurs it means that the Microsoft Exchange Replication (MSExchangeRepl) service could not access the required directory for the source logs, the target logs, or the checkpoint file or could not access the “targetsystemdirectory”. The event can occur if there is a permission issue on the directory, a hardware failure, or a configuration failure. If an administrator has misconfigured the system to use a particular volume and then removed the volume that the configuration points to then the event ID 2074 may be generated. Replication will fail for the respective storage group. Once the misconfiguration has been corrected then an administrator can successfully resume the replication.

Continue reading Troubleshooting Exchange Error 2074

Microsoft introduced its first analyzer tool for Exchange in 2004. Called by the catchy title Microsoft Exchange Server Best Practices Analyzer, the software proved to be so successful that similar software was rolled out for troubleshooting other aspects of Exchange.

Best Practices Analyzer emerged after Microsoft observed certain patterns when addressing critical situations with its support services. Critical situations require urgent assistance to solve a problem that’s disrupting service to an organization’s members and its important business operations. What Microsoft found was that not only were the number of critical situations growing, but that 60 percent of them were caused by configuration errors, not bugs in Exchange. Moreover, new critical situations arising in some shops were the same ones that had emerged in other organizations just a few months earlier.

Microsoft began by creating a utility to gather key information throughout an Exchange environment. When a customer faced a critical situation, they were told to run the utility and Microsoft would sift through the data to ferret out the root cause of a problem.

Collecting data was only the first step. Next, an engine was developed that could analyze the data and expose it to a set of rules. The rules established thresholds. If a key data item was outside the acceptable range in a threshold, the rule would “fire” and a red flag would be raised for support folks.

Continue reading Use Microsoft’s analyzing tools to keep Exchange humming

Some of the new features of Exchange Server 2010 are that of the inclusion of two Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) Writers: the Replication Writer and the Store Writer. These writers make it easier for backup applications to create Windows Server 2008 VSS snapshots. For databases, Exchange Server includes the Replication Writer for replicating databases using the Database Mobility Features. And for those databases that are not replicated using a Database Availability Group (DAG) there is the Store Writer.

The Replication Writer is built into the Replication Service and is available on the passive node of the DAG server. The Replication Writer is used to support backing up particular databases that have had a shadow copy taken of the replicated instance of the transaction log files and of the replicated instance. By using the Store Writer, backups taken by Replication Writer can be restored to the active database location.

The Store Writer is built into the Exchange store and is available on any mailbox server. Store Writer is used for backing up and restoring active databases.

Continue reading Troubleshooting Exchange Replication Service Errors

Virtual servers can benefit an organization’s data crunching needs in many ways. One of them is leveraging their native benefits to broaden the availability and recovery options for Microsoft Exchange 2010 deployments.

Most administrators can cite the benefits of virtual machines by rote:

* They’re portable so Exchange need no longer be bound to a particular piece of hardware. That means design decisions don’t need to be permanent. CPU and memory requirements can be changed with a reconfiguration and reboot. What’s more, new hardware can be be more easily accommodated because the virtual machine containing Exchange can be simply transferred to the new machine.

* They’re hardware independent so planners have greater design flexibility putting together the production as well as the disaster recovery components of a system.

Some virtual machine vendors, like VMware, have included robust availability features into their software. For example, the company’s High Availability product can act as a first line of defense against server failure. If a physical server or any critical component in a server goes down or fails, HA will automatically reboot the Exchange virtual machine on another physical server.

Continue reading Availability and recovery options when running Exchange 2010 in a virtual environment

Performance monitoring is a subject that is discussed frequently in IT departments. It is discussed before servers and applications are purchased, it is discussed while the servers are in the pre-production phase and it is discussed many times after the servers have gone into production.

If the server crashes then forensic analysis is performed to pinpoint the cause of the crash. Sometimes the cause of the crash can be traced back to the exhaustion of resources. But hopefully, with diligent monitoring of the server performance, those scenarios can be detected early as resource consumption ramps up the curve of utilization over time.

Luckily for administrators of Exchange Server there are many tools to help with the monitoring of Exchange Server.

In Doug Gowan’s blog, he has written a very informative guide to monitoring performance of the Exchange Server and has given an excellent overview of what components to monitor. In his blog, Doug discusses such components of the Exchange Server as: RPC operations, DSAccess, memory usage, disk usage and processor utilization.

Continue reading Monitoring Performance of Exchange Server

Windows=based smartphones work best with Exchange.

Let’s face it, your users are going to want to connect  to your organization’s Exchange services with their mobile phones. Rather than allow that activity to grow willy nilly, you may want to impose some controls on the process. So it might make sense to know what smartphones play nicely with Exchange.

Smartphone makers have been steadily improving their handsets’ Exchange capabilities. What’s more, Microsoft has also moved, with the release of Exchange 2010, to better accommodate phone warriors. For example, with Exchange 2010 and ActiveSync, members of your organization get real-time access to their communications on literally hundreds of devices. Email, contacts and calendar items can be automatically synchronized over the air quickly.

What’s more, a user’s inbox becomes truly universal. Barriers to all forms of communication–email, voicemail, rights-protected messages, calendar requests, RSS feeds and saved instant messages–have been removed allowing one-stop access for members of your organization.

In addition, versatility and productivity of mobile email has been boosted with features like previewing messages with speech-to-text voicemail and creating a contest for messages with a conversation view.

Microsoft didn’t leave administrators out of the equation either. They have greater control over device access. They can create lists of devices to block, quarantine or permit access to their network. And budget-strapped IT departments will be glad to hear that the additional mobile support is included at no additional cost in Exchange 2010. Some of that cost, no doubt, is unloaded on smartphone makers, who have to pay a licensing fee to use ActiveSync.

Continue reading Smartphones that play nicely with Exchange

A major factor in moving from Outlook 2000 to Outlook 2003 was the advantage of utilizing RPC calls to make connections from Outlook clients to an Exchange server. The specific technology for making these internet connections was RPC over HTTP.  RPC means remote procedure calls and allow your Outlook MAPI clients to connect to Exchange servers using HTTP or the secure HTTPS protocol.

Remote Procedure Call (RPC) is a protocol that one application can use to request a service from another application running in another system in a network without having to understand network details. Remote Procedure Calls uses the client/server model. The requesting application is a client and the application which supplies the service is the server component. Remote Procedure Calls are synchronous operations that require the requesting application to wait until the results of the remote procedure are returned from the server. The uses of lightweight processes or threads that share the same address space allow multiple Remote Procedure Calls to be performed concurrently.

One of the advantages of using RPC over HTTP is that this methodology can support secure connections to the Exchange server and thus add an additional layer of security between the client and the server.

The other benefit is that these RPC commands could be encapsulated in HTTP. What this means from an administrator perspective is that only one of two ports would need to be opened at the firewall – port 443 or port 80 – as opposed to earlier versions which would have required two additional ports: port 135 and port 53. These ports were well known to hackers and used by them to create havoc within many organizations on a routine basis.

Continue reading Troubleshooting Connections to Exchange Server using HTTP

Understanding the underlying mechanics of how Exchange Server works and how it stores messages can be very helpful to administrators especially when problems occur and resolution is needed immediately.

One of the most important components of the Exchange Server is that of the database which contains all the messages and directory information before those messages are applied to the database. Exchange Server 5.5 Standard Edition uses fault-tolerant, transaction-based databases that can grow to a maximum of 16 GB.  The size of the database for Enterprise Edition is limited only by the hardware used for storage. As with all databases Exchange Server uses transaction log files to be able to reconstruct the data should a failure occur. This data has already been accepted by the server but has not yet been committed.

The important database components of Exchange Server 5.5 include the Information Store and the JET Database Engine. The Information Store is actually comprised of two separate databases: the private information store database, Priv.edb, which manages data in user mailboxes and the public information store, Pub.edb, which manages data in public folders. Both databases are based on the JET format used to track and maintain information by utilizing the log files.

Administrators can encounter problems with the Exchange Server if any of these log files or the database become corrupted for some reason. Typical areas where database files can become corrupted include:

• Page (file system) level
• Database (JET database engine) level
• Application (Exchange information store) level

And the three most common errors that are associated with file-level problems in an Exchange database are:

• -1018 JET_errReadVerifyFailure
• -1019 JET_errPageNotInitialized
• -1022 JET_errDiskIO

Most of the -1019 and -1022 errors are caused by problems in the underlying system but the -1019 and -1022 errors can also be the result of errors in the Exchange Server code itself.

Continue reading Troubleshooting “–1018” Exchange Server Database Errors

Are your users on Microsoft Outlook and Exchange server  complaining about lethargic performance? Here are some things to troubleshoot when you want to quell the griping.

1. Antiquated Software. Are you still on Exchange 2003? That old 32-bit warhorse will have a tough time meeting the email demands of a modern organization. New 64-bit versions of Exchange–2007 and 2010–support more memory and bigger buffers, as well as other speed enhancements. As a result, they can be from five to 10 times more efficient than 2003 in handling mail. While upgrading to a new version of Exchange isn’t an immediate solution to your problems, it’s something to advocate as a long term solution.
2. Mailbox Limits. Both Exchange 2003 and 2007 have 2GB limits on mailbox sizes. However, Outlook users can  exceed those limits. The rub is, the greater that 2GB limit is exceeded, the bigger the hit the user will see in performance. One way to address that problem is to deploy an archiving solution. It will automatically archive a user’s emails when his or her mailbox approaches or exceeds the 2GB limit.
3. Overstuffed Folders. Too many messages stored in a single folder will impair Outlook’s performance. Microsoft recommends that between 3500 to 5000 messages should be placed in a single folder. An archiving solution can address this folder problem, too, as well as creating more top-level folders or sub-folders in folders with high growth rates such as Inbox, Sent and Calendar.
4. Anti-Virus Software. Local anti-virus software can make Outlook work harder than necessary. Each time a message is opened, its body and any attachments to it are scanned by the anti-virus software. That can result in delays of as much as 20 seconds. An alternative to local virus scans is to scan messages in transit at the Exchange Hub Transport servers. With malware scans performed at the servers, you can disable scanning at the client end of things and boost performance for your users.
   Continue reading 10 reasons why Outlook is running sooooo slowly

Administrators have many responsibilities when it comes to ensuring the reliability and performance of their servers. But sometimes their responsibilities get overshadowed by just trying to maintain a set level of performance. If their server performance slows down or begins to degrade they must be able to know where to go looking to correct the behavior before it begins to adversely impact their end user community.

One of those areas that can present performance problems is in the area of memory. And as one of the main components of server performance – CPU, I/O and memory – lack of memory resources can be fairly easily solved by purchasing and installing more memory. But when more memory is not the answer then the troubleshooting process can be more time consuming as there are more aspects of memory usage which must be examined.

Many times the memory performance problems don’t show up until the software applications – such as Outlook – have been upgraded. Some administrators have reported performance problems with paged and non-paged pool memory as the number of Outlook 2007 client have been added within the organization.

To solve this problem it is necessary that the paged pool memory used by client connections to the Exchange server be reduced. This can be accomplished by reducing the size and number of access tokens. Additionally, the client connections can also be distributed and managed so as to optimize performance.

Continue reading Troubleshooting Pool Memory in Exchange Server 2003