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

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

Most people who use Outlook will know that individual email messages can be marked with different priorities.  Usually this is used solely as a way to flag the importance of the email to the recipient, and people who receive large volumes of daily email will often use filtered views to bring the highest priority emails to the surface for action.

What a lot of people don’t also realise is that the priority flag on a message can also be used by Exchange Server 2010 to deliver high priority messages before normal or low priority messages.

This capability becomes important in Exchange environments that are very large, complex, or spam geographically diverse areas.  In these types of environments email latency can become noticeable, unlike smaller environments where a few hundred recipients on one or two servers see virtually no delay in sending and receiving email.

When you combine long distance with high volume it is easy to see how important emails might be delayed in an unacceptable way if they are simply processed in a “first in, first out” order. Continue reading Exchange Server 2010 Priority Message Delivery

In Exchange Server terminology and “recipient” is any object in the Active Directory environment that Exchange is able to send email messages to.

Each type of recipient in an Exchange Server environment has a different purpose and set of capabilities relating to its specific type.  Although there are a large number of different recipient types they fall under a few broad categories.

Mailboxes

Mailbox recipients come in several different types for different tasks or purposes.

User – this is the most common type of mailbox that is associated with a user in the same Active Directory forest as the Exchange organization.

Linked Mailbox – this is similar to a regular User mailbox however a Linked Mailbox is associated with a user in a different Active Directory forest to the local forest where the Exchange organization resides.

Linked User – this is similar to the Linked Mailbox only the association between user and mailbox is reversed, with a user in the local forest associated with a mailbox in a remote Exchange organization.

Shared – although each mailbox has a 1:1 association with a user object, a shared mailbox is one that is configured to allow multiple users to access it (for example a Help Desk mailbox).

Resource – resource mailboxes come in two types, Room and Equipment.  Each is most often used with the calendaring features of Exchange to allow booking of meeting rooms or pool equipment.  The main difference between the two is that rooms are typically fixed location whereas equipment is portable.

Legacy – this refers to any mailbox that still resides on an Exchange 2003 server, and only applies during the transitional period from Exchange 2003 to 2010.  Once a mailbox is moved from 2003 to 2010 it becomes either a User or Shared mailbox, depending on who has permissions to access it. Continue reading Exchange Server 2010 Recipient Types

In his article about Microsoft’s new Exchange Server feature, Mail Tips, author Paddy discusses the advantages of Mail Tips.

I agree with Paddy that this is a beneficial feature that all users within a company will appreciate. With Mail Tips, an end user – who is a sender of an email – will get helpful information before the sender sends out the email to the recipient.

Users will get informative messages about their recipient’s status while they are creating their email messages. Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 can notify the sender of any potential problems with the email message or any statuses of the recipient that the sender should know about such as if the potential recipient is out on vacation. All of this occurs while the message is being created.

The benefit to the end user is that they can modify their email message if needed based on the information they receive about the recipient list – information that was not previously available to them in earlier releases – before they send the email out. This also has the added benefit of reducing those annoying non-delivery reports (NDRs) that administrators have to deal with from time to time.

Continue reading Exchange Server 2010 Mail Tips Feature

When we talk about “logging” in Exchange Server 2010 it can mean a lot of different things.  Here are eight different types of logging that are performed by Exchange Server 2010 that email administrators need to understand.

Transaction Logging

Mailbox and Public Folder databases comprise two main parts – the database itself, and the transaction logs.

When changes occur in the database they are first written to a transaction log.  When the transaction is fully logged it is then committed to the database at a later time.  A checkpoint file is used to keep track of which logs have been committed to the database and which are not.  If there is a database or server problem, the server uses the checkpoint file to determine how to recover the database.

When a database is successfully backed up the committed transaction logs are removed from disk to reclaim disk space.

These log files are not human readable, but they are very important.  In many Exchange environments it is best practice to separate the database and logs on to distinct storage volumes so that a single storage failure does not destroy both the logs and the database at once.

Message Tracking Logs

Message tracking is an optional feature of Exchange that can keep track of all message activity on Edge Transport, Hub Transport, and Mailbox servers.  A message tracking report for any given email message in the organization can be generated showing all of the actions taken by servers along its delivery path (within the boundaries of the Exchange Organization). Continue reading Exchange Server 2010 Logging

There has been a lot of buzz created about Exchange Server 2010’s new database capabilities.  The terms “RAID-less” and “backup-less” get mentioned in conversations but are often taken out of context, or used with incorrect assumptions.

But why are people so excited about Exchange Server 2010 and talking about throwing out RAID and backups?  There are three main reasons for this.

Three Big Exchange Server 2010 Improvements

Improved Database Performance – the Exchange database schema has been overhauled to deliver much greater efficiency and therefore much better performance in terms of disk I/O.  This overhaul stirred some controversy because it put an end to single instance storage, however the small loss of SIS delivers much greater benefits in performance.

Improved High Availability – Exchange Server 2007 had four different HA/DR options, each one with its own complexities and limitations, and each one administered in a different way.  Exchange Server 2010 simplifies this to one single, vastly more effective high availability model called Database Availability Groups.  This basically involves replicating a database between as many as 16 servers (DAG members) that can seamlessly fail over if any individual server experiences a fault.

Improved Data Retention – In Exchange Server 2010 mailboxes and databases can be much bigger than previous versions, archiving has been built in, and longer retention is feasible making recovery of single items and mailboxes possible over longer periods without having to access backups.

These improvements have led to the idea that an organization can deploy multiple Exchange servers in a DAG using cheaper, slower storage sub-systems, without RAID to replicate the data, and without backing up because emails can be recovered almost indefinitely.

Which is true, but only if Exchange Server 2010 is deployed correctly with enough resources to make this possible. Continue reading Data Protection for Exchange Server 2010

With data burdens for organizations increasing at dizzying rates, storage management has become more important than ever. That wasn’t been lost on Microsoft in its continuing development of Exchange Server 2010. The software maker has applied a new philosophy to how the application handles storage. It takes into account the declining price of storage and the pressure to improve performance across the storage infrastructure. It embraces using direct-attached storage instead of disk arrays, continuous replication to spare servers instead of RAID or clustering and cheap disk arrays as a substitute for tape backups.

Exchange 2010, as did Exchange 2007, has improved its handling of input/output loads for a given number of simultaneous users. One way it does that is by shelving a technique for storing copies of email messages that Microsoft has used in all previous versions of Exchange. In those versions, Exchange tries to store all copies of a message at a single location on disk. That saves disk space but reduces performance. Exchange 2010 stores copies wherever there’s free space. That may eat up more space, but Microsoft felt the performance improvement was worth it. Those kinds of improvements in Exchange 2010 opens the door for IT departments to use more economical alternatives to traditional and expensive solutions, such as substituting serial attached storage for network attached storage.

Continue reading Exchange 2010 has some storage twists

One of the challenges for businesses when they provide email access to their staff is how to let staff use email productively while also managing the risk of information leakage.

Although information leaks can occur over many different mediums, leaks over email remain a serious concern for some businesses.

Fortunately Exchange Server 2010 includes features to help organizations manage the risk of information leaks via email.

Using Message Classifications

Message classifications provide a mechanism by which end users can classify individual email messages.  These classifications are completely customizable and can be used for just about any purpose, even non-security related ones.

Custom classifications can be created by the email administrators and distributed to end users for use within Outlook.  These could include message classifications such as “Confidential” and “Public” to convey the level of security associated with the email content.

One of two approaches could then be taken to enforce their usage.

1. Have email messages created with the most confidential classification by default, requiring the end user to deliberately lower the classification to send external emails.
2. Have email messages created with no classification by default, and require users to choose at least one before sending.

Message classifications can be used in conjunction with Transport Rules for enforcement.  For the two examples above Transport Rules could be created to:

1. Reject messages sent to external recipients that are classified as “Confidential”
2. Reject messages that are sent to external recipients with no classification set

Protecting Customer Information

Another use of Transport Rules is to assess emails based on their content.  If certain text patterns are found within an email message the Transport Rule can reject the message from being sent to an external recipient. Continue reading Preventing Information Leaks with Exchange Server 2010

While Service Pack 1 for Exchange Server 2010 captured most of the buzz at Microsoft’s TechEd 2010 conference earlier this month, for many IT departments the news of most interest to them was the Redmond software maker’s announcement about another service pack, one for Exchange Server 2007.

Microsoft told its faithful at the conference that Service Pack 3 for Exchange Server 2007 would be ready at the end of this month. The service pack is needed to make Exchange 2007 compatible with Windows Server 2008 R2.

Windows Server 2008 R2, the server variant of Windows 7 and Microsoft’s only 64-bit only operating system, reached retail shelves in October 2009. When the server software was released to manufacturers in July of that year, however, Microsoft declared the operating system would not be supporting Exchange 2007. That Draconian decision produced ululations from many in the company’s user base, some who believed Microsoft was leveraging Server 2008 to coerce companies to move to its latest mail management application Exchange 2010.

The official word from Microsoft as to why it was choking off Exchange 2007 from Server 2008 was lack of resources. It asserted that it was pulling out all the stops on bringing online Exchange 2010, and it didn’t want to dissipate those efforts on a legacy technology like Exchange 2007. While Server 2008 R2 would support Exchange 2007’s domain controllers, the company said at the time, the mail application itself won’t be supported on the server software. Anyone who wants to upgrade to Server 2008 R2, it added, will have to bite the bullet and move to Exchange 2010.

The announcement to abandon Exchange 2007 users who wanted to upgrade to Server 2008 R2 didn’t surprise pundits, but that didn’t dampen the uproar that ensued. For an IT administrator, stepping up to a new operating system like Server 2008 R2 is challenging enough, but to add to that burden another major upgrade, one to  another email program, was not going to win Microsoft any happy points with info tech stalwarts.

Continue reading Microsoft set to deliver on Exchange 2007 promise