February 2010 Question of the Month
For Exchange 2007, what needs to be backed up for Transport and Edge Servers?
January 2010 Question of the Month
In Exchange 2010, what feature replaced the recovery storage group (RSG) in Exchange 2003 & 2007.
ANSWER: Exchange 2010 introduced recovery databases (RDB).
December 2009 Question of the Month
What are “noise words”
ANSWER: Exchange 2007 searching added the ability to exclude some words to the search catalog (e.g. at, the, as, is, etc) that are not helpful in searching. By default no noise word lists are included in Exchange 2007, but can be as per this URL.
http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2009/09/17/452528.aspx
November 2009 Question of the Month
Name some major differences for the native search for Exchange 2007’s compared to 2000/2003.
ANSWER: Some answers…
– 2000/2003 index was not enabled by default.
– 2007 is near-real time for indexing. Typically within 10 seconds of arrival, messages are indexed.
– 2003 catalog size was 35-45% of the database vs 2007 catalog size of 5-10%.
– 2007 OWA search bar
– 2007 searchable attachments
Part 1) http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2009/09/14/452457.aspx
Part 2) http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2009/09/17/452528.aspx
October 2009 Question of the Month
In the unlikely chance your Exchange 2003 or 2007 Server crashes (3rd party cause most likely), how do you re-install it? Hint: you don’t just run the setup.exe application.
ANSWER:
A1) Exchange 2003 – You use the “/DisasterRecovery” and then run the Exchange 2003 installer. This is so the installer software can attempt to pull the necessary Exchange configuration from within Active Directory. A complete step by step can be found here:
http://www.msexchange.org/tutorials/Recovering-Failed-Exchange-2003-Member-Server-Using-Disaster-Recovery-Switch.html
A2) Exchange 2007 – You use the “/RecoverServer” switch.
http://www.msexchange.org/tutorials/Recovering-Exchange-2007-Server-RecoverServer-switch.html
September 2009 Question of the Month
What fundamental method for simplifying clustering setup has changed with Exchange 2010 compared to previous Exchange versions (e.g.. 5.5, 2000, 2003, and 2007)?
ANSWER: Clustering setup is handled within the Exchange setup, and not within Windows. So, no more dealing with Windows Clustering Service, etc. This is a fundamental change from all previous Exchange clustering setups. This is great news!
More Background on HA and clustering for 2010…
Exchange 2010 integrates high availability into the core architecture of Microsoft Exchange to enable customers of all sizes and in all segments to be able to economically deploy a messaging continuity service in their organization. Exchange 2010 includes many changes to its core architecture. The following features in Exchange 2007 and Exchange 2007 Service Pack 1 (SP1) no longer exist in Exchange 2010: Local continuous replication (LCR) & Single copy clusters (SCC).
In addition to these features, the concept of a clustered mailbox server no longer exists in Exchange 2010. Two other features, cluster continuous replication (CCR) and standby continuous replication (SCR), have been merged and renamed as a set of new features in Exchange 2010: incremental deployment, continuous mailbox availability, database mobility, database copies, and database availability groups.
August 2009 Question of the Month
What is the Mail.que?
ANSWER: The Mail.que is an ese database that acts as the transport queue on your Exchange 2007 server – Hub Transport or Edge Transport roles only.
How To on Backup and Restore a Queue Database
Managing the Queue Database (e.g. configuration options and parameters, etc)
Overview of Queues for Exchange 2007
Easy To Understand Queue Management with photos
July 2009 Question of the Month
What and how does Back Pressure help you?
ANSWER:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb201658.aspx
Back pressure is a system resource monitoring feature of the Microsoft Exchange Transport service that exists on computers that are running Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 that have the Hub Transport server role or Edge Transport server role installed. Important system resources, such as available hard disk drive space and available memory, are monitored. If utilization of a system resource exceeds the specified limit, the Exchange server stops accepting new connections and messages. This prevents the system resources from being completely overwhelmed and enables the Exchange server to deliver the existing messages. When utilization of the system resource returns to a normal level, the Exchange server accepts new connections and messages.
The following system resources are monitored as part of the back pressure feature:
Free space on the hard disk drive that stores the message queue database.
Free space on the hard disk drive that stores the message queue database transaction logs.
The number of uncommitted message queue database transactions that exist in memory.
The memory that is used by the EdgeTransport.exe process.
The memory that is used by all processes.
For each monitored system resource on a Hub Transport server or Edge Transport server, the following three levels of resource utilization are applied:
Normal The resource is not overused. The server accepts new connections and messages.
Medium The resource is slightly overused. Back pressure is applied to the server in a limited manner. Mail from senders in the authoritative domain can flow. However, the server rejects new connections and messages from other sources.
High The resource is severely overused. Full back pressure is applied. All message flow stops, and the server rejects all new connections and messages.
June 2009 Question of the Month
In Exchange 2007, what handy troubleshooting tool is now built-in to the product?
ANSWER:
Exchange Best Practices Analyzer – check the configuration and health of your Exchange topology. Available for Exchange as a separate download
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/bb288481.aspx
May 2009 Question of the Month
2 part question.
1. What product recently had Microsoft Mainstream Support end on 4/14/09 and now is on extended support through 4/8/14?
2. In real terms, what does this mean for you?
ANSWER: Most importantly, extended Support phase means “non-security hotfix support” is gone w/o an agreement. An example is when a DST patch was needed for Windows 2000 and earlier, folks had to pay a LOT for a hotfix agreement or use 3rd software for a fix. This isn’t too important to be honest since Exchange 2003 is rock solid and will give you time to upgrade to Exchange 2010 when you decide to upgrade. http://support.microsoft.com/gp/lifepolicy
April 2009 Question of the Month
From Exchange 2003 to 2007, what is the single biggest change regarding the # of storage groups, databases, or storage limits?
ANSWER:
Storage limits are GONE!!! For Exchange 2003, the previous limit of 18GB SP1 and earlier and 75GB w/SP2 is now 16TB, which in theory is unlimited.
http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/2007/evaluation/editions.mspx
March 2009 Question of the Month
What single Microsoft released Exchange tool is a swiss-army knife in functionality when dealing with permissions on Public Folders for Exchange 2000, 2003, and even 2007?
ANSWER:
PFDavAdmin Tool (Public Folder Distributed Authoring and Versioning Administration Tool)
GUI tool used for performing permission changes (inheritance, bulk export/import, etc) on public folders not available in the ESM/EMC or Outlook. Also can be used to find item counts on a per folder in users mailboxes.
Explained more at http://www.msexchange.org/articles/PFDavAdmin-tool-Part1.html
Download at http://download.microsoft.com & search for “PFDAVAdmin.EXE†(released 4/4/07)
How To Get PFDavAdmin working with Exchange 2007 (as per MVP Jim McBee)
http://mostlyexchange.blogspot.com/2008/01/pfdavadmin-exchange-2007-and-v11-net.html
Microsoft recommends using the PFDAVADMIN utility from a workstation, not from the console of the Exchange server, though. If you get this message, do NOT install the v1.1 Framework on an existing Exchange 2007 server. You run the risk of resetting some of the v2.0 Framework settings and, thus, breaking Exchange Server 2007! If you want to run PFDAVADMIN from the console of an Exchange 2007 server, you need to install the v1.1 .NET Framework prior to building Exchange. Thus, the “workstation” option is much more desirable.
February 2009 Question of the Month
Deploying Exchange 2007 on Windows 2008 means within the built-in OS backup software you won’t be able to do what?
ANSWER: Exchange 2007 backups. Windows 2008 does not include an Exchange aware backup solution. So, not ntbackup08. But, SBS 2008 will include a backup utility for Exchange. If you run Exchange 2007 & Windows 2003, you can continue to use the free OS based ntbackup tool. There are rumors Microsoft might add OS based backups for Exchange in the future, but I would recommend you purchase a 3rd party solution or run under 2003 x64. See the URL for more detailed response to this question.
http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2008/03/05/448338.aspx
January 2009 Question of the Month
Comparing Exchange 2003 with 2007, what is the biggest single improvement made in OoO and what is OoO?
ANSWER: Out of Office, which is the auto-reply feature in Exchange. Biggest single improvement is the different OoO for internal users & external users. So for internal users, you could list your home #, while external users would simply get a vague message you’re not available until tomorrow. What is considered an “internal” user, is something we were not 100% sure on. So, I will test to see if the OoO is based on “internal” users in your Contact list, or just the users in your Exchange domain. I’ll report back to the group on that.
December 2008 Question of the Month
With Exchange 2007, if you want to deploy a transport, hub, and mailbox server in a clustered configuration, what is the minimum number of servers required that is MS supported?
ANSWER: 4 servers. You cannot include combine the mailbox role in a clustered configuration. So, 2 x mailbox and 2 x transport & hub servers. So no clustered failover SBS 2008. :-) That’s a joke, since the question was referring to Standard Edition or higher.