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I did a one day workshop on March 15 in Orlando at the Exchange Connections conference. As usual, it was a great deal of fun. However, for some reason, I never posted this blog entry until today.   Anyways, I decided to put some of the key bits of information out here for others to enjoy. I hope it helps everyone.   First off, we need to understand that putting up a CCR cluster requires several steps, which can be combined into four categories. Configure the Hardware Install and Configure the Operating System Install and Configure the Failover Cluster Feature … Continue reading Exchange Server 2007 CCR on Windows Server 2008 Failover Cluster

During my one day pre-conference session at Exchange Connections, I heard a desire for something that doesn’t exist today. Later in the week, I sat in the back during a Harold Wong session, and the same topic/request/demand/whatever came up. The basic is this: Customer sets up CCR in site1. Customer sets up CCR in site1 as an SCR source to a member server in site2. Customer wants to activate SCR destination because of a problem with bandwidth from site1 to site2 and from site1 to the Internet. (expected outage of less than 4 hours) Customer activates SCR target. Customer does … Continue reading Exchange Server 2007 Disaster Planning

During my booth duty at the Failover Clustering booth, I must have heard questions regarding this topic about once per hour if not more. The official stance: Microsoft does not support the virtualization of Exchange Server 2007 roles at this time. Why not? Well, Microsoft does not have a virtualization platform capable of supporting 64-bit virtual machines at this time. Hyper-V is not an RTM product. Whether Microsoft will change the stance once Hyper-V RTMs is another question, and I don’t have an answer. Also, keep in mind, Microsoft is not about to support a third party’s virtualization platform because … Continue reading Exchange Server 2007 and Virtualization

Microsoft released assessment configuration packs for the following today: Gramm-Leach Bliley Act (GLBA) European Union Data Protection Directive (EUDPD) Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)

Get it here, fresh off the presses and just released today!

This is becoming a pretty common question in my Exchange classes. Which should I use? Why one over the other? My current recommendation is to use CCR whenever possible vs. SCC. Why? I am glad you asked that question. High Availability, see my definition here, is all about risk mitigation. What we should be doing is identifying risks to our important/critical applications and finding ways to eliminate or at least mitigate the risks where economically feasible. One of the major risks that I see with Exchange Server 2007, as well as previous versions of Exchange, is losing my production database … Continue reading Which Exchange Server 2007 Server Cluster Type Should I use, CCR or SCC?

I want to end the work day on a positive note. Yes, there are a couple of things about Exchange Server 2007 that tick me off, but overall, I love the product. I just wanted to take a couple of minutes to mention some of my favorite features. Databases – The change to a single database is a big plus in my mind. Also, I love that we can now have up to 50 Storage Groups and up to 50 Databases when using Enterprise Edition. With the larger number of databases, we can now have smaller and faster databases. We … Continue reading Wonderful Changes in Exchange Server 2007

I have been thinking about this a great deal lately. I, as I said in my previous blog post, I am pretty concerned at the way a CCR implementation is supposed to be moved using the Exchange Management Shell (EMS). Scott Schnoll, somebody I respect greatly, posted on the Exchange Team blog that it is recommended to always use EMS to move the clustered mailbox server from one node to another. He says that you can use the Cluster Administrator tool, but that using Cluster Administrator is not recommended because:  These methods do not validate the health or state of the … Continue reading More on Managing Exchange Server 2007 CCR

Scott Schnoll posted on the Microsoft Exchange Team Blog the other day regarding the proper tools to use when managing an Exchange Server 2007 Cluster. Yes, there is some confusion. If you research the topic on Microsoft’s website, documentation clearly says to use the Move-ClusteredMailboxServer cmdlet. Most of us in the industry just took that and ran with it. But, there is a problem here. Every other single application that runs on Windows Server 2003 server clustering can be fully managed using the Cluster Administrator tool or the cluster.exe command line. Exchange Server 2007 is a bit different when dealing … Continue reading Issue: Managing an Exchange Server 2007 Cluster

In order to keep the number of servers down in a high availability environment, administrators have been looking at using Network Load Balancing (NLB) for CAS and then co-locating the HT role on each node of the NLB cluster to also provide high availability for the HT role. This configuration can work, and it really is not too difficult to configure. It is extremely important to note that using NLB to load balance the default SMTP receive connectors (using port 25) is not supported and is completely unnecessary since they are load balanced for all intra-Exchange communications like HT to HT … Continue reading Exchange Server 2007 Hub Transport (HT) and Client Access Service (CAS) on the Same NLB Cluster – Updated Jan 9, 2008