Tuesday 30 March 2010

Microsoft Whitepaper for Large Mailbox Support in Exchange 2010

Available here for download: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=e3303d34-af6c-4108-861b-dc05f9cf3e76


In Summary

Keeping e-mail on the Exchange Server instead of allowing it to be scattered in Outlook Data Files (.PST files) helps reduce the risk of data loss, improve regulatory compliance, and increase productivity. With most email systems, the main barrier to implementing large mailboxes is the perceived cost and complexity of storage systems. Microsoft® Exchange Server 2010 is specifically designed to overcome these barriers without sacrificing performance or reliability.

This whitepaper talks about how Exchange Server 2010 is using storage more efficiently. It lays out the basics of disk performance, how IO makes a difference for Exchange Server and why larger disks are more efficient - resulting in larger mailbox capacities with Exchange 2010

An overview of resiliency with Database Availability Groups (DAG) explains how replication can be used to deliver robust storage systems at a lower cost.


Large Mailbox Performance – the User Experience

"While the management issues of larger mailboxes have been addressed by Exchange Server 2010, users still need to have acceptable performance. Larger mailboxes tend to contain more items. To ensure users had acceptable performance with Exchange Server 2007, it was recommended that folders contain no more than 20,000 items each. Thanks to database and indexing improvements, Exchange Server 2010 provides good user performance with folders containing up to 100,000 items."

"For users that want to reduce the number of active e-mail items in their primary mailbox, Exchange Server 2010 introduces integrated e-mail archiving and retention policies. This includes a new Personal Archive—a specialized mailbox associated with a user's primary mailbox. When using the archive, all e-mail data is still stored on the Exchange Server. The combination of the user's primary and archive mailboxes can be considered together as the user's large mailbox."


 

Dan
http://twitter.com/dan_germain

Monday 22 March 2010

Join me at Microsoft London Victoria for an overview of Exchange 2010

Registration is free, sign up here.

The event covers Hosted Exchange 2010, but also covers Hosted CRM4 and Hosted Sharepoint.

Oliver Moazzezi

MVP - Exchange Server




Thursday 18 March 2010

TechNet Webcast: Exchange Server 2010 Management and Operations

I had the honour of presenting a TechNet Webcast last week, and the presentation is now available to download on demand.

Grab it here

Event Overview

Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 includes new capabilities that make the operation of your Exchange environment more efficient. Attend this webcast to discover how Microsoft made the Exchange Management Console more powerful, extended the reach of PowerShell, made it easier to delegate management tasks, and built Web-based tools to make the job of managing Exchange easier than ever. Join us to learn more.


Presenter: Oliver Moazzezi, Technical Solutions Specialist, Cobweb Solutions


Oliver Moazzezi specializes in hosted Microsoft Exchange. Since 2001, Oliver has worked for Cobweb Solutions, which currently hosts 50,000+ Exchange mailboxes for nearly 4,000 customers with complementary server products, including Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4, Windows SharePoint Services 3, and Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2. Oliver is actively working on a private cloud platform and the migration of on-premise technologies to it.

You can grab the other webcasts in the series here




Oliver Moazzezi

MVP - Exchange Server



Friday 5 March 2010

Disabling features in the ECP

The official Microsoft Exchange Blog has a great article on RBAC. Follow this link here


Oliver Moazzezi

MVP - Exchange Server



Available Now: Update Rollup 2 for Exchange Server 2010 (KB979611)

Available here:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=6d3ae3e0-3982-46d6-9e9c-7d7d63fae565&displaylang=en

Update Rollup 2 for Exchange Server 2010 resolves issues that were found in Exchange Server 2010 since the software was released. This update rollup is highly recommended for all Exchange Server 2010 customers.

For a list of changes that are included in this update rollup, see KB979611.


 


 

Wednesday 3 March 2010

Using Remote Powershell to administer Exchange 2010

So you fancy administering your Exchange 2010 Org without installing the Exchange Management Tools on your workstation huh? Read on..

First you must ensure you have WinRM and Powershell 2.0 on your workstation. This is present by default in Windows 2008 R2 and Windows 7, however for XP, Vista or Server editions of 2003 or 2008 you can download the required Windows Management Framework install files here.

Once installed fire up Powershell. It doesn't have to be run in Administrator mode for this to work. To make things easy lets cache our credentials

$user = Get-Credential

This binds the credentials we supply to be user later using the $user.















Once that is done we will bind a new session to a variable. I am performing the following over HTTP due to constraints in my lab.

$session = New-PSSession -configurationname microsoft.exchange -connectionuri http://yourcasserver/powershell -credential $user

The above binds the New-PSSession cmdlet with our settings to $session, you can also see we supply our credentials for this using our existing $user variable we have already made.














We can now import the session

Import-PSSession $session

Hopefully by now you will see how we are linking these together :-) we are calling the Import-PSSession cmdlet to our $session variable.

Once you hit return you will see it import the Exchange cmdlets from from Exchange.














We are now done and we have loaded the Exchange 2010 cmdlets.













I can now use them, for example below I have used the Get-Mailbox cmdlet against my test mailbox.














There are two things to note however:

1. If you have any issues with execution policies in Powershell ensure you have set Powershell to allow for remote signed scripts. To check, Get-ExecutionPolicy, to change to remote signed, Set-ExecutionPolicy remoteenabled













2. You must have Remote Powershell enabled for your user, by default this is only enabled for the account that installed Exchange, so to enable it perform the following on one of your Exchange 2010 servers

Set-User -identity youruserhere -RemotePowershellEnabled $true









Oliver Moazzezi

MVP - Exchange Server