Thoughtsofanidlemind's Blog

Tag: Exchange 2010

  • First appearance of an Exchange 2010 Messaging Appliance

    On January 19, 2011 HP and Microsoft announced the HP E5000 Messaging System for Microsoft Exchange. The name is a mouthful but the important point is the creation of a solution designed to make Exchange 2010 easier to deploy. This product is part of a set of four appliances that…

  • Beware the effects of enabling an Exchange 2010 archive mailbox

    The introduction of archive mailboxes is one of the major new features offered by Exchange 2010. Matters are substantially improved in Exchange 2010 SP1 as it supports the separation of a user’s primary mailbox and their archive mailbox across different databases, giving administrators the ability to consider schemes such as…

  • Exchange in the Cloud

    I wrote this text as a “web-only chapter” for Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Inside Out, (also available at Amazon.co.uk and as a Kindle edition, with other e-book formats for the book are available from the O’Reilly web site). Unfortunately the chapter doesn’t seem to have appeared on the O’Reilly web site…

  • Installing an Exchange 2010 Roll-up Update

    Microsoft announced roll-up update 2 (RU2) for Exchange 2010 SP1 amongst the set of updates for different versions of Exchange that the CXP team released in December 2010. I believe that CXP means “customer experience”; in previous times this team might have been known as “ongoing support” or “maintenance engineering”.…

  • On the naming of DAGs

    Most Exchange administrators, even those who don’t have much hands-on experience with Exchange 2010, are now aware that the Database Availability Group (DAG) feature is built on Windows 2008 failover clusters. Exchange 2010 does an excellent job of hiding the complexities of Windows clusters and in normal operation you aren’t…

  • One or two NICs?

    During the development of Exchange 2010, Microsoft originally required that any mailbox server participating in a Database Availability Group (DAG) had to be equipped with at least two NICs (Network Interface Controllers). One NIC handles “MAPI” or client traffic; the other handles the replication traffic generated by Exchange to keep…

  • Exchange 2010 SP1 Store Driver throttling

    The Store Driver is a very important Exchange component. Running on all hub transport servers, its function is to provide the mechanism to deliver inbound messages to mailbox databases. Unlike Exchange 2003 and previous versions, all messages go through a hub transport server, even if they are sent between two…

  • Tweaking the Mailbox Replication Service configuration file

    The Mailbox Replication Service (MRS) is an essential component of any Exchange 2010 deployment as it controls the movement of mailboxes between databases. MRS runs on all Exchange 2010 Client Access Servers (CAS). MRS gets involved in migrations from Exchange 2003 or 2007 to Exchange 2010 because moving mailboxes is…

  • Clearing out mailbox move requests

    After you’ve run Exchange 2010 for a while, you’ve probably moved a few mailboxes around and have accumulated some completed mailbox move requests. When it begins to move a mailbox, the Mailbox Replication Service (MRS) stamps the user object for the mailbox with six attributes that it uses to indicate…

  • Thoughts on lagged database copies

    One of the best things about delivering training to smart people is the questions that they pose after you introduce a topic. During the recent Exchange 2010 Maestro seminars that Paul Robichaux and I delivered in Boston and Anaheim, I took the lead in talking about the Database Availability Group…