One of the great uses of Azure is to host VMs which can address a number of business requirements. While we can install Exchange 2013 on an Azure VM, this is generally not the most cost effect way to have mailboxes running in a cloud. Office 365 is the recommended option to leverage cloud mailboxes since it has pricing and feature advantages. Some customers may still wish to do deploy Azure Exch… Read the rest “Slow Exchange Server Boot In Azure VM”
The question of: I have just ran New-DatabaseAvailabilityGroup and I do not see a File Share Witness (FSW) folder or cluster resources. Where are all my Database Availability Group (DAG) and cluster resources…? What went wrong?
This is a common scenario when an admin is building a DAG, and during the process they check to see that what has changed on the servers. One thing that that causes a false … Read the rest “Dude, Where’s My File Share Witness”
Running scripts to start and stop services has been a task long associated with Exchange. For those who pre-date Exchange 2000, do you remember the fun issues with the increased WaitToKillServiceTimeout value? By default in ye olde days HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlWaitToKillServiceTimeout was 20,000 ms (20 secs). Installing Exchange increased that to 600,000 ms (10 minutes). … Read the rest “Script To Start Exchange Services”
In several recent engagements, there has been some interesting discussions about how to configure the CAS namespaces for the Exchange Web Services virtual directory. Specifically this was around the configuration of the InternalNLBBypassUrl in Exchange 2013 and 2016. Since this was set on Exchange 2007/2010 servers, there seems to be a desire to change it on 2013/2016 servers when troub… Read the rest “Busting The Exchange InternalNLBBypassURL Myth”
Exchange 2016 CU2 has been released to the Microsoft download centre! Exchange 2016 has a different servicing strategy than Exchange 2007/2010 and utilises Cumulative Updates (CUs) rather than the Rollup Updates (RU/UR) which were used previously. CUs are a complete installation of Exchange 2016 and can be used to install a fresh server or to update a previously installed o… Read the rest “Exchange 2016 CU2 Released”
Exchange 2013 CU13 has been released to the Microsoft download centre! Exchange 2013 has a different servicing strategy than Exchange 2007/2010 and utilises Cumulative Updates (CUs) rather than the Rollup Updates (RU/UR) which were used previously. CUs are a complete installation of Exchange 2013 and can be used to install a fresh server or to update a previously installed … Read the rest “Exchange 2013 CU13 Released”
Patch Tuesday this week heralded the arrival of Rollup Update Rollup 14 (RU14) for Exchange Server 2010 Service Pack 3. RU14 is the latest rollup of customer fixes available for Exchange Server 2010. The release contains a security fix to address the issue in Microsoft Security Bulletin MS16-079, in addition to the previous fixes in RU13 and older. Since security updates are delivered via a RU f… Read the rest “Exchange 2010 SP3 RU14 Released”
This is a quick tactical script to help Exchange administrators when resetting Exchange Monitoring mailboxes. Exchange 2013 introduced managed availability which is responsible for evaluating the health of Exchange 2013 and 2016 Exchange servers. Yes it does also probe downlevel servers, but let’s not get bogged down in that in this post. In order to do the synthetic user tests, mail and tests … Read the rest “Script To Automate Exchange Health Manager Service For Monitoring Mailbox Reset”
This is a tale of when a “quick” review of CAS namespaces quickly went off at a tangent. When working with the messaging administrator, let’s call him “Mike” to protect the innocent, he showed me the below for his Exchange 2013 server. He was quite happy with the config, but that bubble was about to be popped. Note that the ShowMailboxVirtualDirectories parameter has been added to allow us to se… Read the rest “Setting Backend Exchange 2013 / 2016 Virtual Directory”
In some of the lab environments provided to me, the base Windows image has pre-set WSUS updates servers. When I then move the lab VMs to a different network, the original WSUS servers are no longer available, and I typically point to Microsoft Update or a different WSUS server.
In the case of pointing to Microsoft Update, I wanted to delete the initial WSUS registry values. In my case, these are … Read the rest “Script To Remove Windows Update Server Values From Registry”