Exchange 2016 CU21 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 one. Exchange 2013 h… Read the rest “Exchange 2016 CU21 Released”
Finally we have good news for all fans of the Remote Desktop Connection Manager (RDCMan) tool! It has risen from the ashes, and is now part of Sysinternals.
Over the years RDCMan built up a strong user base as it was a simple but powerful utility to manage connections to multiple machines. Sure, if you have three or four servers to manage you can get by with saved .rdp files or use the Universa… Read the rest “Remote Desktop Connection Manager Download (RDCMan) 2.81”
There have been some recent feature additions to Azure AD Connect. If we look at the Azure AD Connection Version History after a brief hiatus, there are newer versions as of March 2021. At the time of witing, the latest version is 1.6.4.0 and was released on the 31st May 2021.
There are multiple new features and changes in this build.
As more people are starting to use the Exchange Online V2 module (yay!), there are some new and different issues appearing.
In this case, the command to connect to the tenant was failing when App-Only authentication was used. A certificate was installed onto the machine where PowerShell was running.
The command used is shown followed by a glorious error.
Error Acquiring Token:
System.Exception:… Read the rest “Exchange Online App-Only Authentication Error AADSTS70011 Invalid Scope”
The question "Does Exchange setup automatically run /PrepareSchema?" was something that came up many times in the recent Hafnium remediation activities. This was due to many customers not updating Exchange for multiple years, and being extremely behind on updates. In order to get Exchange updated, it was necessary to perform multiple steps in the upgrade process. Sometimes the /PrepareSchema ta… Read the rest “Does Exchange Setup Automatically Run PrepareSchema?”
When running /PrepareSchema in an Exchange organisation with an existing Exchange Hybrid deployment you may run into an error which states:
"A hybrid deployment with Office 365 has been detected. Please ensure that you are running setup with the /TenantOrganizationConfig switch"
This is shown below:
A similar issue will occur if you specify only /PrepareAD
Note that the /TenantOrganizationConfig switc… Read the rest “TenantOrganizationConfig Required When Preparing Active Directory”
The days change, but sometimes the issues stay the same. This is a redux of an existing post where there was an issue back in 2016 when I was not able to easily re-create a VM in a different Availability Set. As you can see in Create Azure RM VM Using Existing VHD – 250 Hello (rmilne.ca) PowerShell was used to re-create the VM as it allowed all of the resources to be specified.
The original VM was… Read the rest “Create Azure Az VM Using Existing UnManaged VHD”
When installing Exchange updates, I place the server into maintenance mode and restart it prior to installing the actual Exchange update. This is due to have being burned many times by other teams or third party tools that conveniently "overlooked" the fact that their setup required the machine to restart. It also provides an opportunity for issues caused by those third party tools to surface be… Read the rest “Unable to Run Exchange Setup–Pending Reboot From a Previous Installation”
The below is one of the cases where the "Zen of Exchange Management" is what fixes the issue. I've been know to say that sometimes you just need to wait for Exchange to do what it needs to do. To pass the time, feel free to adopt a meditation pose and emit calm and peaceful humming noises. This is Zen.
After remediating multiple other i… Read the rest “Exchange Managed Availability State Unknown”
This is a quick heads up for those who may be deploying Exchange 2016 in the near future. If you are currently on Exchange 2016 CU19 there are no AD schema changes required, but there are AD changes. The former is performed by /PrepareSchema, and the latter by /PrepareAD.
You can take a look at the history of Exchange 2016 schema changes in Active Directory schema changes in Exchange Server and th… Read the rest “Exchange 2016 CU20 PrepareAD Required”