Items specifically related to Exchange 2016
With the release of this month's Exchange updates, there are changes to not only the installation prerequisites but also the installation parameters.
These changes break down into two main areas. What you must ensure is installed prior to installing this or a subsequent CU, and secondly that the command line options have been updated along with the corresponding GUI.
To summarise:
Exchange 2016 CU22 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 CU22 Released”
This is a topic that still comes up when doing email investigations. After there has been an issue, we want to perform analysis to determine what may have happened any potentially why certain security controls did not act the way we expected.
With email one example would be around the audit information collected when an Exchange Online transport rule acts upon a message.
It is common to see that ad… Read the rest “Exchange Online Transport Rule Audit”
The Exchange team just posted that the September 2021 updates are going to be slightly delayed. The priority will always be to ship quality updates rather than force it out to meet a specific day.
You can look at the announcement, and Nino's additional comments here:
Delay of September 2021 Cumulative Update for Exchange Server - Microsoft Tech Community
This means that we have a little bit more tim… Read the rest “Is Exchange Fully Updated? If Not, Go Update Now”
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”
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”
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”