Techibee.com

People who got their hands really wet with exchange 2007/2010 has a good amount idea about Exchange back pressure. Basically it is a kind of situation where Microsoft Exchange stops receiving emails. This is a new condition introduced in Exchange 2007 and improved in Exchange 2010 for better handling of emails.

Exchange server feels this back pressure when it is out of resources. This resource outage can be of two types 1) Disk out of space 2) High Memory utilization

See this video to understand it better.

[Video Source : www.insidetheregistry.com]

If Exchange 2007 queue is growing fast and you want to find who is the top contributor, below code helps you. You need to run this code from a exchange management shell since the code involves Exchange cmdlets like get-message.

Find top 10 senders in Exchange Queue:

$senders = @{}
$queuemessages = Get-message -Resultsize unlimited
$queuemessages | % { $senders[$_.FromAddress] = $senders[$_.FromAddress] + 1 }
$senders.getenumerator() | sort value -last 10

Similarly you can filter the Get-Message output by recipients to get the top recipients.

For one of our client, we have received an alert stating that “The Microsoft Exchange Information Store service terminated with service-specific error 0 (0×0)”.

The error seems to simple and everyone would just suggest to start the service back. But the root cause was different.

One of our colleague started working on the alert and here is the chronology of steps followed in resolving the issue. found that the Information Store service was in stopped state and started the service.  Started verifying queues , encoutered error stating that “Default SMTP Virtual Server is unavailable”. Verified and found that SMTP Service was in started mode.

Escalated call to me and I’ve started working on the issue.

Upon further analysis, found that the SMTP Virtual Instance was stopped in ESM (Exchange System Manager). Tried to start the instance, encountered error stating that “Queue Directory is corrupted , hence the instance could not be started”.

Error logged in Eventlog & Error pop-up when accessed Queue Directory from explorer.

Executed following Steps to resolve issue:

1. Uninstalled existing Antivirus (AVG)

2. Executed chkdsk on volume in which the exchange database is stored. Found disk errors.

3. Executed chkdsk /f on the volume and restarted the server

4. Created new Queue Directory and pointed the path from ESM to the new folder.

5. Started SMTP Virtual Instance & Information Store Services.

Mails started flowing fine.

Are you facing frequent time out issues with your exchange server? Your problem might be related to the components described in http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2010/05/14/454877.aspx.

The first Exchange 2010 ebook I have seen.! I had glimpse at the book and it has topics a general Exchange admin look for and a good stage to start the journey with Exchange 2010.

This was written by a member (Jaap Wesselius) in http://draft.blogger.com/www.sysadmin-network.com and published through redgate.

Here is the TOC if you want to take a look and download the complete book from reg-gate site

Happy Learning…,
Sitaram Pamarthi

Go through this video to have initial understanding of products stated in subject. Forefront team, PM is explaining about them at http://edge.technet.com/Media/FPE-vs-FOPE-and-Exchange-2010–Secure-messaging-with-Forefront/

FPE RC for Exchange 2010 is available for download at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=b8a7d36f-cc8d-4335-ae60-8f27c48f3a37&displaylang=en#filelist

Happy Learning,
Sitaram Pamarthi

DAG(Database Availability Group) is a new feature provided in Exchange 2010 to facilitate automatic database level recovery. In Exchange 2003/2007, there is no option to recover a single damaged/corrupted mailbox store alone than restoring the DB from backup. In this case, I will loose all the data added to the store after backup. This feature(DAG) of Exchange 2010 avoids this data loss and provides a seem less and automated recovery with up-to-date information regardless of when you last backed up the store.

Few points I have to highlight about DAG

• A DAG can consists of 16 exchange 2010 servers max. Which means that any database in these 16 exchange servers can be failed over to another server in the same DAG incase of curruption. The failover time is as low as 30 seconds and transparent to users.
• DAGs use continuous replication and a subset of Windows Failover Clustering technologies to provide continuous mailbox availability. So you need to install this manually on Exchange 2010 server or it will get installed automatically when you add it to DAG
• It’s needs a file share witness share to maintain the availability of Exchange servers in DAG
• DAG configuration has some similarities with Cluster configuration like, CNO creation, multiple network cards for exchange hear beat data and public data, common IP to access DAG CNO, etc

Reference links:

Technet
MsexchangeTeam (it has videos; don’t miss them)

Happy Learning..,
Sitaram Pamarthi

When I heard about it in Microsoft Tech-ed India 2009 session, I got a feeling that it is a very big feature that every one should look into it. Though I couldn’t understand it properly in that session, I did some search/research after coming back to my desk to know what it is and below are the points I collected about it.

#1. First of all it’s a not great feature that every corporate will get benefited largely. But one can enable this feature on requirement basis looking at the functionality it has
#2. It gives a secondary mailbox for every user which will appear under your normal mailbox in outlook/OWA. No additional configuration is needed, if the archive feature is enabled outlook detects it automatically and adds it into your configuration.
#3. You can migrate all your PST data to this archive mailbox and you can access the data when you are in roaming. You can migrate your PSTs by just doing drag drop operation onto archive mailbox
#4. You can configure retention policies in primary mailbox to move the items into archive mailbox.
#5. You can maintain separate quotas for your primary and archive mailboxes. This results in high performance and speed of your primary mailbox while you store your large amount of mails in archive mailbox.
#6. Search across primary and secondary(archive) mailboxes is possible
#7. You can either choose to keep primary and archive mailboxes on same store or in different stores based on your requirement and frequency of archive access.

I haven’t tested these features any lab environment as my E2010 lab is not ready yet. I will post more and correct my self if required after doing so.

See this blog entry for nice explanation of archive feature and few FAQs.

Happy learning..,
Sitaram Pamarthi.

Microsoft has released it’s next version of messaging system, Exchange 2010(beta) a couple of days back.

This is a pretty stunning news for many of M$ customers who just completed their migration to E2k7 or in middle of doing it. Download and have a look at it if you are interested. I am yet to go through the details of it. I will post more after my readings
Reference : http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2009/04/14/451032.aspx
~Sitaram