This is very, very cool: the Exchange Best Practices Analyzer is a new tool from Microsoft that checks your Exchange infrastructure for good design practices. To be more specific, the tool investigates various parameters (including some from AD, a few perfmon counters, the IIS metabase, and your DNS) to see how well your operational configuration conforms to generally accepted best practices.
ExBPA’s purpose is to automate some of the basic health-and-sanity checks that an experienced Exchange administrator, consultant, or PSS engineer might do when evaluating an unfamiliar environment. It’s not designed to find every possible mistake you can make (heaven knows there are plenty); instead, it’s intended to help you quickly find well-known misconfigurations and administrator errors. It checks the protocol configurations for SMTP, POP, IMAP, LDAP, and HTTP; GC/DC accessibility; hop counts and routing latency for message routing; the packet size and contents of the link state table; and basic DNS configuraton stuff.
You can tweak the rules to control which specific areas ExBPA checks for, which is handy. ExBPA generates XML report files that you can parse yourself, or import into another instance of ExBPA on another machine. One output is a list of issues that the tool found– this is similar in concept to the problem report you get from MBSA, and it serves the same purpose of allowing you to quickly pinpoint and fix whatever needs fixing. It’s a very useful tool, and it nicely complements the other free diagnostic and management tools that Microsoft’s been making available. Hats off to Paul Bowden and his team for getting this released!
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