Paul's Down-Home Page

This week Microsoft held the 2011 MVP Summit, which Tony ably summarized here. I wasn’t able to attend, which is a real shame, as seeing my MVP peers and the many Microsoft Exchange team members who come to the summit to teach, debate, and gather information from and with the MVPs is usually one of the highlights of my year. However, despite the fact that Tony, Brian, and I were not able to sit down together, we are still making good progress on developing the revised content for the 2011 series of Maestro events.

For the 2010 event’s, we focused on covering Exchange 2010 SP1. We are continuing that focus for the 2011 event, even though common sense tells us that SP2 will likely be forthcoming sometime this year. Microsoft has not said anything publicly about the release schedule for, or the likely contents of, SP2, so it doesn’t make sense for us to try to include it in our planning. What we can do, however, is refocus on some areas of SP1 that have proved to be particularly interesting from a technical standpoint or particularly challenging for people who are deploying Exchange 2010.

For my part, that means rethinking the way we approach the material covering the client access server. CAS is a complicated topic. There’s just no getting around that fact, but based on feedback from attendees and the kinds of questions I see posted in online fora, I think we can do a more focused job of covering the things that people have the most difficulty understanding. This is especially true for people who are migrating from Exchange 2003, which is a much less complicated client access story. (Having said that, I am not planning on stealing Greg Taylor’s elephant jokes. I don’t have the accent for it!)

I also want to change the approach I take to RBAC to include more demonstrations; we’ll probably also revamp the RBAC lab a bit. Although RBAC is a tremendously useful feature, it really does require some experimentation and hands on usage to really make it click for most people.

Finally, although I am pretty pleased with the way the unified messaging coverage stands right now, I would like to include some more demos and labs. With that in mind, I will be approaching a few hardware vendors to see if we can get them to loan us some demo hardware. Ideally, I would like to have an optional lab for UM that has students set up an UM topology that allows them to experience the thrill that comes when the phone rings and you hear “Welcome to Exchange unified messaging.”

Once we finish wrangling over the exact contents of the course, we’ll post an updated agenda on the Penton registration website. We’ve also followed the lead of practically every other company and event in the entire world and set up a Facebook page for the 2011 Maestro series. I hope that we will see attendees who have registered and people who are considering it congregate around this page to share comments and feedback. For events like this, when the attendees get a chance to communicate before the event, increases the value to them by increasing the interpersonal connectivity of their time in the classroom. (That is one of the major advantages of the way the MCM Exchange training is currently done, something which I will have more to say about in a future post.)

Good news: the official registration site for the 2011 Exchange Maestro events is now open for business.

We have three upcoming events: San Diego on 3-5 May, London on 13-15 June, and Greenwich, CT on 26-28 October. (Tony answers the question "why Greenwich?", as well as some other notes, here.)

As someone who’s been presenting deeply technical multi-day events for a number of years, the second time is always the hardest. Fred Brooks called this the second-system effect: the first time you design something complex, you learn a great deal, and the things you learn often emerge the second time around… not always with positive results.

In this case, Tony, Brian, and I have a lot of solid feedback from our attendees, so we know what the Boston and Anaheim attendees would like to see changed in future events. We also have some ideas about where the larger Exchange community and marketplace are going; this helps us update the content so that it remains timely and relevant. We will have no problem updating and improving the content; I hope in particular to add some unified messaging-related labs to give attendees more hands-on time.

Speaking of hands-on, one of the most consistent pieces of feedback we got was there weren’t enough hours in the day to do the labs and cover the lecture material. This is by design; we want attendees to work on the labs on their own during breaks and at night, coming to us with questions when they arise, then take the labs back to their workplace where they can dig into them without having to divide their attention between the material we’re presenting and the labs. The whole point of these workshops is that they are richly technical, so it’s important that attendees be able to focus 100% on the new material.

A couple of eagle-eyed readers (hello, Mr. McBee) noted that the London Maestro event is co-located, and overlaps the schedule of, the new Connections Powered by Microsoft event. It was significantly less expensive for us to combine the logistics for the two shows; shipping, customs, food and beverage services, and so on, but I want to make clear that there’s no overlap of content between the two events.

Think of the Connections series like a visit to your local food court. You can shop around and have a little of this plus a little of that… a couple of sessions on Exchange, maybe a little Lync on the side, a smidgen of Windows, and SharePoint for dessert. Maestro is, by contrast, like a six-course dinner at a fine restaurant: a richer, deeper, more complex experience that, admittedly, takes more time and money. The two complement each other nicely, but both stand alone.

To abandon the restaurant analogy, the content that we’ll be presenting at Maestro is both broader and technically deeper than the sessions available at Connections. That’s because Tony and I are able to use our knowledge of Exchange and the broader industry to pick out the most useful, most interesting, and least-known aspects of Exchange 2010 design, deployment, and operations and present them to you on a platter, so to speak. (All right; I didn’t entirely abandon the analogy…)

Registration is open now for the San Diego and Greenwich events, and we expect it to open shortly for London as well. Stay tuned for future details, including a few neat new steps we’re taking to help those interested in the Maestro classes get the most out of their attendance…

This week I had the unique opportunity to spend some quality time with two of my favorite people: Tony Redmond and Brian Desmond. The occasion was that we were invited by Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft to take an advance look at their new E5000 messaging system before its formal unveiling. Our goal was to spend some time with the program managers on the E5000 team learning about the system and experimenting with it a bit. The kicker: the whole process was videotaped.

Of course, nothing is as simple as it first seems. Tony, Brian, and I thought that “videotaped” meant “hand-held camcorders.” We were in for a rather rude surprise when we were greeted by Jenny, our makeup artist:

She wasn’t rude in the least, but boy, were we surprised to see her. Jenny quickly got our makeup on and onto the set, where we found no fewer than four large, dolly-mounted video cameras, each with a camera operator, plus a sound guy, a director, and assorted other studio folks. We very quickly got used to their presence and sat down with Dean Steadman and Karl Robinson of Hewlett-Packard and Jeff Mealiffe of Microsoft to talk about the specifics of the E5000 series.

Tony’s writeup gives a good summary of our discussions. Going in, I was of the opinion that having a solution that combines two DAG nodes in a single physical enclosure was useful, but that it was lacking in three key areas: it still needs load balancing; it introduces the potential for the E5000 to be a single point of failure, and it doesn’t include Exchange server licenses so it isn’t really a complete solution.

However, once I had a chance to talk things over with Dean, Jeff, and Karl, I started to come around.

First, load balancing. Yes, you still need it. In this respect the E5000 is no different than any other set of Exchange 2010 servers. I’d love to see load balancing integrated into a future revision of the E5000 series, as I think the customers who will be most interested in the idea of an all-in-one appliance are least likely to want to deal with the complexities of CAS load balancing.

Second, HA. It’s true that if you put an E5000 in your server rack that a site-level failure (including mains power, fire, flood, and so on) can kill both nodes at once– but this is no different than the situation faced by the majority of Exchange 2003 sites now, the very customers at which the E5000 is targeted. Replacing a set of Exchange 2003 servers with a set of E5000s means that customers can not only take advantage of Exchange 2010’s I/O improvements to reduce the total number of servers, but that they can also use DAGs to reduce the risk of data loss from a disk, controller, or server failure. Where business reasons require protection against site-level failure, it’s a simple matter to drop one or more additional E5000s in a remote site and join them to the existing DAG. The more I think about it, the more I like the idea of using building block-style hardware like E5000s as the basis of building remote sites. There’s quite a benefit to standardization of hardware, software, and operations.

Third, license bundling. Because the E5000 will primarily be sold through HP’s channel partners, I’d expect that customers who need Exchange server licenses or CALs will be able to order them at the same time as their E5000 units. The E5000 Quick Deployment tool won’t proceed with installation until you enter a valid Exchange PID. This is required because some models of the E5000 line will be configured with more than 5 databases, and to prevent unpleasantness the installer wants to verify that the PID is for the Enterprise Edition of Exchange. Making things a bit more complicated, from a business standpoint, Exchange server licenses have never been previously bundled in the way that Windows Server licenses have. I’m hopeful that we’ll see the option to bundle all the needed licenses in with the product. (In fact, I had a great discussion with the Microsoft folks about the desirability of an in-app purchasing system for CALs– imagine being able to buy additional CALs or server licenses as easily as you buy songs on iTunes or points on Xbox LIVE.)

The deployment experience is quite smooth; all of the questions normally spread throughout the Exchange setup process are consolidated onto a single page. Once you answer them, the setup tool does the rest. Bear in mind that you have to complete installation on the first blade before you can do anything with the second blade. Don’t give in to the temptation of starting setup on blade 2 before it’s done on blade 1. Trust me on this.

However, if you want to do things like pull out disk drives or even blades while the E5000 is running, go right ahead. I got to experiment with doing exactly this and it was quite a lot of fun. Bear in mind that there are two hot spares allocated for each blade, so if you pull a spare nothing will happen. However, pulling a data drive triggers a rebuild of the mirror pair containing the affected DAG, and then pulling another drive causes a DAG failover, just as you’d expect.

Tony, Brian, and I left the HP folks with quite a bit of feedback on every aspect of the E5000, but that’s why they asked us to come. The basic product is quite solid, and I expect it to be warmly received in its target market of organizations with 500-3000 mailboxes. It’s definitely a major upgrade over what customers in that segment have with Exchange 2003. On to March 1st, the official release date!