Tag Archives: Exchange 2010

2016/09/30 · 17:02

Microsoft Exchange engineering and cloud-scale

The Exchange team (or at least Perry Clarke, its fearless leader) has been known to describe Exchange Online as “the gateway drug to the cloud.” But how did that come to pass?

This week at Ignite, I was lucky enough to have dinner with some folks from the Exchange product team and a very, very large customer where we discussed the various ways in which Exchange engineering has blazed a trail the rest of Microsoft’s server products have eventually followed. After a bracing Twitter discussion this afternoon with @swiftonsecurity and some of her other followers, I thought it would be fun to put together a partial list of some of the things we discussed to illustrate how the Exchange team has built a stairway to heaven, or an elevator to the cloud, or something like that.

Let’s start with PowerShell. Love it or hate it, it is here, so we all have to deal with it. In 2007, the idea that Exchange would be built on PS was both revolutionary and, to many, revolting, but it allowed Microsoft to do several important things (not all of which shipped in Exchange 2007, but all of which are critical to cloud operations):

  • Greatly improve testability, both for the developers themselves but also for administrators, who now got a suite of protocol and endpoint-related tests they could run as part of troubleshooting– critically important when you have to troubleshoot in a global network of data centers hosting tens of millions of mailboxes
  • Fully enable role-based access control, also critical for cloud deployments where customers want to control who can do what with their data
  • Finally decouple the presentation layer of the UI (EMC, EAC, etc) from business logic
  • Massively improve the tools for scripting, including enabling very large-scale bulk operations– an obvious requirement for a cloud-scale service

Requiring PowerShell was a bold move by the Exchange team but one which has both paid off hugely and one that’s been echoed by the Windows, SharePoint, SQL Server and Skype teams, all of whom depend on it for managing their own cloud services. (See also: the Microsoft Graph APIs.)

Then there’s storage performance. In ancient days, getting scale from Exchange pretty much required the use of SANs due to Exchange’s IO requirements. Now, thanks to the IOPS diet imposed by Exchange engineering, it doesn’t. Tony does his usual excellent job of summarizing the actual reductions. Summary: Exchange 2016 requires roughly 96% fewer IOPS than Exchange 2003 did. There have been a ton of storage performance improvements in Exchange’s sister products (notably SQL) but those have their own stories that I’m not competent to tell. The relentless drive to cut IOPS requirements was one of the biggest enablers for Exchange Online, since controlling storage provisioning costs is critical for any type of scaled cloud service.

Of course, data protection is critical too. Exchange moved from having a single monolithic database to one with separate property and MIME databases (Exchange 2000) then to having software-based database replication with clustering (Exchange 2007) to shared-nothing, fully-replicated active/passive database replication (Exchange 2010 and later). Keeping multiple separate database copies (including lagged copies) enables all sorts of DR and HA scenarios that previously had required SANs. The ability to reliably use cheap JBOD disks, which thanks to Moore’s Law have embiggened nicely during Exchange’s lifetime, has been a key enabler for Exchange Online.

Then there’s a bunch of other architectural changes and improvements that are really only interesting to Exchange nerds. For the latest example, I present “read from passive,” but there’s also all the stuff covered by the Preferred Architecture.

Oh, I almost forgot: managed availability gives ExO a fair degree of self-healing, although its behavior sometimes surprises on-prem admins who see it do things on their behalf unexpectedly.

Oh, and let’s not forget the conversion of all the Exchange codebase to managed code– that was an important accelerator for the move to the cloud, as well as serving as a lighthouse for other product groups with code of similar vintage.

There are more examples, I’m sure, but these should get the point across– there’s been a steady stream of architectural changes in the nearly 20 years since Exchange 4.0 shipped that have led directly to the capability, power, and reliability of Exchange Online– which really has been the gateway drug for getting Microsoft’s customers to Office 365.

 

 

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2014/05/15 · 06:00

Exchange Server and Azure: “not now” vs “never”

Wow, look what I found in my drafts folder: an old post.

Lots of Exchange admins have been wondering whether Windows Azure can be used to host Exchange. This is to be expected for two reasons. First, Microsoft has been steadily raising the volume of Azure-related announcements, demos, and other collateral material. TechEd 2014 was a great example: there were several Azure-related announcements, including the availability of ExpressRoute for private connections to the Azure cloud and several major new storage improvements. These changes build on their aggressive evangelism, which has been attempting, and succeeding, to convince iOS and Android developers to use Azure as the back-end service for their apps. The other reason, sadly, is why I’m writing: there’s a lot of misinformation about Exchange on Azure (e.g. this article from SearchExchange titled “Points to consider before running Exchange on Azure”, which is wrong, wrong, and wrong), and you need to be prepared to defuse its wrongness with customers who may misunderstand what they’re potentially getting into.

On its face, Azure’s infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offering seems pretty compelling: you can build Windows Server VMs and host them in the Azure cloud. That seems like it would be a natural fit for Exchange, which is increasingly viewed as an infrastructure service by customers who depend on it. However, there are at least three serious problems with this approach.

First: it’s not supported by Microsoft, something that the “points to consider” article doesn’t even mention. The Exchange team doesn’t support Exchange 2010 or Exchange 2013 on Azure or Amazon EC2 or anyone else’s cloud service at present. It is possible that this will change in the future, but for now any customer who runs Exchange on Azure will be in an unsupported state. It’s fun to imagine scenarios where the Azure team takes over first-line support responsibility for customers running Exchange and other Microsoft server applications; this sounds a little crazy but the precedent exists, as EMC and other storage companies did exactly this for users of their replication solutions back in Exchange 5.5/2000 times. Having said that, don’t hold your breath. The Azure team has plenty of other more pressing work to do first, so I think that any change in this support model will require the Exchange team to buy in to it. The Azure team has been able to get that buy-in from SharePoint, Dynamics, and other major product groups within Microsoft, so this is by no means impossible.

Second: it’s more work. In some ways Azure gives you the worst of the hosted Exchange model: you have to do just as much work as you would if Exchange were hosted on-premises, but you’re also subject to service outages, inconsistent network latency, and all the other transient or chronic irritations that come, at no extra cost, with cloud services. Part of the reason that the Exchange team doesn’t support Azure is because there’s no way to guarantee that any IaaS provider is offering enough IOPS, low-enough latency, and so on, so troubleshooting performance or behavior problems with a service such as Azure can quickly turn into a nightmare. If Azure is able to provide guaranteed service levels for disk I/O throughput and latency, that would help quite a bit, but this would probably require significant engineering effort. Although I don’t recommend that you do it at the moment, you might be interested in this writeup on how to deploy Exchange on Azure; it gives a good look at some of the operational challenges you might face in setting up Exchange+Azure for test or demo use.

Third: it’s going to cost more. Remember that IaaS networks typically charge for resource consumption. Exchange 2013 (and Exchange 2010, too) is designed to be “always on”. The workload management features in Exchange 2013 provide throttling, sure, but they don’t eliminate all of the background maintenance that Exchange is more-or-less continuously performing. These tasks, including GAL grammar generation for Exchange UM, the managed folder assistant, calendar repair, and various database-related tasks, have to be run, and so IaaS-based Exchange servers are continually going to be racking up storage, CPU, and network charges. In fairness, I haven’t estimated what these charges might be for a typical test-lab environment; it’s possible that they’d be cheap enough to be tolerable, but I’m not betting on it, and no doubt a real deployment would be significantly more expensive.

Of course, all three of these problems are soluble: the Exchange team could at any time change their support policy for Exchange on Azure, and/or the Azure team could adjust the cost model to make the cost for doing so competitive with Office 365 or other hosted solutions. Interestingly, though, two different groups would have to make those decisions, and their interests don’t necessarily align, so it’s not clear to me if or when we might see this happen. Remember, the Office 365 team at Microsoft uses physical hardware exclusively for their operations.

Does that mean that Azure has no value for Exchange? On the contrary. At TechEd New Orleans in June 2013, Microsoft’s Scott Schnoll said they were studying the possibility of using an Azure VM as the witness server for DAGs in Exchange 2013 CU2 and later. This would be a super feature because it would allow customers with two or more physically separate data centers to build large DAGs that weren’t dependent on site interconnects (at the risk, of course, of requiring always-on connectivity to Azure). The cost and workload penalty for running an FSW on Azure would be low, too. In August 2013, the word came down: Azure in its present implementation isn’t suitable for use as an FSW. However, the Exchange team has requested some Azure functionality changes that would make it possible to run this configuration in the future, so we have that to look forward to.

Then we have the wide world of IaaS capabilities opened up by Windows Azure Active Directory (WAAD), Azure Rights Management Services, Azure Multi-Factor Authentication, and the large-volume disk ingestion program (now known as the Azure Import/Export Service). As time passes, Microsoft keeps delivering more, and better, Azure services that complement on-premises Exchange, which has been really interesting to watch. I expect that trend to continue, and there are other, less expensive ways to use IaaS for Exchange if you only want it for test labs and the like. More on that in a future post….

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2014/04/04 · 17:05

The value of lagged copies for Exchange 2013

Let’s talk about… lagged copies.

For most Exchange administrators, the subject of lagged database copies falls somewhere between “the Kardashians’ shoe sizes” and “which of the 3 Stooges was the funniest” in terms of interest level. The concept is easy enough to understand: a lagged copy is merely a passive copy of a mailbox database where the log files are not immediately played back, as they are with ordinary passive copies. The period between the arrival of a log file and the time when it’s committed to the database is known as the lag interval. If you have a lag interval of 24 hours set to a database, a new log for that database generated at 3pm on April 4th won’t be played into the lagged copy until at least 3pm on April 5th (I say “at least” because the exact time of playback will depend on the copy queue length). The longer the lag interval, the more “distance” there is between the active copy of the mailbox database and the lagged copy.

Lagged copies are intended as a last-ditch “goalkeeper” safety mechanism in case of logical corruption. Physical corruption caused by a hardware failure will happen after Exchange has handed the data off to be written, so it won’t be replicated. Logical corruption introduced by components other than Exchange (say, an improperly configured file-level AV scanner) that directly write to the MDB or transaction log files wouldn’t be replicated in any event, so the real use case for the lagged copy is to give you a window in time during which logical corruption caused by Exchange or its clients hasn’t yet been replicated to the lagged copy. Obviously the size of this window depends on the length of the lag interval, and whether or not it is sufficient for you to a) notice that the active database has become corrupted b) play the accumulated logs forward into the lagged copy and c) activate the lagged copy depends on your environment.

The prevailing sentiment in the Exchange world has largely been “ I do backups already so lagged copies don’t give me anything.” When Exchange 2010 first introduced the notion of a lagged copy, Tony Redmond weighed in on it. Here’s what he said back then:

For now, I just can’t see how I could recommend the deployment of lagged database copies.

That seems like a reasonable stance, doesn’t it? At MEC this year, though, Microsoft came out swinging in defense of lagged copies. Why would they do that? Why would you even think of implementing lagged copies? It turns out that there are some excellent reasons that aren’t immediately apparent. (It may help to review some of the resiliency and HA improvements delivered in Exchange 2013; try this this excellent omnibus article by Microsoft’s Scott Schnoll if you want a refresher.) Here are some of the reasons why Microsoft has begun recommending the use of lagged copies more broadly.

1. Lagged copies are better in 2013

Exchange 2013 includes a number of improvements to the lagged copy mechanism. In particular, the new loose truncation feature introduced in SP1 means that you can prevent a lagged copy from taking up too much log space by adjusting the the amount of log space that the replay mechanism will use; when that limit is reached the logs will be played down to make room. Exchange 2013 (and SP1) also make a number of improvements to the Safety Net mechanism (discussed fully in Chapter 2 of the book), which can be used to play missing messages back into a lagged copy by retrieving them from the transport subsystem.

2. Lagged copies are continuously verified

When you back up a database, Exchange checks the page checksum of every page as it is backed up by computing the checksum and comparing it to the stored checksum; if that check fails, you get the dreaded JET_errReadVerifyFailure (-1018) error. However, just because you can successfully complete the backup doesn’t mean that you’ll be able to restore it when the time comes. By comparison, the Exchange log playback mechanism will log errors immediately when they are encountered during log playback. If you’re monitoring event logs on your servers, you’ll be notified as soon as this happens and you’ll know that your lagged copy is unusable now, not when you need to restore it. If you’re not monitoring your event logs, then lagged copies are the least of your problems.

3. Lagged copies give you more flexibility for recovery

When your active and passive copies of a database become unusable and you need to fall back to your lagged copy, you have several choices, as described in TechNet. You can easily play back every log that hasn’t yet been committed to the database, in the correct order, by using Move-ActiveMailboxDatabase. If you’d rather, you can play back the logs up to a certain point in time by removing the log files that you don’t want to play back. You can also play messages back directly from Safety Net into the lagged copy.

4. There’s no hardware penalty for keeping a lagged copy

Some administrators assume that you have to keep lagged copies of databases on a separate server. While this is certainly supported, you don’t have to have a “lag server” or anything like unto it. The normal practice in most designs has been to store lagged copies on other servers in the same DAG, but you don’t even have to do that. Microsoft recommends that you keep your mailbox databases no bigger than 2TB. Stuff your server with a JBOD array of the new 8TB disks (or, better yet, buy a Dell PowerVault MD1220) and you can easily put four databases on a single disk: the active copy of DB1, the primary passive copy of DB2, the secondary passive copy of DB3, and the lagged copy of DB4. This gives you an easy way to get the benefits of a 4-copy DAG while still using the full capacity of the disks you have: the additional IOPS load of the lagged copy will be low, so hosting it on a volume that already has active and passive copies of other databases is a reasonable approach (one, however, that you’ll want to test with jetstress).

It’s always been the case that the architecture Microsoft recommends when a new version of Windows or Exchange is released evolves over time as they, and we, get more experience with it in the real world. That’s clearly what has happened here; changes in the product, improvements in storage hardware, and a shift in the economic viability of conventional backups mean that lagged copies are now much more appropriate for use as a data protection mechanism than they were in the past. I expect to see them deployed more and more often as Exchange 2013 deployments continue and our collective knowledge of best practices for them improves.

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2014/03/28 · 12:49

Getting ready for MEC 2014

Wow, it’s been nearly a month since my last post here. In general I am not a believer in posting stuff on a regular schedule, preferring instead to wait until I have something to say. All of my “saying” lately has been on behalf of my employer though. I have barely even had time to fly. For another time: a detailed discussion of the ins and outs of shopping for an airplane. For now, though, I am making my final preparations to attend this year’s Microsoft Exchange Conference (MEC) in Austin! My suitcase is packed, all my devices are charged, my slides are done, and I am prepared to overindulge in knowledge sharing, BBQ eating, and socializing.

It is interesting to see the difference in flavor between Microsoft’s major enterprise-focused conferences. This year was my first trip to Lync Conference, which I would summarize as being a pretty even split between deeply technical sessions and marketing focused around the business and customer value of “universal communications”. In reviewing the session attendance and rating numbers, it was no surprise that the most-attended sessions and the highest-rated sessions tended to be 400-level technical sessions such as Brian Ricks’ excellent deep-dive on Lync client sign-in behavior. While I’ve never been to a SharePoint Conference, from what my fellow MVPs say about it, there was a great deal of effort expended by Microsoft on highlighting the social features of the SharePoint ecosystem, with a heavy focus on customization and somewhat less attention directed at SharePoint Online and Office 365. (Oh, and YAMMER YAMMER YAMMER YAMMER YAMMER.) Judging from reactions in social media, this focus was well-received but inevitably less technical given the newness of the technology.

That brings us to the 2014 edition of MEC. The event planners have done something unique by loading the schedule with “Unplugged” panel discussions, moderated by MVP and MCM/MCSM experts and consisting of Microsoft and industry experts in particular technologies. These panels provide an unparalleled opportunity to get, and give, very candid feedback around individual parts of Exchange and I plan on attending as many of them as I can. This is in no way meant to slight the many other excellent sessions and speakers that will be there. I’d planned to summarize specific sessions that I thought might be noteworthy, but Tony published an excellent post this morning that far outdoes what I had in mind, breaking down sessions by topic area and projected attendance. Give it a read.

I’m doing two sessions on Monday: Exchange Unified Messaging Deep Dive at 245p and Exchange ActiveSync: Management Challenges and Best Practices at 1145a. The latter is a vendor session with the folks from BoxTone, during which attendees both get lunch (yay) and the opportunity to see BoxTone’s products in action. They’re also doing a really interesting EAS health check, during which you provide CAS logs and they run them through a static analysis tool that, I can almost guarantee, will tell you things you didn’t know about your EAS environment. Drop by and say hello!

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2013/11/19 · 11:14

iOS 7 Exchange ActiveSync problems revisited

Back in September I posted an article about a problem that occurred when synchronizing iOS 7 devices against Exchange 2010 SP2. The wheels of justice grind slowly, but Microsoft has released a KB article and accompanying hotfix that describe the symptoms precisely.

I also got an odd report from a large enterprise customer; they had several hundred iOS 7.0.2 devices, all on Verizon in one specific region, that were having synchronization problems. The issue here turned out to be a network configuration issue on Verizon’s network that required some action from them to fix.

Now you’re probably starting to see the value in solutions like those from BoxTone…

 

 

 

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2013/09/26 · 16:49

Odd iOS 7.0x Exchange ActiveSync problem

from the oops-they-may-have-done-it-again department…

I just got an e-mail from a former coworker reporting a problem with synchronizing some, but not all, iOS 7.0.x devices with Exchange 2010 SP2. There are four users (Alex, Eric, James, and Peter, let’s say) with shiny new iPhone 5s devices. Two of them get the same error when syncing: the Provision verb is returning a status of 110 and throwing an exception from Microsoft.Exchange.Security.Compliance.MessageDigestForNonCryptographicPurposes.HashCore. This seems to point to a problem with crypto negotiation with the devices, but I haven’t been able to look at a trace of the conversation between the device and the server to check.

James’ device works fine. Alex’s device works fine. Peter’s device does not work, either with his own account or Alex’s. Eric’s device does not work with his account; no other accounts have been tested. This seems to indicate that the problem is not (necessarily) with the account. Peter and Eric have both wiped their devices, deleted their Exchange accounts, rebooted the devices, and done all the other stuff you might try when faced with this problem, but to no avail.

This Apple support forum thread seems to indicate that a few others who have the same problem, but none of the recommended fixes have worked for Alex or Peter. My working theory is that this is due to an unwanted interaction of some kind between Exchange 2010 SP2 and iOS 7.x, but I can’t prove that yet. As far as I can tell, Exchange 2013 CU2 doesn’t have the same problem.

I’m posting this in hope that it might come to the attention of anyone else who’s having a similar problem so I can get a sense of its scope and nature.

More news when there is news…

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2013/09/07 · 02:56

Do mailbox quotas matter to Outlook and OWA?

Great question from my main homie Brian Hill:

Is there a backend DB reason for setting quotas at a certain size? I have found several links (like this one) discussing the need to set quotas due to the way the Outlook client handles large numbers of messages or OST files, but for someone who uses OWA, does any of this apply?

Short answer: no.

Somewhat longer answer: no.

The quota mechanism in Exchange is an outgrowth of those dark times when a large Exchange server might host a couple hundred users on an 8GB disk drive. Because storage was so expensive, Microsoft’s customers demanded a way to clamp down on mailbox size, so we got the trinity of quota limits: prohibit send, prohibit send and receive, and warn. These have been with us for a while and persist, essentially unchanged, in Exchange 2013, although it is now common to see quotas of 5GB or more on a single mailbox.

Outlook has never had a formal quota mechanism of its own, apart from the former limit of 2GB on PST files imposed by the 32-bit offsets used as pointers in the original PST file format. This limit was enforced in part by a dialog that would tell you that your PST file was full and in part by bugs in various versions of Outlook that would occasionally corrupt your PST file as it approached the 2GB size limit. Outlook 2007 and later pretty much extinguished those bugs, and the Unicode PST file format doesn’t have the 2GB limit any longer. Outlook 2010 and 2013 set a soft limit on Unicode PSTs of 50GB, but you can increase the limit if you need to.

Outlook’s performance is driven not by the size of the PST file itself (thought experiment: imagine a PST with a single 10GB item in it as opposed to one with 1 million 100KB messages) but by the number of items in any given folder. Microsoft has long recommended that you keep Outlook item counts to a maximum of around 5,000 items per folder (see KB 905803 for one example of this guidance). However, Outlook 2010 and 2013, when used with Exchange 2010 or 2013, can handle substantially more items without performance degradation: the Exchange 2010 documentation says 100,000 items per folder is acceptable, though there’s no published guidance for Exchange 2013. There’s still no hard limit, though. The reasons why the number of items (and the number of associated stored views) are well enumerated in this 2009 article covering Exchange 2007. Some of the mechanics described in that article have changed in later versions of Exchange but the basic truth remains: the more views you have, and/or the more items that are found or selected by those views, the longer it will take Exchange to process them.

If you’re wondering whether your users’ complaints of poor Outlook performance are related to high item counts, one way to find out is to use a script like this to look for folders with high item counts.

Circling back to the original question: there is a performance impact with high item count folders in OWA, but there’s no quota mechanism for dealing with it. If you have a user who reports persistently poor OWA performance on particular folders, high item counts are one possible culprit worth investigating. Of course, if OWA performance is poor across multiple folders that don’t have lots of items, or across multiple users, you might want to seek other causes.

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2013/08/31 · 05:28

Microsoft Certified Systems Master certification now dead

I received a very unwelcome e-mail late last night:

Microsoft will no longer offer Masters and Architect level training rotations and will be retiring the Masters level certification exams as of October 1, 2013. The IT industry is changing rapidly and we will continue to evaluate the certification and training needs of the industry to determine if there’s a different certification needed for the pinnacle of our program.

This is terrible news, both for the community of existing MCM/MCSM holders but also for the broader Exchange community. It is a clear sign of how Microsoft values the skills of on-premises administrators of all its products (because all the MCSM certifications are going away, not just the one for Exchange). If all your messaging, directory, communications, and database services come from the cloud (or so I imagine the thinking goes), you don’t need to spend money on advanced certifications for your administrators who work on those technologies.

This is also an unfair punishment for candidates who attended the training rotation but have yet to take the exam, or those who were signed up for the already-scheduled upgrade rotations, and those who were signed up for future rotations. Now they’re stuck unless they can take, and pass, the certification exams before October 1… which is pretty much impossible. It greatly devalues the certification, of course, for those who already have it. Employers and potential clients can look at “MCM” on a resume and form their own value judgement about its worth given that Microsoft has dropped it. I’m not quite ready to consign MCM status to the same pile as CNE, but it’s pretty close.

The manner of the announcement was exceptionally poor in my opinion, too: a mass e-mail sent out just after midnight Central time last night. Who announces news late on Friday nights? People who are trying to minimize it, that’s who. Predictably, and with justification, the MCM community lists are blowing up with angry reaction, but, completely unsurprisingly, no one from Microsoft is taking part, or defending their position, in these discussions.

As a longtime MCM/MCSM instructor, I have seen firsthand the incredible growth and learning that takes place during the MCM rotations. Perhaps more importantly, the community of architects, support experts, and engineers who earned the MCM has been a terrific resource for learning and sharing throughout their respective product spaces; MCMs have been an extremely valuable connection between the real world of large-scale enterprise deployments and the product group.

In my opinion, this move is a poorly-advised and ill-timed slap in the face from Microsoft, and I believe it will work to their detriment.

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2013/04/09 · 08:50

MEC 2014: Austin, 31 March-2 April 2014

This is pretty darn exciting: Microsoft has announced the official date and time of the Microsoft Exchange Conference (MEC) in 2014. It will be held in Austin, home of at least one of the original MECs (the first one, maybe? I wasn’t there so I’m not sure) from 31 March to 2 April 2014. 

I am sure that nothing bad will come of Microsoft’s decision to include April Fool’s Day as part of the conference. Nope, not at all.

On a personal note, I am excited that the conference will be in Austin. It’s one of my favorite cities, and I’ll be making side trips to see family (Hi, Lee Anne!) and friends while there. I also believe that we should have an Exchange-themed visit to the Salt Lick BBQ. Stay tuned for details!

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2013/03/15 · 13:48

Loading PowerShell snap-ins from a script

So I wanted to launch an Exchange Management Shell (EMS) script to do some stuff for a project at work. Normally this would be straightforward, but because of the way our virtualized lab environment works, it took me some fiddling to get it working.

What I needed to do was something like this:

c:\windows\system32\powershell\v1.0\powershell.exe -command "someStuff"

That worked fine as long as all I wanted to do was run basic PowerShell cmdlets. Once I started trying to run EMS cmdlets, things got considerably more complex because I needed a full EMS environment. First I had to deal with the fact that EMS, when it starts, tries to perform a CRL check. On a non-Internet-connected system, it will take 5 minutes or so to time out. I had completely forgotten this, so I spent some time fooling around with various combinations of RAM and virtual CPUs trying to figure out what the holdup was. Luckily Jeff Guillet set me straight when he pointed me to this article, helpfully titled “Configuring Exchange Servers Without Internet Access.” That cut the startup time waaaaay down.

However, I was still having a problem: my scripts wouldn’t run. They were complaining that “No snap-ins have been registered for Windows PowerShell version 2”. What the heck? Off to Bing I went, whereupon I found that most of the people reporting similar problems were trying to launch PowerShell.exe and load snap-ins from web-based applications. That puzzled me, so I did some more digging. Running my script from the PowerShell session that appears when you click the icon in the quick launch bar seemed to work OK. Directly running the executable by its path (i.e. %windir%\system32\powershell\v1.0\powershell.exe) worked OK too… but it didn’t work when I did the same thing from my script launcher.

Back to Bing I went. On about the fifth page of results, I found this gem at StackExchange. The first answer got me pointed in the right direction. I had completely forgotten about file system virtualization, the Windows security feature that, as a side effect, helps erase the distinction between x64 and x86 binaries by automatically loading the proper executable even when you supply the “wrong” path. In my case, I wanted the x64 version of PowerShell, but that’s not always what I was getting because my script launcher is a 32-bit x86 process. When it launched PowerShell.exe from any path, I was getting the x86 version, which can’t load x64 snap-ins and thus couldn’t run EMS.

The solution? All I had to do was read a bit further down in the StackExchange article to see this MSDN article on developing applications for SharePoint Foundation, which points out that you must use %windir%\sysnative as the path when running PowerShell scripts after a Visual Studio build. Why? Because Visual Studio is a 32-bit application, but the SharePoint snap-in is x64 and must be run from an x64 PowerShell session… just like Exchange.

Armed with that knowledge, I modified my scripts to run PowerShell using sysnative vice the “real” path and poof! Problem solved. (Thanks also to Michael B. Smith for some bonus assistance.)

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2013/02/12 · 14:16

Exchange 2010 SP3 released

It’s here! 

 Microsoft today released Service Pack 3 for Exchange 2010 (available from http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=36768).

SP3 enables full coexistence between Exchange 2010 and Exchange 2013, plus it adds a couple of new features, such as Windows Server 2012 support. See the full feature list here.

After you’ve upgraded allof your 2010 servers to SP3, you will be able to install Exchange 2013 in your forest. Opinions differ on whether you should– for example, fellow MVPs Tony Redmond, Michael B. Smith, and Jason Sherry all agree that you should wait. For my part, I’m OK with deploying 2013 into production; it does have some rough edges, but I think CU1 is right around the corner, so adding 2013 in your environment now is certainly defensible.

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2013/02/07 · 16:30

Excessive transaction log growth with iOS 6.1 devices

Well, it appears that Apple has done it again: reports are starting to surface of runaway transaction log growth when mobile devices running iOS 6.1 synchronize with Exchange Server. Tony has a good synopsis here.

Those of you who have been administering Exchange for a while may think this sounds familiar– that’s because there was a very similar problem with Microsoft Entourage back in the day, as detailed by Jeremy Kelly here. Remarkably, a couple of years later, we got the same bug in a slightly different guise, as described in KB 935848. In both cases, the problem was that the client was too stupid to detect certain types of failures, so it would keep retrying the failed operation, which would keep failing. This endless loop quickly resulted in large volumes of transaction log files on the Exchange server.

Luckily, Exchange 2010 and 2013 include throttling to prevent misbehaving clients from using up an excessive share of resources. However, the throttling controls available regulate EAS based on the amount of time user requests take, the number of concurrent connections, or the number of device partnerships. None of these parameters are useful in preventing the iOS 6.1-related problem; it’s not that the individual requests take up an excessive amount of time, it’s that there are so many requests that they generate an excessive log volume. (This video may provide a useful explanation for the phenomenon.)

Exchange 2013 includes the ability to specifically block misbehaving Exchange ActiveSync devices based on “suspicious” behavior. I will have a lot more to say about that in the near future, although that spiffy feature doesn’t help anyone now suffering the problem. For now, all we can do is the following:

  • Block iOS 6.1 devices using an Exchange ActiveSync device access rule
  • Discourage your users from upgrading, although I expect this to be an ineffective strategy
  • If you have a support relationship with Apple, report this problem to them. If you’re a developer, file a RADAR issue. If you have enterprise technical support with Apple, use it. I’ve seen reports that the ordinary consumer-level technical support (i.e. the $49 pay-per-incident support, as well as AppleCare) doesn’t have any way to report this particular problem in an actionable way.

Thoughts for another time: the rapid adoption rate of iOS devices has many benefits for users, including largely avoiding the fragmentation problems that plague Android with issues (like this “smishing” fix that virtually no one has). However, when Apple ships a buggy update, which is common, that rapid adoption multiplies the pain of the bug.

Update 1535 CST 8 Feb: Ina Fried at AllThingsD is reporting that Vodafone is telling iPhone 4S users not to upgrade to iOS 6.1.

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2013/01/06 · 11:08

Michael B. Smith’s list of Exchange 2013 gotchas

Fellow MVP and all-around ace Michael B. Smith just published an article accurately titled “Exchange Server 2013 Gotchas.” Rather than editorialize, I’ll just ask that you read the article and consider the list of issues he’s found.

I don’t agree that all the things he lists as faults are actually faults; for example, I have no problem with Outlook 2003 no longer being supported, and it doesn’t matter to me that installation is slow. Many of the other items he lists have fairly low impact, such as the absence of the Edge Transport role (which very few of my customers use) or the fact that there is no longer a separate UM role– very few organizations have enough concurrent calls to warrant investing in a dedicated UM server. No one likes to see functionality disappear, such as the loss of S/MIME support in OWA, but at the same time we’ve gotten a ton of new functionality (including offline mode and touch mode in OWA, to name two possible reasons why S/MIME was deprioritized.)

Having said that, there are a number of his points that I agree with wholeheartedly. The documentation is clearly not finished; there are many missing pieces, and this is compounded by Microsoft’s still-unresolved decision to change the way TechNet URLs work. The Exchange 2013 message hygiene functionality is useful but limited, and the fact that there is still no way to deploy Exchange 2013 into an existing Exchange 2007/2010 organization is difficult to swallow– Microsoft must know that this is a huge bottleneck for deployments, so there must be some very good reason why the needed coexistence patches have not yet been released.

I don’t think I’d agree with his opinion that “Exchange 2013 is not ready for prime time,” though. Shipping is a feature in itself, and while that’s no excuse to rush a poorly designed or unstable product out the door, I think that Microsoft generally does a good job of balancing market demand for releases against the engineering and support effort required to prepare those releases. With Kevin Allison’s many public statements about getting to a more stable, predictable release cadence for Exchange (both as an on-premises product and a service), I think the new normal is going to be seeing more frequent, more incremental releases. Exchange 2010 RTM, of course, lacked a number of features (such as the ability to manage public folders) that were added in SP1, so the idea of shipping what’s ready to hit a schedule and fleshing it out in an incremental release is nothing new.

Michael’s larger point is well taken: before you deploy Exchange 2013, you should be very sure that you understand how it differs from previous versions and how those differences may affect your messaging operations. As Tony and I work on Exchange 2013 Inside Out, we are taking careful note of the kinds of issues Michael points out, as well as how Microsoft responds to them; we’ll keep doing so throughout the release of Exchange 2010 SP3 and, eventually, Exchange 2013 SP1, to make sure that the book reflects the best available knowledge when it’s released later this year.

In possibly related news, if you’re interested in software engineering and release management issues, I suspect Steven Sinofsky’s new blog, Learning by Shipping, might be of interest to you.

Now, back to the unified messaging chapter… and go Seahawks!

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2012/12/21 · 10:21

Microsoft wins UK case vs Motorola Mobility/Google

Earlier this year I had the unique (to me) opportunity to serve as a technical expert witness in a court case in the UK. Tony’s already written about the case but I wanted to add my perspective.

I was contacted by Bird and Bird to see if I might be willing and able to act as a technical expert in a court case; that’s all they said at first. The nature of the questions they were asking soon clued me in that the case involved Exchange ActiveSync and multiple-point-of-presence (MPOP) support for presence publishing– two completely separate technologies which Motorola/Google had lumped together in this case.  .

My role was to perform a wire-level analysis of the protocols in question: EAS, SIP/SIMPLE as implemented in Lync, and the Windows Live Messenger protocol. For each of these protocols, my job was to produce an accurate, annotated packet capture showing exactly what happened when multiple devices synchronized with the same account, and when the status on one device changed.

This isn’t what most people think of when they think of expert testimony; in courtroom dramas and books, it always seems like the expert is being asked to provide an opinion, or being cross-examined on the validity of their opinion. No one wanted my opinion in this case (which is perfectly normal), just for me to to accurately and impartially report what was happening on the wire.

This proved to be incredibly interesting from a technical standpoint. Like most administrators, it had never really occurred to me to look into the depths of the EAS protocol itself to see exactly what bits were being passed on the wire. After a great deal of study of the ActiveSync protocol documentation and many a late night slaving away over Wireshark and Network Monitor captures, I’d produced a report that showed the actual network traffic that passed between client(s) and server for a variety of test scenarios, along with an explanation of the contents of the packets and how they related to user action on the device.

Along the way, I gained a new appreciation for the economy of design of these protocols– it’s surprising how efficient they are when you look at them at such a low level. (And a shout out to Eric Lawrence for his incredibly useful Fiddler tool, which made it much easier for me to get the required data into a usable format.) I found a few bugs in Wireshark, learned more than I wanted to about SSL provisioning on Windows Phone 7.5 devices, and generally had a grand time. I particularly enjoyed working with the attorneys at Bird and Bird, who were quite sharp and had lovely accents to boot. (I’m not sure they enjoyed my accent quite as much, but oh well.)

When I finished my report, I submitted it to Bird and Bird and that was the last I heard of the case until today, when Mr. Justice Arnold issued his ruling. It was submitted as part of Microsoft’s justification explaining why their implementations did not infringe on Motorola’s patent; the purpose of having an annotated set of packet captures was to clearly illustrate the differences between the claimed innovations in the patent and Microsoft’s implementation to show why Microsoft wasn’t infringing.

Florian Mueller has a good summary of the case that highlights something I didn’t know: the patent at issue is the only one on which an Android manufacturer is currently enforcing an injunction against Apple. I am no patent attorney, but it would seem that Apple might have grounds to have this injunction lifted. It will be interesting to see what happens in the related German court cases that Muller cites, but it’s hard for this layman to see any other likely result besides a Microsoft win… but we will see.

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2012/11/19 · 10:20

Announcing Exchange 2013 Inside Out

Big news, at least to me!

Tony Redmond and I are delighted to announce a new joint project: Exchange 2013 Inside Out, a two-volume set that we will write for Microsoft Press, with an anticipated publication date in fall 2013. Tony is writing part 1, which covers the mailbox server role, the store, DAG, compliance, modern public folders and site mailboxes. I’m writing part 2, which covers client access, connectivity, transport, unified messaging, and Office 365 integration. This division looks as if I got more work to do, but Tony assures everyone that he can easily fill a book on just one topic.

Why two books where Exchange 2010 Inside Out merited just one? Well, just look at that book and reflect that it contains some 400,000 words in a 2-pound tome. Apart from the weight, it takes a long time to write such a book and there are tons of changes and new material in Exchange 2013 that we want to cover. The option of writing a single 500,000 word volume was just not attractive. Thankfully Microsoft Press agreed with us.

We’ve deliberately decided to take our time writing. There’s no point in rushing out a book based on a product immediately after it is released because no real-world experience exists. Microsoft runs an excellent Technology Adoption Program (TAP) that helps the development group understand how new versions of Exchange behave in production environments through early deployments, but we prefer to see how the software evolves and behaves as it is deployed more widely. This can’t really happen until after Microsoft releases Exchange 2010 SP3 and whatever update is necessary for Exchange 2007 SP3 to allow coexistence with Exchange 2013. Writing based on a firm foundation of real-world deployment experience has always seemed to make a lot of sense to us and we see no reason to change now.

Although the two volumes of Exchange 2013 Inside Out will stand alone, we will absolutely make sure that each volume complements the other. We will be technical editors for each other’s volumes, giving us equal opportunity to insert bad jokes and Exchange war stories across the breadth of both volumes.

Mostly because we have no firm dates in mind, we’re not releasing any details of our schedule, we hope that we will be able to offer an early-access program to readers through the Microsoft Press prePress program, so stay tuned!

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