Apr 19, 2009

Exchange 2010

Today we will introduce this exclusive article about exchange server 2010 new features, installation and some new configurations.


The current version is a beta version which is free for download from here.
Most of the tech net library still not written but we will cover all the written until now “summarized”.
Microsoft introduces 3 road maps for making the documentation navigation and studying easier you can find these road maps in these three links:


Server Role Documentation Roadmap

Feature-Based Documentation Roadmap

Exchange Management Console Roadmap

It's not yet released but you can find it when it's released in this link.

So what's new in Exchange 2010?

Exchange 2010 was evolved for portability and cost reduction and any where use.
OWA was developed heavily to cover all the defects were in 2007 Version of OWA and introduce the new changes requested by the users themselves. The important new features of OWA are:

  • Favorites in the Navigation Pane
  • Search folders
  • Message filtering
  • The ability to set categories in the message list
  • Options in the Web management interface for Outlook Web Access
  • A side-by-side view for calendars
  • Multi-client language support
  • The ability to attach messages to messages
  • Expanded right-click capabilities
  • Integration with Office Communicator, including presence, chat, and a contact list
  • Conversation view
  • The ability to send and receive text (SMS) messages from Outlook Web Access
  • Outlook Web Access mailbox policies
  • Creation of public distribution groups


There is one limitation need to be changed to be managed from the administrator which is the location of the user created distribution groups which is location of the creation. This Groups always thrown in the users organization unit ,as an administrator this will not be fine to me what if I need to change the location to be somewhere else in the directory like for example below the organization unit of the department in a dedicated organization unit for the department distribution groups.


The high availability is now integrated to the core architecture of the exchange 2010 without using the clustering technology or technically using some of it but as transparent as you can work on the product without managing the cluster any more from the failover administration tools so, no need to be a cluster professional to install high availability solution anymore.

Two types of the 2007 high availability ways are depreciated in 2010 which are LCR and SCC.

The rest two types (SCR and CCR) are merged into one technology called DAG "Database Availability Group”.

Let’s dive into the Storage structure to know how Microsoft did this?

The previous version of exchange provide the availability on server level which made any failover transfer all the storage groups to the other server even if one database only is corrupted which causing down time for all users not only the users having mailboxes in the defected database. This limitation was removed in Exchange 14 by removing the storage group and reengineering the availability concept to be on the database level which is in fact coping the database to another server using the same copy and replay log technology used in the 2007 version with some modifications.

These changes removed the need to have a clustered mailbox server which enables the administrator to install all the roles (Mailbox server, Hub server and CAS Server) into one server and then duplicate it to have the high availability by enabling the DAG on the databases or server level. But this behavior didn't remove the need to install the windows cluster feature on the members of the DAG, why?

The DAG is a cluster in the background and it’s using the majority node set when the number of DAG servers is odd and using node and file share witness when the number of DAG servers is even.

Only two servers for high available full installation lead the exchange 2010 to be awaited from a new class of businesses which is small and medium businesses.

A lot of administration tasks added to the exchange 2010 EMC like OWA policy, sending mail to the users from the EMC and Bulk management of the users in the EMC and the whole DAG management .

If you want to see all the new features ,use this link

what will we cover in this article?


After you finish this article you will know how to install Exchange Mailbox-CAS-HUB server , configure DAG between 2 servers with these roles installed.

What will not be covered in this article ?


This article will not cover the Edge transport server role either any unified communication topics.

Lab setup:


1 server will act as Domain Controller
2 servers will act as Exchange servers


Hardware Prerequisites:


The recommended hardware setup for the typical installation is 4 GB Ram and Dual processor but it will work with 2 GB Ram. But you can't measure the performance of Exchange 2010 until you have the recommended ram in your box.


Software Prerequisites:

Initially you need windows server 2008 64bit for the best testing lab (not RTM or R2 to test with out issues).

Operating system prerequisites:

These prerequisites are (NET-Framework, RSAT-ADDS ,Web-Server ,Web-Basic-Auth ,Web-Windows-Auth ,Web-Metabase ,Web-Net-Ext ,Web-Lgcy-Mgmt-Console ,WAS-Process-Model ,RSAT-Web-Server ,Web-ISAPI-Ext ,Web-Digest-Auth ,Web-Dyn-Compression ,NET-HTTP-Activation ,RPC-over-HTTP-proxy) for a typical installation.

The prerequisites of the typical installation can be installed using the built in XML file which can save a lot of your time .

You can find These xml file in the scripts folder under the root of your exchange installation path named Exchange-Typical.xml.

To install the prerequisites using the xml file use the following command:

ServerManagerCmd -ip Exchange-Typical.XML

Otherwise you can bind all of them separated by space after the command (ServerManagerCmd –i) like this

ServerManagerCmd -i RSAT-ADDS Web-Server Web-Metabase Web-Lgcy-Mgmt-Console Web-ISAPI-Ext NET-HTTP-Activation Web-Basic-Auth Web-Digest-Auth Web-Windows-Auth Web-Dyn-Compression RPC-over-HTTP-proxy Web-Net-Ext -Restart



Other software prerequisites:

You will need to install the following if it is not exist in your box.

Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5
Windows Remote Management (WinRM) 2.0 CTP 3
Windows PowerShell 2.0 CTP 3
Update from KB 951725
Update from KB 950888
Update from KB 951116
Update from KB 952664
Update from KB 953290
Update from KB 958178
Update from KB 958178

Make sure your computer is updated and all the previous hot fixes are installed





To get fully updated information about the hardware and software requirement use this link

Note: in the mentioned article you will see this paragraph in the Global catalog requirement:
In every Active Directory site where you plan to install Exchange 2010, you must have at least one global catalog server that is the latest 32-bit edition of the Windows Server 2003 Standard or Enterprise.


There is a good discussion about it in this link

Installing Exchange 2010:


The following steps will guide you through the installation:


After you extract the exe file you got from Microsoft web site ,Go to the folder which you used for extraction and then double click the setup.msi.





If you did all the prerequisites you should have something similar to this screen



Click install Microsoft Exchange to start the installation wizard which will copy the necessary files to the temp directory and then starts the installation







Click next



Choose continue setup without languge files (English is enough for now)



Click Next



Accept the terms and license agreement and click Next to Proceed with setup



Choose your option for Error reporting and click Next To continue



Choose Typical Installation and installation path which you need to remember it for later use.



Write your organization name



Choose if you have outlook 2003 clients or not because if you have the setup will automatically create a public folder Database which will provide the access to OAB for outlook 2003 clients otherwise they will not be able to connect to Exchange.



Select your choice for customer experience program and then click Next to proceed with the prerequisites check

If your prerequisites are fine you will get same like this screen otherwise it will give you an error attached with link for the fix.



If your installation goes right way you will see this screen



From the previous screen you can show the log file which will be like this




Now you have finished the installation phase.

Discover Exchange 2010:

The first look is very similar to Exchange 2007 GUI Except the orange icon



Navigate to the new Community and feedback Tab to see the new forum threads and give your feedback to Microsoft.



Navigate to organization configuration and then Mailbox



Here is the change was talking about ,the data base had been moved to organization configuration part and it's on the server configuration also for read only.

Navigate to client access to see the new OWA Mailbox policies



If you want to see the new features of organization federation navigate to the organization configuration



Now choose any recipient mailbox and open its properties to see the new calendar management



Click right any recipient mailbox then have a look to the right click menu



WoW you can now send email to recipients from within the EMC but tack care of this trick ,you need outlook client installed on the machine you will send from ,if no outlook client installed you will get the following error message



Will discover more and more in the upcoming articles.

Setting up the second server:

Now you know how to install Exchange server 2010 so, just follow the whole steps again until you get the second Exchange server installed.

You may note the following error while installing



This is because you didn't create any send connector yet , you can find full details about it in this article

after the installation you may noted already that the automatically created databases have a strange name ,if you would like to change it to a familiar name just follow these steps

from the organization configuration navigate to mailbox then right click the database you want to rename then choose properties





From the properties window just change the name to be as you like









Now you have your second server installed.

Creating Database availability Group:

Right click the mailbox role in the organization configuration and choose New Database Availability Group



Do you remember the file share witness we talked about in the beginning of this article ,here is where you can do it's configuration which will be used by exchange to create it when an even number of servers exist in the DAG. If odd number exists the file share witness will disappear.



As you know the best practice is to place this folder in the HUB transport server but in our case I'll put it in the DC.

Click next to proceed with DAG creation



Now you have DAG in place.


If you want to edit your DAG information right click it and choose properties then edit from this window



Note: only DAG creation is supported from the EMC in this release but adding the servers must be accomplished using the local power shell.

You can find a good discussion about dag creation here.

ok, let's test it practically and see what will we get.


Click right the DAG and choose Manage Database Availability Group Membership…



Click Browse and add both servers



When you click next you will get this



Yes, we forgot to install the failover cluster feature. Creating the DAG doesn't require cluster failover feature to be installed but adding the server will not proceed until you install it.
Let's install it,

Open the server manager and navigate to features then choose add feature




Choose failover clustering



When it finish you will see the this banner



Now go back and try to add the servers from the EMC .

Opps you may get this error,



Now lets do it from the local powershell ,To do this just use this shell command

Add-DatabaseAvailabilityGroupServer –Identity 'YourDAGName' –Mailboxserver 'ServerName'

Here are the result you should see during the process









Check your dag to make sure the servers are listed in the member servers column .



Or just click right it then choose properties to see the member server in a list view



Also they must be operational



Now we have two servers which is even number so, check if the file share witness created automatically or not .if it's created it will appear like this one



And will contain two files



Ok, one more check .. we said that the DAG is creating the cluster and let you manage it from inside the EMC so

how about the cluster networks?

The cluster networks are now called DAG Networks and I should be created for you automatically but if it's not or you need to modify it you can use the EMC to add or remove or edit networks same like in the old days in the cluster but easier.

Now it's time to add the databases to the availability group we just created ..To do so, navigate to the databases from the organization level mailbox role then right click it and choose Add Mailbox Database Copy.



The exchange will show you which servers are hosting the database you are trying to add to the DAG and if you click browse you will only get the servers not currently hosting it.

We have only two mailbox servers so, just choose the other one and click add



Once it's added another copy of the database must appear to you like that



You had the database added to the DAG. Repeat these steps to add the other database to the Other DAG member server





Now you have a complete High available solution.

you can find another article about installation of Exchange 2010 on here by Scott Schnoll's.

See you in the next article.


8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great post, looking forward to see more, please go more technical

Regards
Mohammed Saad

Alaa Elmahdy said...

Thanks Mohammed,

Keep in mind that the TechNet still not complete .

this is just an introduction for helping people to install and try Exchange 2010.

put I promise you will see more technical's

Alaa Elmahdy

ahmedusama_9 said...

goooooood work eng : alaa

Unknown said...

hii alla am Amr Abbas from OMS if you remmember me
its amazing effort you did up here
keep up the good work ya man
:)
ta3lab Qatar

Alaa Elmahdy said...

Of course i remember you Amr
promise to keep it UP.

Unknown said...

Oooh Alaa Elmahdy, You are great. I went through your this complete blog and I am able to setup DAG. It is great to see the setup of DAG in my VMware setup. I faced one little problem but I am successfully created DAG. Thanks a Ton Alaa Elmahdy.
Best Regards
Shambhu

Anonymous said...

You are creative (i am ameer from saudi )

Alaa Elmahdy said...

YOW, GUYS thanks alot.

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