Exchange 2010 Overview

Exchange 2010 has some carried over features from Exchange 2007 as well as some improved and new features broadly falling under the below categories

• Protection and Collaboration
  
• Anywhere Access
  
• Flexibility and Reliability
  

Listed below are the features that have carried over from Exchange 2007 as well as improved and new features falling under each of these categories

Protection and Collaboration

The goal of protection and collaboration is to achieve increased IT governance compliance with advanced tools to protect communication and manage the Messaging infrastructure.

Some of the features that have been carried over from Exchange 2007 are:

• On premise and hosted protection from virus and spam
  
• Compliance to corporate and government regulation
  
• Mobile device security and management policies
  

While some of the features that have been enhanced and new with Exchange 2010 are

• Email archiving and more powerful retention policies
  
• Automated rights management and protection of email
  
• Powerful multi mailbox search UI for eDiscovery or Legal reasons
  

Anywhere Access

The goal of the Anywhere Access is to help and manage communication load by offering an easy to navigate, Universal inbox with advanced messaging feature.

Some of the features carried over from Exchange 2007 are

• Outlook experience on Web, Phone and mobile device
  
• Single inbox for voice mail, email and fax
  
• Increased productivity with improved calendar experience
  

While some of the features that have been enhanced and new with Exchange 2010 are

• Easier inbox navigation with updated conversation view
  
• Enhanced voice mail with text preview
  
• Share free busy calendar information with external partners
  

Flexibility and Reliability

The goal is to provide flexibility needed to operate a scalable high performing and easy to administer messaging infrastructure.

Some of the features carried over by Exchange 2007 are

• Improved installation and deployment scenarios
  
• High Availability through Continuous Replication
  
• Simplified management console and command line shell
  

While some of the features that have been enhanced and new with Exchange 2010 are

• Choice of solution delivery with addition of hosted service
  
• Single platform for High Availability and Disaster Recovery
  
• Role based Administration and User self service

Please let me know if the above article was able to provide you with the information you needed.

Deploying Exchange 2010

Step by Step Installation of Exchange 2010

Microsoft has released Exchange 2010 beta for testing. It has some cool new features which I would suggest to test out before deploying in the production. Exchange 2010 beta can be downloaded from Microsoft Site. Let’s have a quick look at the pre-requisites for deploying Exchange 2010

Operating System Requirements
Exchange 2010 being 64 bit is only support on Windows Server 2008 64 bit operating system. I would suggest using Windows 2008 R2 operating System which can be downloaded from the Microsoft Site. The Management Tools can be installed on the 64-bit editions of Windows Vista® SP1 or later, or Windows Server 2008 64 bit.

Additional requirements to run Exchange Server 2010 Beta
• Memory - Minimum of 4 gigabytes (GB) of RAM per server plus 5 megabytes (MB) of RAM recommended for each mailbox
• Disk space
o At least 1.2 GB on the drive used for installation
o An additional 500 MB of available disk space for each Unified Messaging (UM) language pack that you plan to install
o 200 MB of available disk space on the system drive
• Drive - DVD-ROM drive, local or network accessible
• File format - Disk partitions formatted as NTFS file systems
• Monitor – Screen resolution 800 x 600 pixels or higher

Exchange Server 2010 Beta Prerequisites
If these required prerequisites are not already installed, the Exchange Server 2010 Beta setup process will prompt and provide links to the installation locations.
• Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5
• Windows PowerShell v2
• Windows Remote Management

Actual requirements will vary based on system configuration and specific features installed. For more detailed system requirements, please refer to the Exchange Server 2010 Technical Documentation Library.


Installing Exchange Server 2010 Beta

Once the system is ready for Exchange 2010, run setup from the Exchange 2010 CD or DVD or from the downloaded location.

ITBLOG7.BLOGSPOT.COM 1


On the Welcome page click on “Step 4: Install Microsoft Exchange”. Click on “next” on the next screen.

ITBLOG7.BLOGSPOT.COM 2


Next you will be prompted for choosing the language files. You will need to provide the location of the Language file if you want to select language other than English otherwise you may select on “Continue Setup without Language files” and click “next”.

ITBLOG7.BLOGSPOT.COM 3



ITBLOG7.BLOGSPOT.COM 4

Click on “Next” for Language Confirmation



ITBLOG7.BLOGSPOT.COM 5


Select “I accept” on the License Agreement page and click on “Next” for Language Confirmation


ITBLOG7.BLOGSPOT.COM 6


On the Error reporting page you may choose to provide feedback to Microsoft about the errors or issues being generated on your Exchange Server. Microsoft collects this information to further improve their products. Since I am doing in the LAB environment, I am selecting “No” here.


ITBLOG7.BLOGSPOT.COM 7


This page is similar to Exchange 2007 Setup. There are some improvements in Exchange 2010 which will help you in designing your Exchange 2010 Infrastructure.

Earlier versions of Exchange required Windows Clustering for High Availability. Exchange 2010 no longer requires windows based clustering. Exchange 2010 comes with a new feature named as DAG (Database accessibility Group” for high availability. DAG is the successor of CCR’s and SCR’s log shipping technology used in Exchange and can provide 16 copies of the database across multiple servers. You may refer to the link if you are interested in knowing about the new features on Exchange 2010.

Now we don’t need HUB and CAS role deployed separately to the Mailbox role in High Availability design.


ITBLOG7.BLOGSPOT.COM 8


The Exchange 2010 Beta edition is not supported to be installed along with earlier versions of Exchange. You will be required to install Exchange 2010 in a New Exchange Organization.


ITBLOG7.BLOGSPOT.COM 9


Outlook clients 2003 and earlier and Entourage requires Public folders to access information such as Free Busy wheras Outlook 2007 accesses this information using CAS Server. If you clients older than Outlook 2003 or Entourage than select on “Yes” for Exchange 2010 to create Public folder store for them. Otherwise you may select on “No”


ITBLOG7.BLOGSPOT.COM 10



Here you can select the type of industry that best suits your Organization. Click on “Next” to perform prerequisite checks


ITBLOG7.BLOGSPOT.COM 11


On this screen it display about any missing pre-requisites, if any. It will provide the link to perform corrective actions.

After getting success on all the pre-requisites you can click on the “Install” to start the installation.

Once the installation is completed click on “Finish” to finalize the installation.


Please provide me the feedback if I was able to help you with this article.


Happy Installation ;)

Exchange 2010 First Look

Exchange 2010 can provide
- High availability and site resilience which is native to exchange
- Usability of less expensive and less complex storage.
- Simplify Administration and reduce support costs

High Availability Feature names
- Mailbox resiliency: Name of Unified High availability and Site Resiliency Solution
- Database Availability Group: A group of upto
mailbox server that host a set of replicated databases
- Mailbox Database Copy - A mailbox databse (.edb and Logs) that is either active or passive.
- Database Mobility: The ability of a single mailbox database to be replicated to and mounted on other mailbox servers
- RPC CAS: Cas feature that provides a MAPI endpoint for Outlook clients
- Shadow Redundancy: A transport feature that provides redundancy for messages for the entire time they are in transit
- Incremental Deployment: The availbility to deploy high availability / site resilience after Exchange is installed
- Exchange Third Party Replication API: An Exchange provided API that enables use of third party replication for a DAG in lieu of continuous replication.

High Availability Solution
- Uses enhanced CCR and SCR Technology
- Can be deployed on wide range of storage option
- Clustering is native to Exchange and Does not depend on Windows based clustering.
- Reduces the need of SAN infrastructure

Improvements in Exchaneg 2010
- All clients connecty to CAS Server
- Database level failover
- Failover is managed by Exchange
- Use of Database Access Group provides database level failover

High Availbility Terminology
- High availbility: Provides data availbility, service availbility and automatic recovery from failures
- Disaster recovery: Process to provide manual recovery from failure
- Site Resiliency: DR solution used for recovery from site failure
- *over: Short for switchover / failover.
- Switchover: It is a manual activation of one or more database after a failure.
- Failover: It is an automatic activation of database after a failure.

Exchange 2010 possible *overs
- Database or Servers within a Datacenter
- Datacenter level switchover

Exchange 2007 brought forward concepts
- Extensible Storage Engine (ESE)
* Database and log files
- Continuous replication
* Log shipping and replay
* Database seeding
* Store service and Replication Service
* Database health and status monitoring
* Divergence
* Automatic database mount behavior
- Concepts of quorum and witness
- Concepts of *overs

Exchange 2007 dropped concepts
- Storage Groups
- Databases are global objects and are no longer identified by Server names
- Clustered Mailbox Server no longer exists
- Two high availbility copy limits (now 16 copies of mailbox database are available)
- Private and public Networks

High Availability Fundamentals
- Database Availability Group: It is a base component of HA and site resilience. It provides a group of up to 16 servers that hosts a set of replicated databases. It defines the boundaru for Mailbox database replicatio, Database and Server *overs, and Active Manager. It manages membership and proivdes heartbeat of DAG member servers

- Mailbox Database replication: It Provides continuous replication of mailbox databases. It supports encryption and compression and supports multiple replication networks

- Active Manager: It is an Exchange component that manages *overs. It runs on every server in DAG and selects best available copy on failovers. It keeps track of where the database is active and provides this information to other Exdchange component such as RPC CAS and HUB Transport. Active Manager has two roles
* Primary Active Manager (PAM): It runs on the node that owns the cluster group. it gets the topology change notifications and reacts to the server failures by selecting the best database copy on *overs.
* Standby Active Manager (SAM): It runs on every other copy of DAG. It responds to the query about which server hosts the active copy.
Both the roles are necessary for automatic recovery.

Transition Steps
- Verify the pre requisites are met for deploying Exchange 2010
- Deploy Exchange 2010
- Use Exchange 2010 mailbox move feature to move mailboxes from Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2010


Unsuported Transitions
- In place upgrade to Exchange 2010
- Using database protability between Exchange 2010 and non-exchange 2010
- Backup and restore of earlier versions of Exchange to Exchange 2010
- Using Continuous replication between Exchange 2010 and 2007


Exchange 2010 improvements
- Onlive Move Mailbox: It supports moving mailboxes Between Exchange 2007 SP2 and Exchange 2010 without causing downtime to the users. Move is performed asynchronously by a new service called Microsoft Exchange Mailbox Replication Service (MRS) running on CAS

- RPC CAS: It replaces RPC endpoint client access on the Mailbox role to the CAS role. It does not replace for Public folders. Clients connect directly to the Public Folder store to access Public Folder databases

- Shadow Redundancy: It helps HUB and Edge Transport Servers in keeping the copy of items until it is delivered to the next hop. It also helps in upgrade or maintenance.

Please let me know if this post was helpful.