AV scanning exceptions for Exchange recommended by Microsoft

Very handy document that lists out the files and folders within Exchange (2007 – 2013) that should be excluded from AV scans.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb332342(v=exchg.141).aspx

n3ilb

Monitoring IO performance on Windows Servers

Hi All,

If you’ve ever supported a SQL server that has been experiencing IO delays you’ll know that SQL will write a warning in the Event Log if an IO delay of 15 seconds or longer has occurred.  In the past I’ve found that this can be a great indicator of an issue with the underlying storage used by the server, be that local disks or even a SAN.

Unfortunately though, if you don’t have a SQL server it can be hard to spot IO delays on a server without lots of perfmon or 3^rd party tools, say a server acting as a File Server…

This is where the registry value TimeOutValue under the key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Disk can help identify delays. The value TimeOutValue is the duration that Windows will wait for a hard disk to respond to a command, if the value is exceeded the command will time out and an event will be written to the Event Log with an event ID of 9 (AFAIK).

By default within Windows Server 2003 – 2008R2 this is set to a default value of 60 (seconds). This default value though is too high to often pick up IO delays and therefore the TimeOutValue should be set to 10 (decimal) and the server should be rebooted. Now you can keep an eye out for Event ID 9 showing up in the Event Log which will likely indicate IO issues and it’s time to get thinking about RAID levels, cache settings and disk IOPs.

Hope you find this useful!

n3ilb

AD and Exchange Schema Information

Hi,

It’s probably not that often that you need to check the version of the Active Directory Schema in regards to the version of Active Directory or MS Exchange you’re running.  You’re probably only curious when you start managing a new environment or look to upgrade an existing one.  Then if you’re like me, off the top of your head, you’ll not remember the attributes in AD to check.  Microsoft’s documentation on this is a bit hit and miss, some articles don’t include the latest and greatest versions of Exchange or Windows i.e. Exchange 2010, 2013 or maybe Server 2008 R2 or 2012.

I’ve found a couple of decent articles that are up-to-date, explaining how to check and what the values stored in AD and which values are which versions of Windows or Exchange, for Exchange here and for AD here.  Exchange 2013 RTM has a forest rangeUpper value of 15137 as indicated here.

To make life a little easier for myself I’ve written a .net 3.5 Windows Form Application that you can run from any domain member with .net 3.5 installed and it will go off and query the information for you.

This can be downloaded from here (http://dl.dropbox.com/u/51452635/ADSchemaQuery.zip), feel free to use and I hope it saves you some time the next time you need this information.  Please note I’m providing this software FOC without any warranties or support and although I have tested this you run it at your own risk!  I’d always recommend you run this within a test environment before running in a production environment.  If you find any issues with it please add a comment and I’ll try and help you resolve it when I have the time!

n3ilb3

Exchange 2010 SP2 Prereqs

I’d previously covered this but the original post is out of date as the prerequisites have change in the SP2 build of Exchange 2010… so…

On Server 2008 R2

Powershell with Admin Rights

Import-module ServerManager

Client Access Server

Add-WindowsFeature 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, Web-WMI, Web-Asp-Net –Restart Following the reboot Set-Service NetTcpPortSharing -StartupType Automatic

Hub Transport Server

Add-WindowsFeature 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 –Restart Install – Office 2010 Filter Packs – http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=191548

Mailbox Server

Add-WindowsFeature 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 –Restart Install – Office 2010 Filter Packs – http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=191548

Edge Transport Server

Add-WindowsFeature NET-Framework,RSAT-ADDS,ADLDS -Restart

Installing the telnet client – useful to test mail relaying on the Hub and Edge Transport servers

Add-WindowsFeature Telnet-Client

Whitespace in Exchange Databases (2007 and 2010)

Hi All,

Across the lifetime of an Exchange database its size will grow as the number of items it contains grows, the database file (.edb) will increase in size as necessary.  However if the number of items in the database decreases the edb file won’t shrink, rather the freed space within the database is held as whitespace.  This whitespace is then reused as the number of items in the database increases again until it is exhausted at which point the physical file size of the DB increases once more.

This whitespace can be recovered and the physical edb file shrunk, however, to do so means the database will need to be taken offline and an Exchange database defrag carried out.  Keep in mind this can be a time-consuming operation and your database will be unavailable during this process…

Checking whitespace in Exchange is easy enough…

Exchange 2007 – Look in the Application Event Log for Event ID 1221, the event information will tell you how much freespace/whitespace that particular DB has after the last online defrag.

Exchange 2010 – Using EMS and enter the following command - Get-MailboxDatabase -Status | Select-Object Server, Name, AvailableNewMailboxSpace

Hope you find this useful!

n3ilb

Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES) Windows service restart ordering

Hi All… nothing new here… this is posted all over the web and I got the information from here (http://btsc.webapps.blackberry.com/btsc/search.do?cmd=displayKC&docType=kc&externalId=KB13718) but I wanted to make a note of it for my own quick reference…

So order to STOP the services…

Controller
Dispatcher
Router
Then the rest…

Order to START the services

Router
Dispatcher
Controller
Then the rest…

Have fun!!

N3ilb

Installing the Telnet Client from the command line on Server 2008 and Server 2008 R2

So I find it a pain that Server 2008 and 2008 R2 don’t come with the telnet client installed after the initial OS install, the telnet client is a great way to check ports are open for various services, like IIS or SMTP.

On 2008 R2 the quickest way I find to install it is through PowerShell, in a PowerShell window (running as administrator) just do the following…

This won’t work on Server 2008 though…

Instead you need to go with…

Hope you find this useful!

N3ib