Exchange 2010

I attended the Microsoft Launch for Windows 7, Server 2008 R2 and Exchange 2010 here in Denver this week. My company http://www.statera.com/ was actually a sponsor and I worked our table for awhile. In the afternoon I was able to attend a couple sessions on Exchange 2010 with Harold Wong.
The first session was about Exchange 2010 high availability. One of the biggest changes in 2010 is the removal of Storage Groups, now you only deal with Databases. And with databases you can create Database Access Groups (DAG). A DAG consists of Databases and Mailbox servers for replication. Was is improved from Exchange 2007 is the fact that a database can be easily replicated to up to 16 mailbox servers. Also databases can be staggered to be active on multiple mailbox servers. You can have database one active on mailbox server 1, database 2 active on mailbox server 2 with each mailbox server having a replicated copy of the non-active database. This basically allows you to have an Active-Active cluster. Allowing an organization to utilize all mailbox servers for active user connections.
Another huge feature is the fact that you can now have the HUB and CAS role on a mailbox server that is participating in a DAG. in Exchange 2007 if you clustered the mailbox role you could not place any other roles on that server. Now a small to medium size company can have complete redundancy with only two servers running MB, HUB and CAS roles.

The Second session was about Archiving in Exchange 2010. Microsoft now offers Archiving naively in 2010, but it is a light implementation. The problem I see, as Harold pointed out, is the fact that the archive mailbox for a user's mailbox is located in the same database as the user mailbox. This configuration really kinda defeats one of the primary reasons to archive, move the archived mail off the primary mailbox server and storage and move to secondary storage. Harold stated that Microsoft is working on a fix to allow the archived mailbox to be setup on another database, this would probably be in a service pack for 2010. Another missing piece is a tool to automatically move messages and items from local PST files to the archive location. With the release a user would need to manually do this step.

More to come on Exchange 2010!

Server 2008 R2 Core Edition

Couple really helpful features were added to Server 2008 R2 Core, sconfig and iscscicpl.
sconfig comes from the Hyper-V Server 2008 free download, it is a nice configuration utility that handles many of the initial setup tasks needed for the server. Having these in a nice easy to use group makes the initial IP, naming, domain membership as well as remote access available very nice.
iscscicpl is the GUI iSCSI initiator interface that was available only in Server 2008 full install editions. This now makes connecting and configuring iSCSI SAN storage a breeze.

Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V

I have already done a couple upgrades of Hyper-V from R1 to R2 and must say that Microsoft has taken a huge leap in their data center virtualization offering! I think most everyone who follows virtualization knows about the BIG improvement, LIVE MIGRATIONS. But Live Migrations are not the only new feature/enhancement with the R2 Hyper-V release. One of the small features that might not get a lot of notice but I really appreciate is a check mark on the Virtaul switch that allows you to turn off administrative access on a physical NIC when connected to a virtual switch. This to me not only reinforces the best practice to have a separate, dedicated NIC for admin access to the host computer but really cleans up the Network Interface connections on a host computer. With R1 each time you created a Virtual Switch a "duplicate" Network Interface was created and without proper naming (side note: ran into this at a client sight, they did not properly name the Network Interfaces and it made troubleshooting and administration a nightmare) would result is numerous Network interfaces only differentiated buy a number appended to the end of the standard name. Now check the check box does not create this second Network Interface, nice work Microsoft.

Another cool feature, and what actually enables Live Migrations, is Clustered Shared Volumes. Along with allowing for multiple hosts to access a single LUN at the same time, it eliminates the requirement for creating and individual LUN for each virtual machine. This provides for better utilization of shared storage space. Now you can create a single large LUN and present it to all hosts in the cluster and place multiple VMs within this LUN separated by simple folders.

More to come!