Exchange 2010 versus 2007

As a senior consultant with Statera I go out on sales calls and work with clients wanting to upgrade their messaging environment. Lately I have had to explain the difference and reasoning about going to Exchange 2010. Several prospective or current clients want to know why they should go to a relatively new technology in Exchange 2010 instead of Exchange 2007. I usually give the same speech and figured I would give the high points in this post:

1. DAG's (Database Availability Groups) this is probably the most compelling reason to go directly to 2010. DAG's offer the most straight forward and easiest way to invoke both High Availability and Disaster Recovery. DAG's combine and enhance the various replication options from Exchange 2007 (LCR, CCR, SCC and SCR) into a standard, easily administrated solution. Exchange 2010 removes Storage Groups from the Exchange vernacular and puts the Database as the main storage hierarchy. Another benefit of DAGs versus Mailbox clustering in Exchange 2oo7 is that now instead of a active passive scenario, you can now have an active active scenario with each node having active databases and cop0y databases; this allows for better utilization of server hardware.
2. Server reduction: Exchange 2010 allows an organization to placed the HUB and CAS roles on a server that is participating on a Mailbox DAG. Previously in Exchange 2007 if you had a clustered Mailbox server you could not place any other roles on the clustered servers. Exchange 2010 can reduce a simple high availability design for an organization from four server to two. In Exchange 2007 you would need to have two dedicated servers for a mailbox cluster and then another two servers to host the HUB and CAS roles. In Exchange 2010 you can have the same redundancy with only two servers, each one hosting the Mailbox, HUB and CAS roles.

There are also other benefits of Exchange 2010 is the reduction is IOPS for the databases has been calculated as much as 70% compared to Exchange 2007. Since the path to go from Exchange 200X to Exchange 2010 is the same, a company looking to move either to Exchange 2007 or 2010 is a big decision. If the company decides to go with 2007 a complete migration will require another complete migration in the future to migrate to 2010. My recommendation is to forgo the next migration and go directly to 2010. While 2010 supports installation on Server 2008 R2, Exchange 2007 does not. These two factors highlight that going directly to Exchange 2010 and Server 20087 R2 will result in a company being in a supported state from Microsoft for a longer duration than going with Exchange 2007 on Server 2008.

I do understand that some companies still are hesitant to run on the "Bleeding Edge" of technology. My answer to this is that Exchange 2010 is more of an R2 version of Exchange 2007 than a complete redesign of the Exchange platform as Exchange 2007 was compared to Exchange 2000/2003.

If you are contemplating this move please take the above information into effect and please do not hesitate to contact me at Sean dot McNeill at Statera dot com for more information.

Server 2008 R2 Support coming for Exchange 2007

See the announcement here: http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2009/11/04/453026.aspx

Exchange 2007 SP2 has been released

Read more about this new service pack for Exchange 2007 here:
http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2009/08/25/452095.aspx

Interesting client project

Been working at a client here in Colorado to upgrade them from a Windows NT 4 domain to 2008 Active Directory and Exchange 5.5 to Exchange 2007. Yes you read that right! The fun part is neither can be done in one move, both require going to 2003 levels first then to the final desired levels. This is a pretty small shop, about 100 users so it is not that bad, but working with NT 4 and Exchange 5.5 has made me really appreciate the new OS and Exchange versions.

Tonight is one of the big moves, upgrading a newly installed NT 4 BDC to PDC then upgrading the OS to 2003. Hopefully this goes pretty smooth. Over the next few days I will then be installing Exchange 2003 and migrating mailboxes to get to a much more stable and supportable environment. After this week it should be pretty easy to get to 2008 AD and Exchange 2007.

Wish me luck!

Power Consumption Comparison for Exchange 2007, PHysical vs Virtual

The guys over at the Microsoft Exchange Team Blog have a post talking about power consumption for an Exchange 2007 environment comparing Physical versus Virtual. Good information: http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2009/06/19/451650.aspx

Case Study for Hyper-V and Exchange 2007

Check out this case study for a project I completed implementing Hyper-V with Exchange 2007. The client liked Hyper-V so much with Exchange 2007 that they then had me assist with a new Hyper-V cluster for consolidating other servers.
http://www.statera.com/customers/cases/CoBizVirtualizationCS060309.pdf

Standby Continuos Replication (SCR) in a Parent Child domain

Ran into a problem configuring SCR here at a client, the client has an empty root domain with a child resource domain. Exchange is in the Child resource domain along with everything else. When I attempted to get configure SCR between two mailbox servers I got an error about SCR is not supported between servers in different domains. My first thought was to verify the machines were in the same domain and yes they are. I then tried the command from the target machine for the SCR (first time was from source) and got the same error.

I then went searching and found this:
http://blogs.technet.com/timmcmic/archive/2008/12/21/exchange-2007-sp1-ru5-error-regarding-replication-between-computers-in-different-domains-when-using-standby-continuous-replication-scr.aspx

Seems that Exchange 2007 SP1 Rollup 5 introduced this error and it was not fixed in Rollup 6 just released this month. The link has work some arounds for the problem and states it is schedule to be fixed in Rollup 7. Thanks to Tim McMichael for explaining this bug so I did not go crazy and start rebuilding or re-joining servers to domains.