Exchange 2010 goes RTM!

It is official, hot off the presses Exchange 2010 goes live!
see the full announcement here from the MS Exchange Team: http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2009/11/09/453096.aspx

Server 2008 R2 Support coming for Exchange 2007

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

Zune HD

My wife and daughter got me a Zune HD for my birthday. Been playing with it this weekend and loving it! First portable device to have HD Radio on it and has a great feature while listening to the radio to "tag" a song you like and then buy it from the Zune Marketplace.
The browser is good, must have wireless connectivity but in this day and age not to hard to find a hotspot. Only has about 10 apps, all free, mostly games but a calculator and MSN Weather app, all free. Hopefully the application selection approves!
The touch interface was very easy to learn and is easy to use. Another great feature is it works just fine with my car FM transmitter that the wife got me last year for my Zune 4GB! I have created a new playlist for my daughter so while we drive around she can listen to her favorite songs, mostly Pink! And now with HD Radio on the Zune HD I can get HD stations in my car without an upgrade to my car radio.

Running Admin Tools from a non-domain joined computer

As a consultant I find myself at client sites and working from my Statera laptop that I do not join to the clients domain. So usually my only option for running admin tools is to remote into a server and run the tools from there, not too bad. Tried running with the runas command and it never worked, even though I usually have domain admin credentials in the clients domain, get an error. So a friend of mine posted a link to this blog post, http://www.jameskovacs.com/blog/TIPHowToRunProgramsAsADomainUserFromANondomainComputer.aspx
here the author talks about running SQL tools in a similar situation to me. So I tried it out for a few other admin tools and yes, it works great. The trick if you didn't already follow the link is to use the /netonly switch in the runas command line argument:
runas /netonly /user:domain\username "Path to admin tool"
works like a charm and plan to use it more at client locations. I am also toying with the idea of creating a Powershell application to automate this, if I get it going will post it as well.

SCVMM 2008 R2 Problem with P2V from Dell Physical Server

Had a client that I upgraded to 2008 R2 Hyper-V and SCVMM 2008 R2. When they tried to P2V Dell Physical servers they received BSOD or errors on the Install Integration Services step. We tried over and over and could not successfully P2V the server. We then tested to see if a new VM build had any problems with installing Integration Services, worked perfectly. So we ended up getting Microsoft Premier Support involved. After several tests and trials later the problem was solved; the problem dealt with the physical server being build with the Dell OpenManage startup CD. Seems this method of build set a registry key that conflicts with the Integration Services install. The key in question is:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Wdf01000\Group] = Base
changing the key to "WdfLoadGroup" and rebooting the VM allowed the Integration Services to install successfully.

Exchange 2010 Code Complete

The MSExchange Team guys are reporting that the Exchange 2010 Code is complete and is on schedule for RTM in early November.

http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2009/10/08/452775.aspx

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!