Exchange 2010 Deplyment Assistant

Microsoft have been listening which is great for administrators upgrading to 2010. Initially only available to assist in upgrading from Exchange 2003, the Exchange 2010 Deployment Assistant asks a few pertinent questions creating a step by step configuration guide to deploying 2010 safely.

Read More about the new deployment tool at the msexchangeteam.com Blog.

http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2009/11/11/453172.aspx

Exchange 2010: Installation

Well, got some time today to build up Exchange 2010 RC1 in our test environment. Building a 3 mailbox DAG with 2 x CAS/HUB server in Hyper-V. So far built up W2k8 base image, patched them and added to the local domain. Used the following Blog Post to help on the pre-req's.

http://blogs.dirteam.com/blogs/davestork/archive/2009/04/22/installing-exchange-2010-beta-quick-preparation.aspx

More to come!

Exchange 2010 and Fail!

Been in Sydney week before last going through the new features of Exchange 2010. I am enjoying the new High Avaliabilty setup which leverages cheap storage with multiple copies. Squeezing four days worth of training into 3 days, we covered heaps of content. Below are the major advantages I have seen thus far. I will comment on the cons after

• Ability to use more lower spec lower cost disk (SATA) to store data because of a change in Database Structure
  
• Using Windows 2008 clustering technology and Log Shipping to create multiple copies of the data over multiple machines with fast failover.
• Powershell upgrades allowing native remote execution through the powershell console
• Inbuilt Archiving solution of sorts ( More on this later )
  
• Text to speech conversion from the Unified Communications Server.
• Webaccess fully supported on IE, Firefox and Safari

However there are a couple of points you need to be aware of!

• All other High Availability options have been removed.
• MAPI client connects to CAS now requiring a higher spec CAS / Trasport server.
  
• Archving solution can only be stored in the same database as the rest of the email.
  
• No in place upgrade. Cost per mb is lower to store but for those recently invested in hardware for Exchange 2007 are going to need to purchase additional hardware to transistion to Exchange 2010.
  
• Cannot transistion from Exchange 2000 or less to Exchange 2010.
  

Of course there are heaps of new features where the Exchange developers have listen to Exchange admins which is great but sometimes they forget about issues they have fixed in the past!

On a sadder note, my previous blog is dead. Through some hacking of my ISP and some epic fail on the backups on my part I have lost the majority of the post. I am going to re-create a couple posts shortly which I think still need to be out there. Suffice to say I have left that ISP and chosen blogspot as my new blog home. Hopefully I will have more luck!!!!