Confessions of an IT Geek

Exchange 2003 ESM on Vista and Exchange 2007 Virtualization

Microsoft has released a couple of exciting new items related to Exchange. First is the release of a Vista compatible version of the Exchange System Manager for managing Exchange Server 2003.

Second, Microsoft has released some guidelines around virtualization support for Exchange Server 2007. Initially as you may know, MS was not supporting virtualization of Exchange except for testing. Now MS is supporting it assume that the hypervisor platform has been certified in the Microsoft Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP). Of course at this point the only certified hypervisor is Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 but the program shows that other hypervisors are planning to be test. But no don't expect that VMWare will be in the mix anytime soon.

Read through the support policies for virtual Exchange servers carefully. There is a lot of information here. Some highlights though.

• Supported only on Hyper-V
• Guest VM must run Windows Server 2008 and Exchange 2007 SP1
• Must used fixed size VHDs
• No support for the UM server role

Automating Exchange Server 2007 SP1 Installs

Here is a link to a recent good post on the MS Exchange team's blog that discusses a set of scripts that were created to automate the install of Exchange 2007 SP1. Its a fairly detailed post and includes a link to the script files.

You Had Me At EHLO... : Client Network Traffic with Exchange 2007 SP1

The Exchange team has provided some detail on how to estimate the total amount of network traffic that would be generated by a set of Exchange clients against an Exchange 2007 SP1 server. In the article there is also a link to one of my favorite white papers that goes into this same subject in great detail for Exchange 2003.

Link: You Had Me At EHLO... : Client Network Traffic with Exchange 2007.

Exchange CCR Videos out

If you have been considering deploying continuous cluster replication but you have been reluctant to do so because of the complexity or maybe you are just a bit intimidated, the Exchange team has released some videos show how to do this. Check it out.

Exchange CCR Video Post