November 2009 - Posts
Just to include all details on products surrounding Exchange: a few days after the Exchange 2010 launch at Tech.Ed Europe, both Forefront TMG 2010 and Forefront Protection for Exchange 2010 launched as well.
Forefront Threat Management Gateway (TMG) 2010
Forefront Threat Management Gateway 2010 allows employees to safely and productively use the Internet without worrying about malware and other threats. Forefront Threat Management Gateway 2010 is available for download in both Standard Edition and Enterprise Edition.
System Requirements
- Supported Operating Systems: Windows Server 2008
Recommended system requirements:
o Supported Operating Systems: Windows Server 2008 SP2 or Windows Server 2008 R2
o A computer with 4 core (2 CPU x dual core or 1 CPU x quad core) 64-bit processor
o 4 gigabytes (GB) or more of memory
o 2.5 GB of available hard disk space. This is exclusive of hard disk space that you want to use for caching or for temporarily storing files during malware inspection
o Two disk for system and TMG logging, and one for caching and malware inspection
o One network adapter that is compatible with the computer's operating system, for communication with the Internal network
o An additional network adapter for each network connected to the Forefront TMG server
Get the bits!
Forefront Protection 2010 for Exchange Server
Microsoft Forefront Protection 2010 for Exchange Server (FPE) provides fast and effective protection against malware and spam by including multiple scanning engines from industry-leading security partners. It also integrates with Forefront Online Protection for Exchange to provide the defense-in-depth benefits of hosted and on-premise filtering in a single solution
System Requirements
- Supported Operating Systems: Windows Server 2003; Windows Server 2008; Windows Server 2008 R2
Forefront Protection 2010 for Exchange Server system requirements*
- x64 architecture-based with:
- Intel Xeon or Intel Pentium family processor that supports Intel Extended Memory 64 Technology (Intel EM64T), or
- AMD Opteron or AMD Athlon 64 processor that supports AMD64 platform.**
- Server software
- Microsoft Windows Server 2003 SP2, Microsoft Windows Server 2008, or Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2
- Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 SP1 or Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 ***
- 2 gigabytes (GB) of free memory in addition to that required to run Exchange server. For more information about the memory requirements for running Exchange server, consult your Exchange server planning documentation. ****
- 2 GB of available disk space. This is in addition to the disk space required for Exchange server. Utilizing a server as a redistribution server for updates requires additional disk space.
- A four core server with 2.0 GHz or higher processors is recommended. Lower performing servers are supported, but message throughput is decreased.
- Microsoft XML Core Services (MSXML) 6.0 SP1
- Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 SP 1 Windows Communication Foundation or Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 (automatically installed with Exchange Server 2010). If you are installing the Microsoft Forefront Online Protection for Exchange Gateway, .NET Framework 3.5 is required.
- Microsoft Chart Controls for Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5. If these controls are not already present, they will be installed during the FPE installation process.
- Windows PowerShell 1.0
- Client Access Server (CAS). Required only for use with the on-demand scan with Exchange Server 2010.
* All minimum system memory and disk space requirements for Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 SP1 or Exchange Server 2010 must be met before you can install FPE. Too little available memory or disk space may impact the ability of FPE to scan large files. Also, you cannot install FPE if previous versions of the product are installed.
** For evaluation purposes, 32-bit operating systems are supported.
*** To protect Exchange server, if both the Exchange server and SharePoint Products and Technologies are installed on the same server, only FPE can be installed.
**** Less memory is required if Intelligent Engine Management (IEM) is not enabled and fewer than 5 engines are selected (approximately 250 MB of memory per engine.) The memory requirement increases by 1.5 GB on multi-role servers.
Get the bits!
Last week during TechEd Europe, Exchange 2010 officially launched. At the conference among a lot of topics on Exchange was a Q&A session hosted by Kamal Janardhan, Principal Lead Program Manager on the Exchange team at Microsoft.
During the session, a lot was clarified on the topic of the new archiving feature in E2010. In this article I'll try to summarize the most important things.
The archiving feature, just introduced in Exchange 2010 had - in my opinion - a few loose ends that still needed tying up. That or I just didn't understand the whole purpose of the feature J
Actually MSFT has a top three wish list of features that they want to have ASAP, being:
- Accessing your archive from a Outlook 2007 client
- Storing the archive in a separate mailbox database
- Importing PST files to a users archive
Especially the second feature surprised when I first heard that it wasn't possible. The news here, on all three features, is that they are planning to have them ready in the next big Exchange update (that being probably SP1, release date ~ 1 year after RTM)
The original idea behind the archiving was to have only the most frequently used data available. Most frequently being 2 years, which several studies mention as the time for data being access frequently. By adding an archive after 2 years (the default policy) the load on the Exchange server would be reduced.
The archive would only be available when connected to the Exchange server. Same idea. That and the mails from the last 2 years would be available offline via the ost file. The same situation that you now have when synching your smart phone.
Placing the Archiving mailboxes on a separate database is what we all want (just like e.g. Enterprise Vault does this) so we can place them on cheaper storage. MSFT's vision is that with Exchange 2010 you can have your databases on cheap SATA disks without RAID (or even JBOD). I will elaborate on this subject in a later blog post.
Archiving to a separate database will be available in the next update for Exchange 2010.
A few features on archiving:
- End user search will also work for the archive
- It will not be possible to have multiple archive mailboxes per user. The reason that people had multiple PST files was probably due to the 2 Gig size limit anyway
- The retention policies for the mailboxes can be configure via a GPO
- The dumpster size can be configured (using Power Shell)
- In the RTM version of Exchange 2010, delegates by default have no rights on the Archive mailbox. These can be set. It is likely that this will change in the next update
- The retention policy will work with the date received date and timestamp of the message.
- Accessing the archive mailbox from your smart phone is technically possible but currently not implemented.
- It is possible to have a retention policy based on message class (e.g. mail, contacts, calendar etc.)
Just released: OCS R2 Web Trust tool. The Web Trust Tool is a command-line tool (OCSWebIMTrust.exe) that can be used anytime there is a need to establish or remove a trusted sever entry for an Outlook Live server.
It works by searching the Active Directory and locating all instances of Outlook Live server or Exchange Client Access server. It then adds each server found to a list of trusted server entries, thus replacing the previous list of entries.
Get it here
As you have probably noticed, after the official launch yesterday at TechEd Europe, Exchange 2010 is now generally available!
Just to summarize, here are a few important and related links:
Exchange 2010 final bits are available at Technet and MSDN
Exchange Server 2010 Release Notes
Exchange Server 2010 UM Language Packs
Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Management Pack for System Center Operations Manager 2007
Exchange Team announcement
Yesterday was the first day of TechEd Europe (what happened to Middle East and Africa?). Berlin was a first for me, but apart from the weather, all is good here in Deutschland.
My first day started of with two sessions, one of which was about Windows Server 2008 R2, which is generally available by now. Nice and intereseting (but not new) session about the AD recycle bin, Powershell for AD and Djoin.exe (the easy way to join machines to your domain).
Second session was one by Mark Minasi, who I like as a speaker very much. Seldom to find good English, thorough knowledge and a sense of humor in one speaker 
The keynote hit of at 3.30pm, with a nice opening and focussed mostly on what MSFT calls "The New Efficiency". Herein different technologies combine to make our lives easier. These include Windows Server 2008 R2, Exchange 2010 and Windows 7.
After the Efficiency intro, the official launch of Exchange 2010 was a fact! The demo by Julia White included all the new and cool feature of Exchange 2010 (online mailbox move, mailtips and Outlook Webapp)
The last part of the keynote included a number of System Center products such as SCOM, SCCM and SCVMM, all running on Windows Server 2008 R2. The demo of the Power Management - Management pack for SCOM with SCCVM combined, showed the feature to shutdown a physical host when the load of the combined virtual machines can be supported by fewer physical machines. This minimizes the carbon footprint of your datacenter.
The evening was all about the Fall of Wall memorial, very impressive to witness!
More on day 2, later!
As shown on the official supported apps page at the MSFT site, Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 will be officially supported on WIndows Server 2008 R2 starting next year.
The official words: Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 and later versions will be supported beginning Q1 2010