March 12, 2015 Dave Stork Exchange 2013, High Availability, Load Balancing, Management One comment

Using your browser to check Exchange 2013 protocol health

Reading Time: 2 minutes Sometimes you're not at work and you suspect there is something wrong with your Exchange 2013 servers and you can't access your environment remotely for whatever reason. Well, in some cases you can check this with just a browser. For each Exchange protocol, there is an URL you can use to check the health. The format would be: https://<External FQDN>/<protocol>/healthcheck.htm If the specific protocol is working correctly, the Exchange server will respond with: 200 OK SERVER.CONTOSO.LOCAL The server.contoso.local would be the

March 21, 2014 Dave Stork Exchange 2013, High Availability, Issue, Support Leave a comment

Updated – Exchange 2013 DAG, Windows Server 2012 R2 and VMware vSphere? Check support!

Reading Time: 2 minutes UPDATED 28/3/2024: See update below article. A little heads up. While working on an extensive design including Exchange Server 2013 with Service Pack 1 installed on Windows Server 2012 R2, my eye caught a comment in the Facebook group Exchange Server 2013 (Facebook login required). VMwares vSphere 5.1 and higher are shown to be validated by Microsofts Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP) to run Windows Server 2012 R2 VM’s. The hypervisor needs to be validated also as a requirement for

December 24, 2012 Dave Stork Exchange, Exchange 2010, High Availability, Load Balancing, Management Leave a comment

Simplifying the OWA URL with Citrix Netscaler

Reading Time: 3 minutes Next to Content Switching (which I recently wrote a post about), Citrix Netscalers can also do URL Rewrites. This enables us to simplify the OWA URL. First, be sure the Rewriting option is enabled by going into System, then Settings and choose Configure Basic Settings. Check the tick box for Rewrite After this, first make an Rewrite Action by going to Rewrite>Actions and add an Action. Give it a comprehensive name and set the type to REPLACE. In the Expression

December 21, 2012 Dave Stork Exchange 2010, High Availability, Load Balancing, Management Leave a comment

Load balancing Exchange 2010 with Citrix Netscaler using Content Switching

Reading Time: 4 minutes Next to F5, KEMP technologies and a lot of other network load balancing vendors there’s also Citrix with it’s Netscaler brand. Especially when an environment also has Citrix servers, it could mean that well scaled Netscaler devices are present and can also be used for other purposes next to Citrix Secure Gateway access. Obviously Exchange 2010 comes to mind. Citrix already has a very helpful Netscaler Exchange 2010 deployment guide (PDF warning). But unfortunately that guide is not always something

November 2, 2011 Dave Stork Exchange 2010, High Availability, Management, Question of the day Leave a comment

Unable to change database path on Exchange 2010 in a DAG?

Reading Time: 2 minutes If you find yourself unable to change the database path of an Exchange 2010 database, check whether it is part of a DAG. See the screenshot for the missing option: If so, you cannot move it. The solution is to remove all copies except the active. Now you can move the DB and Transaction log paths. Do note that you will have downtime! Changing the path requires a dismount and since you do not have the redundancy of a DAG,

July 15, 2011 Dave Stork Exchange 2010, High Availability Leave a comment

Exchange, Load balancers and recommendations

Reading Time: 5 minutes This is a follow-up post to Differences in Exchange Load Balancing recommendations by Microsoft and vendors. This post refers to issues I discovered and were discussed in that post. I suggest reading the previous article before reading this one. I also expect some experience with load balancers in combination with Exchange Server 2010. In the previous post I mentioned several discrepancies in the Exchange deployment guides from several Load balancing companies. I contacted them and pointed out their apparent discrepancies. Their

May 30, 2011 Dave Stork Exchange 2010, High Availability, TechEd Leave a comment

Differences in Exchange Load Balancing recommendations by Microsoft and vendors

Reading Time: 3 minutes *** See my followup here Exchange, Load balancers and recommendations: At TechEd North America 2011 Andrew Ehrensing (Solution Architect form Microsoft) presented the session “Load Balancing with Exchange Server 2010” (EXL307) for which the video and slides can be found here. It was an excellent session, a lot of useful information even if you don’t have to load balance with Exchange per se. For me it was an extra interesting session, as we just had implemented a load balancer with

April 28, 2011 Dave Stork Exchange 2010, High Availability Leave a comment

Change in Exchange 2010 SP1 CAS static port configuration

Reading Time: < 1 minute For those who are using Exchange 2010 DAG and a Network Load Balancer, note that there is a small difference between RTM and SP1. If you choose to use static ports for your Client Access Servers, for the Address Book Services you would edit the Microsoft.exchange.addressbook.service.exe.config located in: “C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\V14\Bin” But with SP1 (directly installed or upgraded from RTM), the location has changed to the registry: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\MSExchangeRpc\ParametersSystem You have to make a new REG_DWORD with the value “TCP/IP Port”

November 23, 2010 Dave Stork Exchange 2010, High Availability, Outlook Leave a comment

Public Folders and the DAG

Reading Time: 3 minutes When realizing a High Available Exchange 2010 environment, you automatically going to use DAG (Database Availabilty Groups). It is a different approach with previous versions of Exchange, who leverage server redundancy. DAG supplies us with mailbox database redundancy. When using a DAG the single point of entry for your clients and for all protocols (including MAPI RPC), is the Client Access Array (or CAS Array). Essentially a DNS record pointing to a Load Balancer. A Hardware Load Balancer (HLB) is