Evaluating Microsoft Exchange 2010 for Your Business

Transcription

1 Evaluating Microsoft Exchange 2010 for Your Business an Storage ebook

2 Contents Evaluating Microsoft Exchange This content was adapted from Internet.com s Enterprise Networking Planet, Enterprise Storage Forum and ServerWatch websites. Contributors: Paul Ruben, Paul Shread and Ryan Bass. 2 2 Exchange Server 2010 Promises a Brave New World 4 Microsoft Adds Archiving, ediscovery Features to Exchange Nine Things to Like (and Three to Not) In Exchange Installing Exchange 2010 Step-by-Step 7 12

3 Exchange Server 2010 Promises a Brave New World By Paul Rubens M icrosoft promises a brave new world of lower IT costs, increased user productivity and better risk management to customers that deploy Exchange Server 2010 (ES10). Can the company s flagship unified communications product deliver on this promise? Julia White, Microsoft s director, Exchange product management, said that lower IT costs flow from a number of enhancements to Exchange in its new iteration, including Role Based Access Control (RBAC). Speaking at a webinar organized by Californiabased research company The Radicati Group, White said the new simplified administration model is significantly easier, and therefore less expensive, to use. RBAC does away with the need to manage the deeply unpopular access control lists in Exchange, enabling IT administrators to delegate administration tasks by defining roles for other users. Using RBAC, users in the HR department can be allowed to update staff contact information, compliance officers can run searches across multiple users mailboxes, and end users can make and manage their own distribution groups, thus freeing up the IT staff s time. Storage is another area where customers see significant cost savings, White said. Disk I/O activity has been reduced 70 percent compared to Exchange Server 2003, which means a far wider range of low-cost, lowerperformance disks can now be used for storage. I/O patterns have also been optimized so that disk writes no longer come in bursts. Hence, low-cost SATA drives can be used in ES10. One of the top pain points that we are hearing these days especially with the emergence of online services is the desire for large mailboxes, said White. With Exchange 2010 we can enable very large 5 to 10 gig mailboxes in a very cost effective way. When it comes to increased productivity, White highlighted some new features designed to make it easier for users to triage their inboxes. You can now ignore conversations for those long and painful strings, and with the click of a button you can get them out of your inbox forever as well as any future s, White offered as an example. Outlook Web Access (OWA) has also been upgraded to incorporate all of the functionality of the Outlook desktop client. It now supports Firefox and Safari as well as Microsoft s Internet Explorer. Another new feature that looks appealing is Exchange s voic preview, which uses speech-to-text technology to enable users to read computer-generated transcriptions of their voic messages from within Outlook. This could be useful for checking voic s in situations, such as meetings, when listening to the messages would be inappropriate. Users can also listen to voic s directly from Outlook, thereby doing away with the need for a separate voic system. 2 Back to Contents Evaluating Microsoft Exchange an Internet.com Storage ebook. 2010, Internet.com, a division of QuinStreet, Inc.

4 Microsoft has gone a long way toward addressing the well-known problems associated with PST discovery and management with which many Exchange administrators (and compliance officers) are familiar, White claimed. That s because archiving is built in to ES10 using a personal archive. This looks like a normal mailbox that can be viewed using Outlook or OWA, and it can be searched at the same time as the user s primary mailbox. The difference is that it is physically located on the Exchange Server. You can file things to it, and you can move things in and out of it, just like you would your normal mailbox, said White. Personal folders are expensive to discover, and they are often lost or corrupted. You can now replace them with a personal archive that s managed centrally which means (as an administrator) you can discover it much more easily, there s back up of it and there s controls on it. White also highlighted the work Microsoft has done to increase system availability. One change is a concept called database groups, which allows companies to replicate their data across multiple data centers, with up to 16 replicas of each database. This reduces the need for future backups and has a nice disaster recovery story built in, she said. Will Enterprises Bite? It s estimated that about 45 percent of the installed base of corporate messaging users in the United States use Microsoft Exchange. Given that only about 50 percent of these companies are using Exchange 2007, according to Radicati Group, what are the chances that many companies will make the move to ES10? It s a big deal to upgrade, admited White. However, she said she believes that many companies with aging hardware running Exchange 2003 will want to make the move sooner rather than later. Our guidance for 2003 users is certainly to skip 2007 and move straight to 2010, she said. EC10 will appeal to businesses that want the mobile and web experience especially as they become more mobile. What do others think of the new product? Bryan Cote, group product manager at storage giant EMC, thinks that personal archives have the potential to be very exciting. The PST thing has always been a big problem for our customers. PST consolidation to user archive is probably my favorite feature [in ES10]. Andre Franklin, archiving product manager at HP, said he believes that by sidestepping the management of PSTs by introducing personal archives with low-cost storage possibilities Microsoft has made a very smart move. Microsoft has hit a home run by addressing that, there s no question about it, Franklin said. Beyond that, the fact that ES10 supports SATA drives for cheap, lowcost storage makes a lot of sense. Let s manage these large mailboxes in personal archives, as the storage is relatively low cost. Why send the data off somewhere else that s low cost, when you can keep it within Exchange at very low cost and do your own archiving? Microsoft has made a big deal about the concept of software and services, and ES10 has been built from the ground up to be run within an enterprise or offered from a service provider s facility, according to White. Brent Rich, director of operations at New York-based service provider Intermedia.net, said he believes this will help service providers offer a more reliable service. From an architectural perspective as a service provider, we think the new design of 2010 will help us, he said. We already provide a five-nines SLA for our customers, but we believe we can do better with Exchange Back to Contents Evaluating Microsoft Exchange an Internet.com Storage ebook. 2010, Internet.com, a division of QuinStreet, Inc.

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6 Microsoft Adds Archiving, ediscovery Features to Exchange 2010 By Paul Shread M icrosoft updated the data storage features in Exchange 2010 to add new archiving and ediscovery capabilities. Exchange 2010 Service Pack 1 (SP1) arrived in August Central to SP1 is the new archiving and ediscovery updates based on customer feedback. The integrated archiving ability of Exchange 2010 announced in 2009 get new flexibility in SP1, with the ability to provision users Personal Archive to a different mailbox database from their primary mailbox. The added functionality lets organizations implement separate storage strategies or tiered storage for less frequently accessed . Multi-Mailbox Search, which can be used to conduct ediscovery of for legal, regulatory or other reasons, received a new search preview to help with early case assessment by estimating the number of items in the result set, along with keyword statistics, before located in the search is copied to the designated discovery mailbox. Microsoft also added a search result deduplication option for users to copy only one instance of a message to the discovery mailbox. SP1 also supports annotation of reviewed items. Microsoft also included support for access to a user s Personal Archive with Outlook New server-side capabilities allow historical data from.pst files to be imported directly into Exchange, and IT pro controls will enable delegate access to a user s Personal Archive. To make it easier to set retention policies, SP1 updated the Exchange Management Console with new tools to create Retention Policy Tags for automating the deletion and archiving of and other Exchange items. 4 Back to Contents Evaluating Microsoft Exchange an Internet.com Storage ebook. 2010, Internet.com, a division of QuinStreet, Inc.

7 Nine Things to Like (and Three to Not) In Exchange 2010 By Ryan Bass E xchange 2010 is Release 3.2 of the product. This is good news because it means that Exchange 2010 is the second release of the third generation of the product. Exchange 2007 was the first release for G3. This can be likened to Windows 2000 and Windows XP. Windows 2000 was a significant change from NT 4, but Windows XP was mostly about tuning and adding additional features (the same is true for Vista and Windows 7). If you re looking at starting a fresh deployment of Exchange the timing is perfect. The Exchange 2010 code was actually developed first for Microsoft s live@edu program, which is a hosted version of Exchange for education institutions. While this may have been a bit bumpy for students it means that the on-premises version has run through some serious real-world testing in a very large environment. That is great news for everyone looking at deploying Exchange 2010, but is especially beneficial for sizable deployments of Exchange because one of the hardest things to test is real-world scalability. Changes and New Features There are a host of improvements and new features in Exchange We ll step through the most important changes and reveal some of the key enhancements. 1. High Availability Microsoft has made significant changes to high availability. With 2010 you can easily replicate your mailbox databases to other Exchange servers. If there is a problem with the primary database Exchange can automatically switch to one of the backup copies. For example, you could replicate your mailbox database to a local server for high availability / business continuity and to a remote server for disaster recovery. If your primary database fails there are two copies to fall back on. 2. Store and Mailbox Database Changes Improvements have been made to the Extensible Storage Engine (ESE) which Microsoft claims will reduce IOPS by 70 percent. This means that you may be able to save some money by using less expensive storage. 3. Delegation of Permissions As mentioned earlier, a new feature called Role Based Access Control (RBAC) allows administrators to delegate very detailed permissions to sub-administrators, help desk personnel, and even end users. While this will probably not be especially useful in small environments it continued is extremely beneficial in large ones. For example, an IT security specialist may be allowed to do legal discovery, and end users might be allowed to manage their own distribution groups. 5 Back to Contents Evaluating Microsoft Exchange an Internet.com Storage ebook. 2010, Internet.com, a division of QuinStreet, Inc.

8 4. Management/Admin Updates Administrators will be happy to learn that one of the new management features is the ability to connect remotely to their Exchange servers. All they need is Power Shell v2 and Windows Remote Management 2.0 (this feature is not available for the Edge Transport server role). 5. Throttling User throttling in Exchange 2010 will help protect the system from intentional and non-intentional over-taxing of the system. For example, if an account is compromised and be used to pump spam the overall system performance will not be degraded. 6. Text Messaging Users can now configure true SMS notification from within the Web client. If you re using AT&T, Verizon, Sprint or T-Mobile in the U.S. then you can setup and calendar text notifications with very flexible rules (other countries are available as well). You could configure all s from your boss to trigger an SMS notification! 7. Archiving Exchange 2010 allows you to archive messages on the server so you don t have to store them in a local PST file on your desktop machine. Trying to keep track of local PST archives will not be missed. 8. Outlook Web App The Exchange 2010 web interface finally allows the full featured Web interface for Firefox users! 9. Miscellaneous while the user is actively using their account. reply-all to that 3,000-recipient message. groups to monitor/approve messages. What You May Not Like It s not all roses, there are some limitations and requirements that you may not like so much in Exchange Once again, there is no upgrade path so you will need to setup brand new systems if/when you decide to move to Exchange 2010 from a previous version. And 64-bit hardware is required so you won t be able to use an old server. This isn t a huge deal for large shops, but could be a serious factor for smaller, cash-strapped organizations. Finally, Exchange 2010 requires Windows Server Windows Server 2003 has become an extremely stable and relatively lightweight server OS. While Windows Server 2008 has had some time to stretch its legs, it is still a bit of a resource hog. Conclusion All-in-all Exchange 2010 looks like it will be a good move for most medium to large-sized organizations. For smaller entities, hosted is starting to look better and better. has become very much a utility type service and there are a plethora of reliable low-cost providers out there. If you go the Google Apps route you also get access to additional productivity tools like Google Calendar, Docs, Sites, and Chat. The ability for different users to work on the same document at the same time is a considerable value-add. Combining all that with a low price point makes for a compelling argument to go the hosted route. 6 Back to Contents Evaluating Microsoft Exchange an Internet.com Storage ebook. 2010, Internet.com, a division of QuinStreet, Inc.

9 Installing Exchange 2010 Step-by-Step By Ryan Bass N ow that we ve looked at the features in Microsoft Exchange Server 2010, let s walk through the steps required to install a fully functional Exchange 2010 server on Windows Server 2008 R2. System Requirements First, you need to make sure that your Active Directory (AD) environment and your Exchange server meet the minimum requirements: Prerequisites level is Windows Server 2003 (or higher) running Windows Server 2003 w/sp1 or later Windows Server 2008 w/ SP2 or later OR Windows Server 2008 R2 for the Exchange server itself joined to the domain (except for the Edge Transport server role) In this example we are going to install Exchange 2010 on a Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system. Before installing Exchange we need to install some Windows components. It s important that you don t miss anything here because the Exchange 2010 installer does not provide very good feedback if Server 2008 R2 is missing required components. 1. Install the 2007 Office System Converter: Microsoft Filter Pack 2. Add the appropriate Windows components/ features a. Open PowerShell via the icon on the task bar or Start >> All Programs >> Accessories >> Windows PowerShell >> Windows PowerShell. Be sure that PowerShell opened with an account that has rights to install Windows components/features. b. Run the following command: Import-Module ServerManager c. For a typical install with the Client Access, Hub Transport, and Mailbox roles run the following command: Add-WindowsFeature NET-Framework,RSAT- ADDS,Web-Server,Web-Basic-Auth,Web- Windows-Auth,Web-Metabase,Web-Net- Ext,Web-Lgcy-Mgmt-Console,WAS-Process- Model,RSAT-Web-Server,Web-ISAPI-Ext,Web- Digest-Auth,Web-Dyn-Compression,NET-HTTP- Activation,RPC-Over-HTTP-Proxy -Restart. continued For a full matrix of the required Windows components with regards to the Exchange server roles see: bb aspx#ws08r2 7 Back to Contents Evaluating Microsoft Exchange an Internet.com Storage ebook. 2010, Internet.com, a division of QuinStreet, Inc.

10 3. If your Exchange server will have the Client Access Server role set the Net.Tcp Port Sharing Service to start automatically a. Open PowerShell via the icon on the task bar or Start >> All Programs >> Accessories >> Windows PowerShell >> Windows PowerShell. Be sure that PowerShell opened with an account that has rights to modify service startup settings. b. Run the following command: Set-Service NetTcpPortSharing -StartupType Automatic 3. Click on Step 3: Choose Exchange language option and choose one of the options (Install only languages from the DVD will be fine in most cases). 4. Click on Step 4: Install Microsoft Exchange. 5. Click Next at the Introduction page. 6. Accept the license terms and click Next. 7. Make a selection on the Error Reporting page and click Next. 8. Stick with the default Typical Exchange Server Installation and click Next. 9. Choose a name for your Exchange Organization and click Next. 10. Make a selection on the Client Settings page and click Next. 11. If you want your Exchange server to be available externally then choose a domain name such as mail. myorganization.com, click Next. 12. Make a selection on the Customer Experience Improvement Program page and click Next. Exchange 2010 Installation Now we re ready to run the Exchange 2010 installer. We ll go through a typical installation that includes the Client Access, Hub Transport and Mailbox roles. This is what you will want to install if you are only going to be running one Exchange server. If you scale out your Exchange architecture with multiple servers then you will want to familiarize yourself with the Exchange server roles for a proper deployment. 1. Logon to the desktop of your soon to be Exchange server with a Domain Admin account. 13. If all the prerequisites are there then you can click Install. 14. Grab a cup of coffee or take a walk while the installation process does its thing. 15. When the installation has finished go back to the Exchange installation page click on Step 5: Get critical updates for Microsoft Exchange. 16. Install Microsoft Update (if necessary) so that Windows update will check for non-os updates, and verify that there are no Exchange updates. 2. Run setup from the Exchange 2010 media. 8 Back to Contents Evaluating Microsoft Exchange an Internet.com Storage ebook. 2010, Internet.com, a division of QuinStreet, Inc.

11 Post Installation Steps Now that you have Exchange 2010 installed, you will need to do some basic configuration in the Exchange Management console to get mail flowing to/from your server. 1. Open the Exchange Management Console via Start >> All Programs >> Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 >> Exchange Management Console 2. Expand Microsoft Exchange On-Premises so you can see: Organization Configuration, Server Configuration, Recipient Configuration, and Toolbox 3. Under Organization Configuration >> Hub Transport >> Accepted Domains add a new Accepted Domain for the domain you wish to use for addresses. For example, your AD domain will be listed by default (i.e. ad.myorganization.com). You will probably want to add myorganization.com as an Authoritative Domain. 4. Under Organization Configuration >> Hub Transport >> Send Connectors >> New Send Connector... >> Pick a name such as MyOrganization Internet Send Connector >> change the drop down to Internet >> Next >> Add... >> enter * in the Address field and check the box to include all subdomains >> OK >> Next. Now, if you want your Exchange server to route mail directly, then click Next on the Network setting page, but if you want to route your through an upstream provider then select Route mail through the following smart hosts and Add... a mail gateway such as smtp.comcast.net. Click Next >> Next >> Next >> New 5. Under Server Configuration >> Hub Transport >> Right-click Default *** >> Properties >> Permission Groups tab, check the box for Anonymous users. This will allow your Exchange server to accept incoming mail delivery from remote mail servers. 6. Under Recipient Configuration >> Mailbox, create mailboxes for your existing AD users (or create a new user & mailbox) a. New Mailbox... >> select User Mailbox >> Next >> Existing users >> Add... >> select an existing AD account >> OK >> Next >> specify an alias (e.g. the AD user name) >> Next >> New 7. If you want to use an SSL certificate for Outlook Web App, IMAP, POP, etc. click on Server Configuration and import or create the certificate Mail Routing Configuration Now the final piece you need to configure to receive mail is your external DNS records. The method for configuring your DNS records will depend on whether you host your own DNS or have a provider that hosts it for you. Either way you will need to create an A record that points mail. myorganization.com to the IP address of your mail server, and an MX record that points myorganization.com to mail.myorganization.com. You will also want to make sure that port 25 is open, both inbound and outbound, to your Exchange server. Conclusion That s it! You should now be able to browse to mail.myorganization.com/owa (or from the server) and logon via the Web interface to send and receive mail! 9 Back to Contents Evaluating Microsoft Exchange an Internet.com Storage ebook. 2010, Internet.com, a division of QuinStreet, Inc.