Office 365 News

Microsoft hosted its annual Ignite conference in Atlanta this September. Ignite was massive at 1412 sessions. That is a lot of sessions! Many are posted at the Ignite channel on YouTube or through the Microsoft Ignite On Demand portal. Here are the top 15 sessions I think every Exchange admin should watch.

Understand the Microsoft Exchange Server 2016 Architecture
Ross Smith discusses the Exchange 2016 preferred architecture. Mike Cooper of GM discusses his implementation of Exchange 2016. Ross and Mike take questions from the audience.

• Ross demonstrates a new feature where you can recover deleted or purged items to their original folder.

Deploy Microsoft Exchange Server 2016
Brian Day and Jeff Guillet discuss what’s changed in Exchange system requirements. Discussions included:

• Exchange 2016 CU3 supports Windows Server 2016
• Server 2008 R2 FFL/DFL will become the new minimum requirement in future Exchange 2016 releases.
• .NET 4.6.2 currently only supported on Exchange 2016 CU3 on Server 2016. Will be made available in CU15/CU4 for older operating systems.
• .NET 4.6.2 will be mandatory with CU16/CU5. The setup will block you if you don’t have 4.6.2 installed.
• WMFS 5 is only supported on Windows Server 2016. It is not supported when you install it on older operating systems (use the version that comes with your OS).

Design your Exchange infrastructure right (or consider moving to Office 365)
Robert Gillies, Boris Lokhvitsky, Adrian Moore discuss the business benefits of deploying the Exchange preferred architecture.

• The importance of eradicating failure domains
• SAN versus DAS
  • Since Exchange 2003 each version has dropped IOPS requirements.
  • Exchange 2016 uses 93% fewer IOPs than 2003
  • Exchange 2016 uses 30% fewer IOPs than 2013
  • Exchange databases average 10 IOPs
  • 7200 RPM SATA/NL-SAS average 70 IOPs
• Thick versus Thin Provisioning
• The importance of controller write cache
• Bound versus Unbound Namespaces
• Stretched DAGs
• Virtual vs. Physical

Earlier this month was a big day for Exchange updates. Not only did we get Cumulative Update 12 for Exchange 2013, but we also got our first update for Exchange 2016. Yay!

As always, test these updates in a lab first! I recommend checking out this 7-part guide on configuring Exchange in your lab. It doesn’t take much to get one going.

The updates are as follows:

Exchange Server 2016 Cumulative Update 1 | UM Language Pack Download

Exchange Server 2013 Cumulative Update 12 | UM Language Pack Download

Exchange Server 2010 SP3 Update Rollup 13

Exchange Server 2007 SP3 Update Rollup 19

So what’s new?

This update is a culmination of bug fixes and feature tweaks. Most notably the OWA S/MIME control ditches its SHA-1 signing certificate in favor of the more secure and robust SHA-2. This signing change makes it to all supported versions of Exchange. For 2007, which is in extended support, this is the only thing Rollup 19 addresses. Exchange 2010, also in extended support, similarly sees this update and just one other minor tweak–which is the introduction of a link to the new Hybrid Configuration Wizard.

Despite the inclusion of this link in EMC, the new Hybrid Configuration Wizard was able to run against prior roll-ups of Exchange 2010. This update simply adds a link for ease of access. Be sure to check out this blog post from the Exchange Team for more info on the new HCW for Exchange 2010.

Another cool update, that flew under the radar, is that the web.config file for Outlook on the Web will now be preserved during a cumulative update. This is neat because it will preserve any customization admins may have made to that file. Sadly this change only applies to Exchange 2016 deployments but let us keep our fingers crossed this will be ported back to Exchange 2013.

One surprising plot twist was the retraction of Mailbox Anchoring in the Exchange Management Shell. This had been implemented in the previous 2013 update and was set to ship with 2016 CU1. Exchange CU12 sees this change reverted and 2016 never sees it at all.

Mailbox Anchoring was the concept of making sure that an admin was always getting the same experience when connecting to the Exchange Management Shell. This was especially important in an environment where Exchange 2013 and 2016 are load balanced in the same pool.

In essence, when you opened Exchange Management Shell mailbox anchoring would always proxy you to the server that hosted your admin mailbox. If your admin account didn’t have a mailbox, or, it was unavailable, then it would proxy you to a server hosting the arbitration mailbox. If neither were available then the Exchange Management Shell would fail to connect. At this point, your only option was to connect through local PowerShell and add the Exchange snap-in.

Microsoft has reverted this change in response to community feedback.

As mentioned in a previous post .NET 4.6.1 continues to remain unsupported. The Exchange Team has indicated that support will be added in a future cumulative update. For now, keep that update away from your Exchange servers. As of writing 4.5.2 remains the highest supported version for Exchange 2013 & 2016.

Other items of note include:

• Exchange 2016 receives 17 new languages in Outlook on the Web.
• Exchange 2016 ditches self-extracting packages in favor of ISOs for delivery.
• Workaround for .Net update KB3097966 causing significant slowdowns in Exchange installations is documented here.
• Lag Replay Manager is enabled by default in 2016 CU1 (but can be disabled).