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. 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