Category Archives: Exchange

TechEd North America 2013 Sessions

TechEd North America 2013 was held from June 3 – 6, 2013 in New Orleans. It was a great event with lots of great sessions. I was there as well to present two sessions (Get Your Mailbox Moving and Exchange in the Cloud. Afraid of losing your job?) but unfortunately had to leave on the first day due to personal circumstances back home. Kay Sellenrode (MCM Exchange 2007/2010 and MCA) took over these sessions successfully though.

I have made a selection of all Exchange related sessions and some Office 365 sessions where Exchange or Hybrid is involved. Happy viewing!

Day one – Monday June 3

Day two – Tuesday June 4

Day three – Wednesday June 5

Day four – Thursday June 6

For a complete overview (and selection) of all sessions delivered at TechEd North America 2013 please visit the Channel 9 MSDN site at http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2013#fbid=WYqwn0iOxi6

Exchange 2003 The server cannot be removed because…

While uninstalling Exchange Server 2003 (after a successfull migration to Exchange Server 2010) I ran into the dreaded “The server cannot be removed because” issue:

The server <servername> cannot be removed because:

– One or more users currently use a mailbox store on this server. These users must be moved to another mailbox store on a different server or be mail disabled before uninstalling this server.

Facility: Exchange System Manager

ID no: c103f492

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MapiExceptionUnexpectedMailboxState: Unable to delete mailbox

When moving mailboxes from Exchange 2003 or Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2010 the move request finishes, but with a status of CompletedWithWarning:

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The mailbox is moved to Exchange 2010, but the time to finish the actual migration takes a long time. The first reports of this issue I’ve seen came with Exchange 2010 SP2 RU3.

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Kemp Edge Security Pack for Exchange 2013

Now that Microsoft TMG2010 no longer is available it’s time to look for other alternatives. Reverse proxy solutions is not a problem, there are various solutions for this. Microsoft itself has the ARR (Application Request Routing) on top of IIS available. This can perform reverse proxy, but for load balancing you still have to rely on NLB. Another drawback is that ARR does not do pre-authentication.

With the new software version for the Kemp LoadMaster series (V7) it is now possible to do reverse proxy and pre-authentication out of the box. The new module is called ESP or Edge Security Pack. The idea is the same as before, clients hit the Kemp LoadMasters and the requests are distributed across multiple Exchange Client Access Servers. But before the requests are sent to the Client Access Servers they are authenticated. Kemp uses an authentication provider for this, in a normal scenario this would an Active Directory Domain Controller.

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The advantage of pre-authentication is evident. In case of a (brute force) attack the CAS servers are only bothered with normal authentication traffic, the attacks are handled by the Kemp and these never reach the CAS servers. ESP is specifically designed to handle this kind of traffic. With ESP the CAS servers only handle normal user authentication.

Continue reading Kemp Edge Security Pack for Exchange 2013

Exchange 2013 coexistence, EAC and ECP

When you introduce Exchange 2013 into an existing Exchange 2010 environment and you want to open the Exchange Admin Center (using https://localhost/ecp or using https://webmail.contoso.com/ecp) it ‘fails’ and it opens the Exchange 2010 ECP instead.

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This is caused by the fact that the administrator mailbox is still on Exchange 2010 and the ECP is tied to the administrator mailbox. You can move the mailbox to Exchange 2013 but instead you can also add the suffix /?ExchClientVer=15, like this https://localhost/ecp/?ExchClientVer=15

This will open the Exchange Admin Center in Exchange 2013 while the administrator mailbox is still on Exchange 2010:

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