Tag Archives: Exchange 2013

Exchange, Office365

Moving Mailboxes in a Hybrid Configuration – Part I

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In three earlier blog posts I explained how to implement directory synchronization and how to create an Exchange hybrid configuration:

These steps will create a hybrid configuration between your on-premises Exchange 2013 environment an Exchange Online, but to move mailboxes from Exchange on-premises to Exchange online (or vice versa) you need to create an endpoint. This an on-premises Exchange 2013 server (but it can be more) where the Mailbox Replication Service (MRS) is running, used to move mailbox data from one server to another. The process is similar to an on-premises mailbox move where the MRS is responsible.

Create a migration endpoint

To create an endpoint you have to go to the Exchange Admin Center in Office 365 and login as an Office 365 tenant administrator. You can get there via the Microsoft Online Portal, select Admin | Exchange, or navigate directory to the Exchange Admin Center, and login as an Office 365 tenant administrator.

In the Exchange Admin Center dashboard, under Recipients select migration. At this point an empty screen will be shown:

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Continue reading Moving Mailboxes in a Hybrid Configuration – Part I →

Exchange

Exchange 2013 Recreate Arbitration Mailboxes

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While testing with Exchange 2013 CU9 in our lab environment we utterly destroyed the DAG and after recreating the DAG and the Mailbox databases we found that the Arbitration Mailboxes were in a corrupt state. The accompanying user accounts were still available in Active Directory, but mandatory properties were incorrect. This was clearly visible when running a Get-Mailbox –Arbitration command:

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Continue reading Exchange 2013 Recreate Arbitration Mailboxes →

Exchange

Exchange 2013 CU10

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Microsoft silently released Exchange 2013 CU10 on September 15th 2015, right on track with their quarterly cadence, and as expected. There are no new features in this Cumulative Update, but besides a lot of hotfixes there’s also a change to RBAC which require changes to the Configuration Partition in Active Directory.

So, no changes to the Active Directory Schema, but you have to run Setup.exe /PrepareAD /IAcceptExchangeServerLicenseTerms before you start the actual setup. Please note that you have to do this, even if you run the GUI version of setup. If you omit this step the changes won’t be applied to Active Directory. As a result, the RBAC changes might not be available after your upgrade. A similar issue happened with CU9 as written down in this blog post MessageCopyForSentAsEnabled and MessageCopyForSendOnBehalfEnabled not available in CU9.

Before installing Exchange 2013 CU10 in your production environment I recommend testing it thoroughly in a lab environment. The last couple of CU’s have been pretty successful without too many issues, but there might be specific issues in your own organization that Microsoft is unaware of.

When upgrading DAG members please remember you disable all the Exchange server components as explained in my blog about deploying Exchange 2013 CU9.

You can download CU10 here, and the CU10 Language packs here. A complete list of issues resolved can be found in Knowledge Base Article KB3078678.

At the same time Microsoft released released Exchange Server 2010 Service Pack 3 Update Rollup 11 (KB3078674).

When Exchange 2016 is released in the (near) future, you will need Exchange 2013 CU10 or Exchange Server 2010 SP3 Update Rollup 11 for coexistence. This will be hardcoded in the product, so if you’re planning to deploy Exchange 2016 in the future you have to install these version.

Also, when you’re running an Exchange 2013 Hybrid scenario with Office 365 you have to use the latest version, so in this case Exchange 2013 CU10 is mandatory.

Exchange

Exchange 2013 Health Manager generating alerts in SCOM after reboot

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We have a 26 server Exchange 2013 server environment, monitored by SCOM. Within Exchange 2013 Managed Availability is monitoring the health of the individual servers, and alerts are escalated to SCOM which sends out text messages to the Exchange administrators.

It is crucial to have this configured properly to avoid invalid or unneeded text messages being sent out.

I’ve noticed that after a reboot of an Exchange server Managed Availability can send out alerts, even when the probes and monitors involved have a global override. Using a global override Managed Availability should never send out alerts to SCOM anyways.

To avoid this from happening you can set the Managed Availability service on your Exchange 2013 server, which is the Health Manager service MSExchangeHM to “Automatic (Delayed Start)”.

The easiest way to do this is to use PowerShell using the Set-Service command:

Set-Service –ComputerName EXCH01 -Name MSExchangeHM –StartupType Type;

Where Type can be Disabled, Manual or Automatic.

Unfortunately it is not possible to set this to “Automatic (Delayed Start)” using PowerShell, but you can create a Registry key on the Exchange 2013 server to achieve this by using the Set-ItemProperty command:

Set-ItemProperty -Path “Registry::HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\MSExchangeHM” -Name “DelayedAutostart” -Value 1 -Type DWORD

To do this for all Exchange 2013 servers in your organization you can do something like this:

$ExServers = Get-ExchangeServer | Where {$_.Name –like “EXCH*”}
ForEach ($Server in $ExServers) {
  Write-Host “Setting Health Manager service on $Server to Automatic (Delayed Start)”
  Invoke-Command –ComputerName $Server {
    Set-ItemProperty -Path Registry::HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\MSExchangeHM -Name DelayedAutostart -Value 1 -Type DWORD
  }
}
Exchange

MessageCopyForSentAsEnabled and MessageCopyForSendOnBehalfEnabled not available in CU9

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You have Exchange 2013 CU9 running in your environment and you want to configure the option to store sent messages in the shared Mailbox instead of the user’s mailbox as described in my blogpost Exchange 2013, Shared Mailbox and Sent Items.

But when you open the Exchange Management Shell and try to change the Mailbox settings using the Set-Mailbox cmdlet, the options -MessageCopyForSentAsEnabled and -MessageCopyForSendOnBehalfEnabled are not available.

To solve this you can run the setup.exe /PrepareAD /IAcceptExchangeServerLicenseTerms command from the CU9 installation media.

But why wasn’t this run during installation of Exchange 2013 CU9 in the first place?

You might expect that when running the setup application (either using the GUI or using setup.exe /mode:upgrade) that the upgrade of the Active Directory Configuration partition automatically takes place.

However, this is not always the case. It turns out that when there are no Schema changes during the upgrade process, which is the case when upgrading from Exchange 2013 CU7 or CU8 to Exchange 2013 CU9, the preparation of the Configuration Partition in Active Directory is automatically skipped by the setup application.

This is a bit annoying and nothing will break (except the fact you’re missing some new functionality) and can be solved by running the Setup.exe /PrepareAD later on.