Tag Archives: Exchange 2013

Exchange

Upgrade to CU8 Fails on Receive Connector misconfiguration

2 Comments

During an upgrade of an Exchange 2013 SP1 multi-role server to Exchange 2013 CU8 the upgrade crashed, apparantly on a strange Receive Connector configuration since the following error message was raised:
The values that you specified for the Bindings and RemoteIPRanges parameters conflict with the settings on Receive connector ” SERVER1\Relay Connector SERVER1″. Receive connectors assigned to different Transport roles on a single server must listen on unique local IP address & port bindings.

image

Continue reading Upgrade to CU8 Fails on Receive Connector misconfiguration →

Exchange, Office365

Creating an Exchange 2013 Hybrid environment

Leave a comment

Updated: November 11, 2015

In a series of blog posts we will create an Exchange hybrid environment, where the on-premises environment consists of Exchange 2013 multi-role servers. Creating such an environment consists of several steps:

  • Implementing Directory Synchronization.
  • Running the Hybrid Configuration Wizard.
  • Creating Migration Endpoints.
  • Moving Mailboxes to Exchange Online.

Current Infrastructure

The current infrastructure consists of two Exchange 2013 multi-role servers and two Exchange 2013 Edge Transport servers, all of which are fully patched and running the latest version of Exchange 2013 (i.e. Exchange 2013 CU8). An Office Web Apps 2013 servers is also involved for rendering attachments in Outlook Web App.

A Kemp LM3600 LoadMaster is used for distributing incoming client requests from the Internet across both servers. SMTP is directed to two Exchange 2013 Edge Transport servers, which are subscribed to the internal Exchange 2013 servers, as shown in Figure 1.

image

Figure 1. The starting point when creating a new Hybrid environment.

In Office 365 we have are using a tenant called ExchangeLabsNL, for Exchange Online the tenant name is not important, but for SharePoint Online it is important. The corresponding SharePoint Online environment is accessible via Exchangelabs.nl.sharepoint.com, so the tenant name is important after all.

Note. The tenant name cannot be changed later on, so don’t choose any silly names for your tenant. One day you will regret this.

Directory Synchronization Server

In our on-premises environment we are going to install a dedicated Directory Synchronization server. This is not really a hard requirement since DirSync can be installed on a Domain Controller as well. Personally I prefer to use a dedicated DirSync server and keep all Domain Controllers identical.

Exchange Hybrid Server

There’s a lot of confusion about the Exchange Hybrid server when creating an Exchange Hybrid environment and to be honest, it took quite some time for me as well to get rid of the confusion.

A true hybrid server does not exist, but in Microsoft terminology, the hybrid server is the Exchange server where the Hybrid Configuration Wizard (or HCW) is run to configure a Hybrid Configuration. And the Hybrid Configuration is nothing more than some information written in Active Directory so it can be easily found and used by all Exchange servers in the organization. In Figure 1, the hybrid server can be either server EXCH01 or server EXCH02.

An additional Exchange 2013 server can be added as a hybrid server. You can even use a dedicated FQDN like hybrid.contoso.com for this to separate SMTP and migration traffic from/to Office 365 form regular client traffic accessing the normal Exchange servers EXCH01 and EXCH02.

Free/busy information in this scenario for example is not using the dedicated hybrid server, since it is not possible to designate this kind of traffic to dedicated servers. When users in Exchange Online are creating new meetings with users in Exchange on-premises, the free/busy information is found using the normal Exchange EWS virtual directory. This information in turn is found using normal Autodiscover requests.

So, before you start building your Exchange Hybrid environment you have to make absolutely sure your starting point is working flawlessly, internally and externally. If you run into issues with AutoDiscover, free/busy, out-of-office or Certificate errors you have to fix these first before continuing with the hybrid configuration. One great tool to test your existing environment is the Remote Connectivity Analyzer (www.testexchangeconnectivity.com) and of course your own Outlook clients Glimlach 

Note. If you are running Exchange 2010 you can also use the existing Exchange 2010 servers to create a hybrid environment without adding Exchange 2013 servers (although you have to be absolutely sure about this, Exchange 2010 is no longer in mainstream support). If you want to use Exchange 2013 in your existing Exchange 2010 environment you have to start a coexistence project first. When this is fully functioning (without error of course) you can continue with the DirSync and hybrid configuration.

When all is running fine you can continue with implementing the DirSync solution, as outlined in the following blogpost: https://jaapwesselius.com/2015/05/13/implementing-directory-synchronization/

Exchange

Install Exchange 2013 Cumulative Update 8

8 Comments

On March 17 Microsoft released the 8th Cumulative Update for Exchange Server 2013, 98 days after the release of CU7 which is nicely in line with the quarterly release cadence of Cumulative Updates. This Cumulative Update is called CU8, not a word about Service Pack 2, so SP1 still continues to be the officially supported Service Pack.

There are some new features in CU8 that are worth noticing.

  • With CU8 there are improvements for mobile clients in a Hybrid Configuration. When a Mailbox is moved the Outlook client will automatically detect and reconfigure accordingly. This was not the case with Mobile clients. This behavior has changed in CU8. When a mobile client connects the local Exchange server and the Mailbox is moved to Exchange Online an additional check for the TargetOWAUrl on the Organization Relationship object is performed. This will return an HTTP/451 redirect to the mobile client which in turn will be redirected to this new URL. This feature will be available to all EAS compatible devices that can handle the HTTP/451 redirect option. Unfortunately this feature is only available for onboarding customers (i.e. to Office 365) and not for offboarding (from Office 365) customers.
  • There an improved migration for Public Folders migration, now supporting batch migrations. This is faster (supports multiple jobs), more reliable and provides an easier migration management.
  • CU8 supports viewing calendar and contact types of modern Public Folders in OWA

Continue reading Install Exchange 2013 Cumulative Update 8 →

Exchange

Exchange 2013 Edge Transport server does not install in (DMZ) Domain

Leave a comment

Some customers have an Active Directory domain in their DMZ (for management purposes) and the Exchange 2013 Edge Transport server can be a member of this domain as well.

Unfortunately starting with Exchange 2013 CU5 the Edge Transport server won’t install anymore when the server is a member of such a domain. Setup crashes with the following error message:

“Active Directory failed on localhost. This error is not retriable. Additional information: the parameter is incorrect.” And “Active Directory response: 00000057: LdapErr: DSID-0C090D8A, comment: Error in attribute conversion operation, data 0, v2580 —> System.DirectoryServices.Protocols.DirectoryOperationException: The requested attribute does not exist.”

At this moment (up to Exchange 2013 CU7) there’s no other workaround that to remove the Edge Transport server from the domain, install the Edge Transport server role (make sure you got the FQDN of the server correct!) and after installing rejoin the Active Directory domain. This works fine.

I noticed however that upgrading an Exchange 2013 CU6 Edge Transport server that’s domain joined to CU7 doesn’t hit this issue, there was no need to remove it from the domain before upgrading.

Exchange

Database MDB02 is low on log volume space

3 Comments

My Exchange 2013 (CU7) servers are logging warning approx. every hour regarding the free available disk space on the Mailbox database volumes in the

Application and Services | Microsoft | Exchange | Managed Availability | Monitoring crimson channel in the eventlog. The threshold for this is set to 175GB, and especially for lab environment this can be too low.

The following event is logged:

Log Name: Microsoft-Exchange-ManagedAvailability/Monitoring
Source: Microsoft-Exchange-ManagedAvailability
Date: 1/22/2015 12:07:46 PM
Event ID: 4
Task Category: Monitoring
Level: Error
Keywords:
User: SYSTEM
Computer: EXCH01.contoso.com
Description:
Database ‘MDB02’ is low on log volume space. ‘MDB02’ is low on log volume space [F:\]. Current=86,97 GB, Threshold=175,78 GB Continue reading Database MDB02 is low on log volume space →