All those System Administrators running their Exchange Server 2007 on a Windows 2003 (64-bit) server have the previlage to get access to the traditional NTBackup utility to backup their exchange stores. But those who are running their Exchange Server 2007 on Windows 2008 (64-bit) must have faced the dilema of which tool to use to backup their mail stores. This is because Windows Server Backup in Windows Server 2008 no longer supports Exchange-aware backups or restores. In order to back up and restore Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1 (SP1) on Windows Server 2008, you must use an Exchange-aware application that supports the Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) writer for Exchange 2007, such as Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager, a third-party Exchange-aware VSS-based application, or a third-party Exchange-aware application that uses the streaming backup APIs locally on the Exchange server to make a backup locally on the Exchange server.

What does all this mean? Nothing but shelling out extra $$$ to invest in a backup solution unless you are interested in a very simple backup solution to assure that the logs get truncated and you have backup copies which you can restore. Here is a basic hack which can help one save a couple of $$$.

Step #1

Get access to a Windows 2003 R2 Server which is running a 64-bit OS. Assuming that you are not running your production Exchange Server 2007 in 32-bit environment, we require the 64-bit version library files. If you do not have a one handy, you can get the source files and then expand the DLL’s or install one in a virtual environment.

Step #2

Copy the ntbackup.exe, ntmsapi.dll, and vssapi.dll files from C:\windows\system32 into a new folder on your Exchange Server 2007 running on Windows 2008. I created a folder called NTBackup under Program Files and placed them there.

Step # 3

Right click Ntbackup.exe and choose “Run as administrator”.

Your should see the Exchange Server Information Store as part of your backup wizard.

Select the Information Stores that you want to backup. Choose the Backup media or filename and the path where you want to store your backups. Once you have finished the configuration, click on Start Backup and the exchange store backups should start.

Once the backup is complete, you should see all the transaction logs getting truncated (hope circular logging is not enabled) and also the mail store would be stamped with the Last Full Backup date and time stamp.

One thing to note though: you cannot back up a storage group in a Standby Continuous Replication (SCR) environment. Backups of storage group copies are available for Local Continuous Replication (LCR) or Cluster Continuous Replication only.

 Exchange 2003 Standard and Enterprise offers the feature to monitor the Server status of the Exchange Servers. If some of the monitored services and other Resources (RAM, CPU, Services) are in “Warning State” or “Critical State” we can receive a status e-mail or a customized action provided by a script notification can be run. This article explains in detailed steps how to configure Monitoring and E-Mail notification.

In the first step we have to configure a Server for monitoring and select/configure the resources to monitor. To do so, open the Exchange System Manager Snap-In and select the appropriate Server object in the Servers container.

Right-click the Server object and open the Properties for it.

Once the Properties dialog box is open, select the Monitoring tab as shown above.

There are many resources available for monitoring. We can add the following resources:

• Available Virtual Memory
• CPU Utilization
• Free disk space
• SMTP queue growth
• Windows 2003 Service
• X.400 queue growth

Many other 3rd party monitoring tools like Nagios can do most of the monitoring and so we will only add the two most critical items which are not monitored by Nagios. These are:

• Available Virtual Memory
• SMTP queue growth 

In the first step, we will add the Available Virtual Memory instance. Click on the Add button under Monitoring tab. A dialog box similar to the one shown below will open.

Select the Available Virtual Memory from the list and click on OK.

Configuring virtual memory monitoring is very similar to configuring CPU utilization monitoring. We have skipped the CPU Utilization Monitoring. Set the duration to 5 minutes, the warning threshold to 15% and the critical threshold to 10% for Available Virtual Memory. Once the values are set, click on OK.

 

Follow the process for adding another instance and select SMTP Queue Growth this time from the list.

If SMTP queues start backing up, it often indicates that there is a major problem. It shows that message transport has failed, the Internet connection has failed, or someone is using the server to send spam. In any event, we need to know that there is a problem.

We must input a warning and a critical state threshold value, but these values are entered in minutes. The idea is that we must tell Exchange how many minutes the queue should be constantly growing for before we generate a warning or a critical state message. We can use any values that we want, but I recommend setting the warning threshold at 10 minutes and the critical state threshold at 15 minutes.

Close the dialog boxes and the Properties once done. The next step is to configure an E-Mail notification for the recipients of the “Warning” and “Critical” state conditions. To do so, open the Notifications object under Tools.

Click on New and select E-mail Notification.

In this Property dialog box we can specify the monitoring Server and the Servers / Connectors to monitor. We also have to select the State (Critical and warning) for which we configure E-Mail notification.

First we will configure the Warning State notification.

In the “To” field select a recipient for the notifications. 

Change the Email server value to some other server in your organization which runs SMTP. If you do not have any, I suggest setting up a basic MS SMTP service in IIS. This is because when the monitored Server is the same Server as the monitoring Server we can run into trouble. The Server cannot send us an E-Mail notification when it is in an critical state and is unable to send E-Mails.

Next step is to configure E-mail Notifications for Critical State. Follow the same steps that we went through earlier for Warning state notification except for the fact that this time we will select Critical from the drop down.

Once done, close all the property pages and dialog boxes. We are done with the setup.

Now when one or more of the configured resources run into a “Critical” or “Warning” state we receive a E-Mail from an account “WMI@SERVERNAME” with a error message with the server name in the subject line and the condition of the resource / service in the E-Mail body.

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In the first part of this series, we discussed how to Install Exchange Server 2007 SP1 in a coexistence environment with Exchange 2003. For those who missed the article, they can view the same by clicking here.

Now that we have installed the Exchange Server 2007 SP1 in the organization, it’s time to move the user Mailboxes to Exchange 2007. Moving mailboxes is a very easy task and can be accomplished by using the Exchange Management Console or by using the PowerShell commands from command line. In this post I’m going to use the Exchange Management Console.

So, let’s open the Exchange Management Console and in the tree on the left, navigate to the Recipient Configuration and expand it. Under the node, select Mailbox.

Here we can see in the results pane that now we are able to see all the mailboxes that we have on our Exchange 2003 server and they are all marked as Legacy Mailboxes. This means that all the mailboxes are still on the Exchange 2003 Server and need to be moved to Exchange 2007.

In this example, we will move the Administrator mailbox. So we choose the account, right-click it and choose Move Mailbox.

The next screen provides us options as to where we want to move the mailbox and here we need to choose the mailbox database. I assume here that the Storage Groups and Mailbox Database are already created on Exchange Server 2007. If not, then that’s the first thing that you need to do.

 

In my example, I’m going to move the Administrator mailbox to the General Mailbox Database.

 

There now that we have selected the Mailbox Database, Exchange 2007 automatically appends it with the Server Name and the Storage Group. Click Next to proceed.

 

On the next screen we are presented with lot of options as what should be done if the Move Mailbox process encounters any errors or finds any corrupt messages in the mailbox. Either we can Skip the entire mailbox move or we can allow Exchange Server to move the mailbox and simply Skip the corrupted messages. Moreover, if we go ahead with that option, we can even define how many corrupted messages should be skipped before the Move Mailbox stops the process. Since, I would not like to skip any messages, I’ll choose “Skip the Mailbox” and move further.

 

Next we are presented with the scheduling screen which allows us to schedule the Move Mailbox process. This helps in particular when you are in a production environment with heavy traffic and want to schedule this unattended during off-peak hours. Moving mailboxes does not take much time and is entirely dependent on the number of items in the mailbox. Even in a production environment, while moving mailboxes, the user will hardly notice any issues and after moving the mailbox, the user may simply need to restart Outlook to get everything working again.

In the scheduling option, you can choose to move the mailboxes during off peak hours and also you have a choice to cancel the running task if the move mailbox task runs for certain hours. I’ll chose “Immediately” and move ahead in this example.

 

That’s the last screen that we see before we actually tell exchange to move the mail box. It allows you to do a quick round up of what we have selected and what options have been set. Once we have reviewed the options, click on “Move”.

While the mailbox is being moved, we can see the progress, the number of items found, the number of items moved, etc. If you select multiple mailboxes, note that by default Exchange 2007 moves only 4 mailboxes at a time. The remaining mailboxes will be shown as “Pending”.  Lot of checks are performed in the background by the Exchange Server during this process.

 

 

If all goes well, the final screen that we see is the confirmation showing us the status of the Move Mailbox process. Click on “Finish” to close the wizard. That’s it to Moving Mailboxes from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007.

In this article I’ve tried to explain how to install or upgrade an organization running on Exchange Server 2003 to Exchange Server 2007 SP1 on a Windows 2008 Server. In the next post I’ll be talking about some post install configurations and then after how to remove Exchange 2003 from the organization once everything is migrated to Exchange 2007.

There is no in-place upgrade supported with Exchange 2007 and so the only option is to upgrade to Exchange Server 2007 by adding it to the current Exchange 2003 organization and then moving all the resources from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007 and thereafter removing the Exchange 2003 Server. This means that we have no option but to perform a migration. So let’s get on with it.

Prerequisites

The first step is to prepare our new Windows 2008 server so that it is ready for Exchange Server 2007 installation. Please note that we are talking about the 64-bit version of Exchange Server 2007 SP1 as the 32-bit version is not supported in production environment.

We will need the following components installed before we proceed:

• .Net Framework version 2.0 and 3.0
• .Net Framework version 2.0 update or Service Pack 1
• IIS 7 (various components)

 

• Windows PowerShell
•  
• MMC -Microsoft Management Console 3.0 (installed by default so can be skipped)

The following components should not be installed (were required in Exchange 2003):

• Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP)
• Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP)

Once we have installed the prerequisites, let’s proceed towards the installation.

Installation Process

We are going to install all Exchange Server Roles (HUB, CAS and MAILBOX) on one single box except for the Edge Transport Role. Let’s start by first preparing the Active Directory for Exchange 2007. Actually, the installer would do this automatically, but I like to perform this manually so that we can see what’s happening and understand it better. Here is what we will do before we run the installer of Exchange 2007:

• Prepare the schema for legacy Exchange permissions. This is because we are migrating from Exchange 2003 in the current organization.
• Prepare Schema
• Prepare Active Directory
• Prepare the Domain

The first thing that we do is to update the schema for legacy permissions. In order to do this we must login to the Domain Controller which is the Schema Master at the forest root and run the command from there.

Type Setup /PrepareLegacyExchangePermissions and press Enter.

 

This must be run as an Exchange Admin account and also ensure that you are in the local server’s Administrator group. The safest thing to do is to add the user account you are logged in with to the Enterprise Administrators Group, Schema Administrator Group and Domain Administrators Group. Also, the domain should be able to communicate with all other domains in the forest and we should all ample time for the replication to finish once this command is run.

Next, we will proceed towards updating the Schema from the Windows 2008 Server.  Type Setup /PrepareSchema and press Enter.

 

We can see that the task failed with an error on the server. This is because the Remote Server Administration Tools were not installed. We can do this using the GUI but I’ve used the command line. Type ServerManagerCmd -I RSAT-ADDS and press Enter.

 

Here we go, the Remote Server Administration Tools have been installed and we need to reboot our Windows 2008 server before proceeding further.

Once the server has rebooted, let’s try preparing the Schema once again. Type the command that we used earlier – Setup /PrepareSchema and press Enter.

 

This time the task completed without error. Let’s move on.

Type Setup /PrepareAD to proceed with the Active Directory preparation.

 

Once this is completed, move on with preparing the domain.

Type Setup /PrepareDomain and press Enter.
Note: this setup can be skipped if you do not have multiple domains within the forest.

 

Great, we are done with preparing our Active Directory for Exchange Server 2007 SP1 installation and now we can run the installer. If you have geographically dispersed domains, please allow enough time for replication to happen over the WAN links.

So, with the Active Directory now ready, we are ready to complete the installation. Start the setup. The first screen that we see is as under:

 

Since we have already taken care of the prerequisites, we can directly proceed to Step-4 i.e. Install Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 SP1. Click on it and we will be presented with the standard EULA.

 

Accept the License Agreement and click Next.

 

We now have a choice of a Typical Installation or a Custom Installation. Since I like to see what configuration options are available, I always tend to choose the Custom option. Also, for this example, we are going to install the Exchange server in the D: drive instead of the C: drive. You can change the path to your liking here. Once the selections are done, click Next.

The next screen allows us to choose which roles we want to install.

 

We will choose all the three main roles i.e. Mailbox Role, Client Access Role (CAS) and Hub Transport Role (HUB). I’m not choosing the Unified Messaging Role (UM) as I intend to do a separate article on this in the near future.

Once the selections have been done, click Next.

 

Here we go. The installer now prompts for the Mail Flow setting. Since we have an Exchange 2003 server we will need to browse and select the same so as to enable it as a Bridgehead server in the routing group. Once selected, click Next.

 

In the Readiness Check page, wait for all the readiness checks to complete and then click Install.

The installation process takes some time so it would be a good idea to sit back and relax over a cup of coffee. During the installation process, if we open up the System Manager on Exchange Server 2003, we will notice a new routing group.

 

Once the installation process completes, we now have a working environment of the new Exchange Server 2007 SP1. The process of installing Exchange 2007 on a Windows 2008 server is fairly simple.

To verify the installation, open the new Exchange Management Shell and type Get-ExchangeServer. A list of all Exchange 2007 server roles that we installed would be displayed. It is a good idea now to open up the Management Console of Exchange and run the Exchange Best Practices Analyzer. It will give a good idea about the deployment and would help in determining if the configuration has been done in accordance to the Microsoft best practices.