Ant Drewery

You Had Me At EHLO has the solution to an issue we experienced when installing some of our Exchange 12 boxes. We got round it at the time by using the RC1 Refresh version of MMC 3.0 but we’ll use the registry key and RTM version in future.

You Had Me At EHLO… : Resolving MMC 3.0 errors when installing Exchange 12 CTP release

I’m still trying to get my head around Exchange 12 mail flow and message routing but I’m sure it’ll become clearer once we get the servers up in the other sites. I’m hampered a little by the fact that this beta doesn’t have a GUI for configuring the bridgehead servers so I can’t have a nose around the settings.

From my understanding so far Exchange 12 is an Active Directory site aware application so it is very important that your Subnets and IP Site Links are correctly defined in AD Sites and Services. After checking available hardware in the various regions I’ve settled on 4 AD sites in the sandpit environment. These are Crawley (UK), Tampa (US), Santos (Brazil) and Montreal (Canada). The sites will be fully meshed with IP Site Links. To begin with the links will have uniform costs but at a later stage I’ll be investigating whether adjusting the values has any impact on mail routing within our organisation.

For the Crawley site we’ll have 4 servers initially. There will be a domain controller containing the global catalog, a mailbox server, a server with the bridgehead and client access roles and a gateway server. According to the release notes the gateway server role hasn’t completed the security pass. Therefore we’ll keep it on the internal network and route email to/from it via a Mailsweeper server in our DMZ.

I’ve placed a diagram of the Crawley topology below. Click on it for a larger version.

I’ll provide more information once the other sites are running and we’ve had a chance to experiment with connectors and mail routing. There’s no point me regurgitating the help files at this stage when I don’t have a decent understanding.
[tags]Exchange 12[/tags]

Having had some time to review the Exchange 12 help files and documentation I’ve revised my infrastructure design slightly. In this post I’ll address server naming conventions and follow it with a post on my revised topology.

We use strict server naming conventions in our production environment and I’ve carried these through to our AD/Exchange 12 sandpit with some slight modifications.

I’m prefixing all server names with LAB. If for some reason they are picked up by one of our systems (e.g. LanDesk) it groups them together and makes it immediately obvious that they’re not production machines.

Next comes a three letter location code: MTL – Montreal, CRW – Crawley, TPA – Tampa etc.

That’s followed by EX. This makes it clear that they are Exchange servers and makes them easily identifiable to those who don’t work in the Messaging team and understand the role codes that follow.

Now we add a code that identifies the server’s primary role:

MB – mailbox server
BH – bridgehead server
CA – client access server
GW – gateway server
UM – unified messaging server

We might also use PF if the box was a dedicated public folder server.

Lastly we add a numeric increment to prevent duplicate names. We wouldn’t bother with this where you can only have one server of a particular role in a site e.g. SRS in Exchange 2003.
So the final server name would look like LABCRWEXMB2 or LABSYDEXUM1. We’re also using a similar convention for non-Exchange servers in our environment e.g. LABCRWDC1.

[tags]Exchange 12[/tags]

Here are some screenshots from the Exchange 12 installation process. Click on the images for a larger view.

[tags]Exchange 12[/tags]

Ok, our first Exchange 12 server is up and running. As this is a test environment and we are using slightly dated hardware we installed the 32 bit version. There is an excellent post at You Had Me At EHLO that talks about choosing Exchange 2003 hardware that can be reutilised for Exchange 12.

We installed on to a Windows 2003 R2 member server. This was part of a domain where we had raised the domain and forest functional levels to Windows Server 2003 Native. This is achieved via Active Directory Domains and Trusts. One of the pre-requisites in the Exchange 12 Release Notes is to have a domain functional level of Windows 2000 Native or greater. The default is Windows 2000 Mixed.

Other pre-requisites included Microsoft .Net Framework 2.0 (found under Optional in Windows Update) and Microsoft Management Console 3.0 (found here). We also assumed the Exchange 2003 pre-requisites of ASP.NET, IIS, SMTP and NNTP but our first attempt at installation failed because NNTP must not be installed.

After running setup and accepting the licence agreement we were presented with a choice of server roles. These were:

Bridgehead
Allows the routing between Active Directory Sites (it appears routing groups and admin groups have been dropped).

Mailbox Server
Provides the backend functionality including mailbox and public folder stores.

Gateway Server
Runs in your DMZ to provide ‘messaging hygiene’. I figure that’s virus scanning and spam filtering.

Client Access Server
Provides client connectivity for methods other than Microsoft Outlook e.g. OWA, ActiveSync.

Unified Messaging Server
Integration with the corporate phone system.

For this server we chose Mailbox Server as we have a second server to be built which will take the Bridgehead and Client Access roles.

I noticed that there were no /domainprep or /forestprep commands to be run. This appears to be covered in an installation step called Organisation Preparation.

So after 3 unattended steps (Copy Files, Organisation preparation and Server Roles) the installation was complete…

Note: I’ll update this post with some screen shots from our second installation.

[tags]Exchange 12[/tags]

We’re just beginning a pilot/test implementation of Exchange 12 beta running on a global Windows 2003 R2 Active Directory. This is a sandpit environment separate from our production AD.

The initial infrastructure will have routing groups in the UK, US, Canada, Australia, Brazil and possibly New Zealand. Each site will start with a domain controller, front-end server and back-end server but this will expand as we manage to source additional hardware or make use of virtual servers. I hope to be able to add clusters and possibly storage area networks to the environment.

I’m installing the first Exchange server today so expect posts on Exchange 12, Active Directory and Monad over the next few weeks.

[tags]Exchange 12, Monad[/tags]