Exchange September 2017 updates

I don’t normally just repeat blog posts from other groups, but I felt this one was important to make sure people are aware of a couple of the highlights. For me, since I also work with Active Directory (AD), as all of us Exchange engineers do at some point, there is a new block during the install of Exchange Server 2016 CU7 if the Forest Functional Level (FFL), is anything below 2008R2.

The Exchange Supportability Matrix has had the correct information for some time, where anything after Exchange Server 2016 CU3 is not supposed to be installed in a pre-2008R2 FFL. However, this CU7 is the first full block of running the update if the FFL is not at that level.

The next big issue is the .NET support stance. The Exchange PG has chosen to skip support for .NET 4.7 (or 4.7.0 for clarity) and support .NET 4.7.1 version that is coming very shortly. The ‘plan’ is to allow .NET 4.7.1 support with the December 2017 Exchange updates and then force a .NET 4.7.1 requirement for possibly the June 2018 release. All plans are subject to change.

The Exchange team blog post has an article on the .NET 4.7 support stance and how to set your Windows Servers not to automatically install the .NET update. Also, the Exchange_AddIn module I published a few months ago has a ‘Get-DotNetVersion’ function that does sense .NET 4.7.

There are other updates, fixes, changes that you should also be aware of as an Exchange engineer that are listed on the Exchange team blog site for both the Exchange Server 2016 CU7 update and the Exchange Server 2013 CU18 update.

And as always, the friendly reminder for hybrid environments, N-1 CU’s are only supported for Exchange Server 2013 and 2016 versions. Thank you for being aware of these changes.