Disabling IPv6 And Exchange – Going All The Way

When we are performing the Exchange Risk Assessment, one of things PFE love to check is how servers have been configured for IPv6.  There have been numerous occasions where we have found servers whose admin has said that they have disabled IPv6, but when you look at the server it is not really disabled.  When…

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Awareness – Is Your Federation Trust Metadata Updated?

Imagine the scenario — all is working well with your Office 365 hybrid solution until you come into the office tomorrow morning and you get calls saying on-premises users are unable to see the free/busy information for mailboxes in Office 365.  While this sounds like a bad dream, this reality could come true tomorrow morning,…

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Using ADPropertiesOnly With Exchange Virtual Directory Cmdlet Shows False Positives

Previously we discussed an interesting feature of the Exchange virtual directory cmdlets where they check data stored in AD, rather than making a trip to the server and querying its IIS metabase.  For the details on this, please read the original post here: Slow Response To Exchange Virtual Directory Cmdlets. In that article we were…

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Exchange 2013 CU6 Released

Exchange 2013 CU6 has been released to the Microsoft download centre!  Exchange 2013 has a different servicing strategy than Exchange 2007/2010 and utilises Cumulative Updates (CUs) rather than the Rollup Updates (RU/UR) which were used previously.    CUs are a complete installation of Exchange 2013 and can be used to install a fresh server or to…

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How To Rename DAG Network Using PowerShell

Quick post for a Friday!  A customer had an “interesting” issue where the DAG networks were not being displayed inside the Exchange Management Console.  The underlying reason is because the implemented firewalls between Exchange servers, and then restricted network traffic between Exchange and the DCs.  This is not a supported situation.  For details on the…

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Retrieving Packets Received Discarded Perfmon Counter From Multiple Servers

Whilst working on a customer’s Exchange 2010 DAG issue, I wrote a quick script to quickly grab some performance monitor counters from all of their Exchange servers.  The issue that we were investigating was related to discarded packets when the VM was running on a certain hypervisor host.  The customer had moved their Exchange VMs…

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Exchange and AntiVirus Exclusions – Still A Critical Conversation

In a previous post we saw the Microsoft requirements for the exclusions that must be added to file system AV on Exchange servers.  In a recent CritSit, basically an uber urgent support request where the customer is down or as good as down, I also got to examine some of the other causes for file…

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Exchange 2013 CU5 Released

Exchange 2013 CU5 has been released to the Microsoft download centre!  Exchange 2013 has a different servicing strategy than Exchange 2007/2010 and utilises Cumulative Updates (CUs) rather than the Rollup Updates (RU/UR) which were used previously.    CUs are a complete installation of Exchange 2013 and can be used to install a fresh server or to…

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Exchange 2013 SP1 Architecture Poster

In the smelly MEC 2014 man purse, there was  a shiny Exchange 2103 SP1 architecture poster.  The MEC attendees were the first ones to get the update to the older Exchange 2013 RTM poster, which is now published for everyone!  I created a deep zoom of the poster so that it is easy to scroll…

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