Tag:

Exchange

TechEd Session Recap: Future Look at Microsoft Exchange Server (OFC-B310)

by Philip Sellers May 13, 2014

written by Philip Sellers

Microsoft Exchange is the cornerstone for email in many businesses. And a quick poll of the users in the room during this session indicated that the majority of those users are running Exchange on-premise and not Office 365’s flavor of Exchange. So, we were all extremely interested to here where things are going in terms of development in Exchange. This session focused on the future features with previews of some of these feature in Office 365 hosted Exchange and slides showing others. It was intended to be an overview of where things are going for development, but didn’t delve deeply into any one of the features or the technical layers below them.

The development cycle for Exchange has changed some, as many customers witnessed for the first time with Exchange 2013. The newest version of Exchange released to customers on Office 365 before the on-premise version released and our speakers Pavani Haridasyam and Ef Regalado attributed the switch to the nature of cloud and the ability to iterate and release more often on the cloud platform. The development cycle is to first release the newest features internally to Microsoft employees and after getting bugs worked out and feedback from users, those changes are pushed to Office 365 customers and will ultimately be incorporated into a future on-premise version of Exchange. But Microsoft chose to keep all Exchange development, both for the cloud and for on-premise, with a single team in order to keep things consistent for all customers.

Investment in Exchange has not slowed and a considerable amount of effort has been going into creating new features that customers are requesting and that Microsoft believes customers need. This session focused on three major areas of development for customers on Exchange – Security and Compliance, Working Smarter, and Social Email.

In terms of security and compliance, Microsoft has been taking the Exchange compliance views and been working towards creating a unified compliance console for Exchange, SharePoint and Lync. The compliance center aims to be user friendly tool for non-technical compliance officers in companies to perform their job functions – power with usability.

Data loss prevention is also another major focus in the security and compliance area – with the ability to fingerprint documents in Exchange and then pinpoint those to ensure that they do not get sent out of the company. The DLP features are also extended into the OWA apps for mobile devices in attempts to ensure that documents do not leak through email. S/MIME has also been added in the OWA interface, which many customers have requested.

The Exchange team is also working diligently on features that help people work smarter with their email. Admitting that many customers are overwhelmed by the volume of email they receive, OWA has a new People View or Personalized Inbox feature that lets you easily view email with a particular person from an easy People list in the sidebar. This is one of the features making its way into Office 365 hosted Exchange now. In addition to the arranagement by people, the Exchange team has been working to improve collaboration of documents with integration to OneDrive for Business to ‘attach’ files – which are actually stored in OneDrive rather than being attached to an email, which is quickly outdated. It allows for multiple people to collaborate in a document in real time using Office Web Apps and all changes to be stored and updated centrally, rather than having to email multiple revisions between people. Enhanced previews are also a part of Outlook Web App, so that when you paste in a URL, it will give you a Facebook-like preview of the URL and the ability to copy and paste in images is now supported in Office 365 hosted Exchange and will be included in a future on-premise version of Outlook Web App.

Pushing collaboration even further, the Exchange team has been working on a new Groups functionality to allow for social interaction with integration into Yammer. The team is working to unify groups which have existed in various forms in AD and Exchange and in SharePoint separately. The unified approach should allow for things to be logically located and less overlap in features or function to exist between the Microsoft platforms. Azure Active Directory is the mast of the Group identities according to the slides presented and it will be federated with other Office 365 apps. Notifications are sent to groups members when changes are made, but they are not overwhelming in the way that email notifications have in the past – instead they are collected into the unified group. Email conversations and calendars are stored in Exchange. Documents, OneNote and lists are stored in SharePoint and Yammer will be the group feed of activities. The Yammer piece has yet to be implemented.

May 13, 2014 0 comments

Datacenter Storage

HP Discover 2012: Decrease time to value with HP AppSystem solutions

by Philip Sellers June 5, 2012

written by Philip Sellers

Five click and you’re in business. That’s the value pitch for HP’s AppSystem product offerings for various database and software products I received from Martin Whittaker, Vice President of Systems and Solutions Engineering. And given the amount of time that I’ve invested and seen my coworkers invest into bringing various solutions online, there is an incredible amount of value to be had for deploying systems using purpose-built solutions. Five clicks.

Of course, this is all accomplished through the incredible amount of work that HP has done in investing in automation and these solutions are built on the expertise that they have gleaned from hundreds of thousands of implementations of these various software packages under their belt.

HP AppSystem products are single SKU product solutions that are vertically integrated hardware, storage, networking and software which is purpose-built for a specific application. Just as benchmark systems are carefully built to specifically perform well on the benchmarking tests, these solutions are purpose built to provide the best performance and improved time to value.

HP has released two new AppSystem offerings – AppSystem for Apache Hadoop and AppSystem for SAP HANA. Both of these new offerings are centered around the difficulties of storage and analytics of big data sets. Apache Hadoop is an implementation of Google’s MapReduce and Google File System papers that tackles the issue of storage for large data sets across multiple nodes and then allows them to be interpreted into usable information. The SAP HANA solution is about doing in-memory database analytics at near-realtime results of large data sets.

These new solutions joins an impressive set of specific use-case solutions for Microsoft SQL Server for consolidation of database servers and for data analysis, Microsoft Exchange messaging solutions, Microsoft Lync unified communication, and Vertica data analytics solutions. To learn more about AppSystems and the ideas behind all of them, check out this video from HP:

Disclosure: HP sponsored my trip to HP Discover, covering all travel expenses, however HP does not control the content of the posts that I write based on my attendance to the show. The thoughts, impressions and information contained in this post are my own.

June 5, 2012 0 comments

Datacenter Software Storage Virtualization

EA2631 Virtualizing Exchange 2007 session recap

by Philip Sellers September 18, 2009

written by Philip Sellers

Deja vu. Well, almost. I sat in on a simliar session last year and I wondered what has now changed with vSphere being available and what new expectations could be had for virtualizing Exchange and I found answers. First of all, as the speaker put it – VMware has eaten their own dogfood and virtualized Exchange 2007 for their internal consumption. With approximately 55,000 mailboxes, that is an impressive feat itself.

Beyond internal consumption, all data points to Exchange evolving into a better workload to run within virtualization. Much of that can probably be attributed to Microsoft’s own virtualization technology, but Exchange on ESX benefits just the same. Performance gains out of ESX 4 make for a good combination with the improved I/O for Exchange 2007. Initial data for Exchange 2010 continues the trend of making Exchange a better workload in general and making it more appropriate to virtualize.

September 18, 2009 0 comments

Compute Datacenter Projects

Month of silence, because of a blade enclosure

by Philip Sellers March 5, 2009

written by Philip Sellers

I can’t believe it, but its been almost a month since my last post. And what a month its been around my work. This has been one of the busiest and most difficult months that I can remember with the company. I have my hands in several different technologies, VMware and our blades are just two of my primary responsiblities. Over the past month, though, we’ve experienced a catastrophic failure of one of our blade enclosures. The failure has only occurred once, but the fall-out from this has taken almost a month to work out. And honestly, we’re still not through working out the kinks.

Of course, my story has to begin on Friday the 13th… Sometime around 9:00am, we started getting calls for both our SQL 2005 database cluster and our Exchange cluster. After investigation, we found that the active nodes were both in the same enclosure and a third ESX host in the same was experiencing problems, too. The problems were affecting both network and disk IO on the blades. All of our blades are boot from SAN, so the IO had to be a fiber-channel issue.

Several hours later, we were finally able to get enough response out of the nodes to be able to force a failover of services for Exchange, shortly followed by SQL 2005. As I worked with HP support, nothing improved on the affected servers. We were finally diagnosed with a problem mid-plane on the enclosure.

While waiting for the mid-plane to be dispatched to the field service folks, I requested that we go ahead and do a complete power-down on the enclosure and bring it up clean. This required physically removing power from the enclosure after powering down everything that I could from the onboard administrator.

After the reboot, everything looked much healthier. The blades came back to life and everything began operating as expected. After intense discussions on the HP side, we reseated our OA’s and the sleeve that they plug into on the back side of the enclosure. Net outcome was the same – everything still operating well. The OA’s nor the sleeve were loose, so we doubted that was the cause.

One nugget I learned from HP support (please vett this information on your own), is that the Virtual Connect interconnect modules require communication with the onboard administrators (OA’s). I’m still not sure I fully understand, but HP support did tell us that if VC lost communication to the OA, its possible that it caused our problems. If this is so, this smells like very, very bad engineering and design…

Continued investigation on HP’s part has pointed us back to the original diagnosis – a faulty mid-plane. Only by default did we return to that conculsion, however. This is the only piece of hardware common to the problems. Our only other conclusion was that this was a very bad, “hiccup” — which obviously buys us no real peace of mind…

So, sometime soon, we will be replacing the mid-plane of our enclosure. I have, of course, lost some faith in the HP blade ecosystem. We have plans to migrate our corporate VMware cluster onto blades, as well as some Citrix and other servers. Losing an enclosure like this has un-nerved those plans. We were fortunate to have drug our feet to only have 3 blades populated and serving anything at the time this happened. I will post updates as we move forward…

March 5, 2009 2 comments

Virtualization

Where virtualization sits in my datacenter

by Philip Sellers October 7, 2008

written by Philip Sellers

I had a fairly major revelation during VMworld. Its not something that I had stopped to think about and I guess the week of sessions and discussions helped me assemble several random thoughts together.

First, I’ve always relegated virutalization to a status where it is certainly a valuable technology and integral part of HTC’s datacenter strategy, but there is a trade-off where you have over-head and lose some performance. I realize that the trade-off is very small, but understand that our datacenter has one farm of dual-core servers – our VMware farm.

Second, I realized that our processors are just out pacing the computing needs of our current generation of software. Much of this can be blamed on Microsoft’s inability to keep their server OS up to snuff, in my opinion. But these two concepts never seemed to co-exist in my mind, until VMworld.

One keynote talked briefly about how ESX is optimized for multi-core and how it makes efficient use of gobs of memory. And, I’ve got two blade centers with blades that meet that description collecting dust as we try and figure out what to run on them. So, why at this point am I hesitant to put Exchange, SQL Server and other ‘high-impact’ applications on a virtual platform? I know that Windows Server 2003 can’t use all the memory or multi-cores. It wasn’t architected to.

We’re not making the move into Windows 2008 at this point, partially because of the Vista effect (our company is also swearing off Vista upgrades and sticking with our trusty XP). And I guess that’s a third point. Windows 2003 is just good enough for our busines. We’re comfortable with that OS, what it provides us and supporting it. I know that Windows Server 2008 has some improvements to handle the additional hardware, but I’m still hearing it doesn’t do an efficient job of it. But when you combine the complacency with Server 2003, XP and the ability to squeeze more performance out of the hardware by applying ESX, I think we have a winning combination.

In our datacenter, we run multiple instance of Microsoft SQL Server in virtual and we have very good results from this. I’m also facing a migration of Exchange onto a quad-core blade with 8Gb of RAM and thinking that’s way too much hardware for what our Exchange is doing. And that thought is a major turn – because never in my past 8 years working with Exchange have I wanted LESS hardware for a server.

And Exchange 2007’s architectual changes really has decentralized the whole Exchange “server” concept into multiple pieces which use many small servers for redundancy. That defeats the big server, multi-core, gobs of memory hardware idea that all of Microsoft’s hardware partners are pushing, except with virtualization.

So, at today’s crossroads, I’m dropping a lot of my resistence to keeping certain applications physical. And that’s a big shift in my mentality. There is too much horsepower to waste on an operating system which really can’t take advantage of it. What do you think?

October 7, 2008 1 comment