Exchange 2007

Mark Russinovich to the recue : Outlook Hangs (Requesting Data)

2010-08-25T12:08:00Z

We have all seen this before!
Outlook hangs and is requesting data, Mark shows us how you can actually troubleshoot this…

We had a related post on Exchange troubleshooting a few months ago
http://www.pro-exchange.be/blogs/exchange2007/archive/2010/04/13/exchange-server-performance-troubleshooting.aspx

Very interesting & happy reading ;)

The Compound Case of the Outlook Hangs
http://blogs.technet.com/b/markrussinovich/archive/2010/08/24/3351213.aspx

Exchange 2007 SP3 released with support for Windows 2008 R2

2010-06-22T11:56:00Z

Ask and you shall receive - Exchange 2007 SP3 w/support for Windows Server 2008 R2 Now Available
http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2010/06/21/455145.aspx

I am very pleased to let you all know that Exchange Server 2007 SP3 is available for download. As we highlighted in Updates to the Exchange Supportability Matrix this past November, this third service pack for Exchange 2007 enables Exchange 2007 to be installed on the Windows Server 2008 R2 version of the operating system. We heard you loud and clear that this is enormously important to our Exchange 2007 customers, so we worked quickly to deliver SP3 in order to meet this requirement.

Download Exchange 2007 SP3 here.

Exchange Server Performance Troubleshooting

2010-04-12T23:26:00Z

During our last Chalk Talk session @ Techdays belgium someone asked a question about Exchange Server Performance Troubleshooting.

Question:

The problem was that Clients were experiencing the famous “Requesting Data” notification in Outlook.
They had different Outlook versions throughout the company, Outlook 2002 aka XP, 2003 & 2007.

The Outlook XP users were experiencing the most problems.
The question was how can we troubleshoot this?

Answer:

Looks like a simple question right? There are so many things that can cause performance issues on an Exchange server.
Memory, CPU, Storage, 3rd Party Server Applications, 3rd Party Client Applications, Mailbox size, Mailbox items, Server views, Network, Active Directory …
You see there is no single answer to this question…

Any of the following sections can help you in the design/validation/troubleshooting process

1. Outlook and Exchange Server Compatibility

Let’s look at a roster of Outlook clients supported for Exchange 2007
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd314087.aspx

So Outlook 2002/XP is supported for Exchange 2007.

2. Exchange Server Sizing

Processor and memory configurations for Exchange Server 2007 Server Role
http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2006/09/25/428994.aspx

3. Storage Related Information

Planning/Optimizing Storage Configurations
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb124518(EXCHG.80).aspx
Exchange 2007 Mailbox Server Role Storage Requirements Calculator
http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2007/01/15/432207.aspx
http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2009/04/23/451159.aspx

How to Align Exchange I/O with Storage Track Boundaries
With a physical disk that maintains 64 sectors per track, Microsoft Windows always creates the partition starting at the sixty-forth sector, therefore misaligning it with the underlying physical disk. To be certain of disk alignment, use Diskpart.exe, a disk partition tool. Diskpart.exe is a tool provided by Microsoft in the Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 support tools that can explicitly set the starting offset in the master boot record (MBR). Setting the starting offset correctly will align Exchange I/O with storage track boundaries and improve disk performance. Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 writes data in multiples of 8-kilobyte (KB) I/O operations, and I/O operation to a database can be from 8 KB to 1 megabyte (MB). Therefore, make sure that the starting offset is a multiple of 8 KB. Failure to do so may cause a single I/O operation spanning two tracks, causing performance degradation.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa998219(EXCHG.80).aspx
Storage Technology
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb738146(EXCHG.80).aspx
http://www.mmcug.org/blogs/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=16
http://www.yonahruss.com/2008/11/raid-10-vs-raid-5-performance-cost.html
http://weblogs.sqlteam.com/billg/archive/2007/06/18/RAID-10-vs.-RAID-5-Performance.aspx

4. Pre-Deployment Testing/Verification tools

Microsoft Exchange Server Profile Analyzer
Collect estimated statistical information from a single mailbox store or across an Exchange Server organization.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=C009C049-9F4C-4519-A389-69C281B2ABDA&displaylang=en

Exchange Load Generator
Exchange Load Generator is a simulation tool to measure the impact of MAPI, OWA, IMAP, POP and SMTP clients on Exchange servers.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=0FDB6F14-1E42-4165-BB17-96C83916C3EC&displaylang=en

Microsoft Exchange Server Jetstress Tool
Simulate disk I/O load on a test server running Exchange to verify the performance and stability of your disk subsystem before putting your server into a production environment.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=73DFE056-0900-4DBB-B14A-0932338CECAC&displaylang=en

5. Active Directory Testing

Active Directory Performance Testing Tool (ADTest.exe)
ADTest.exe is an Active Directory load-generation tool that simulates client transactions on a host server to assess the performance of the Microsoft® Active Directory™ within Microsoft® Windows® Server 2003 and Microsoft® Active Directory Application Mode™.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=4814FE3F-92CE-4871-B8A4-99F98B3F4338&displaylang=en

6. Exchange Analysers

Introducing the Exchange Analyzers

Read about the features, abilities, and future vision for the Exchange Analyzer family. Visit the Exchange Team Blog for the details.

Exchange Remote Connectivity Analyzer
The Exchange Remote Connectivity Analyzer tool is a Web-based tool designed to help IT Administrators troubleshoot connectivity issues with their Exchange Server deployments. The tool simulates several client logon and mail flow scenarios. When a test fails, many of the errors have troubleshooting tips to assist the IT Administrator in correcting the problem.

Exchange Best Practices Analyzer
The Microsoft Exchange Best Practices Analyzer is designed for administrators who want to determine the overall health of their Exchange servers and topology. The tool scans Exchange servers and identifies items that do not conform to Microsoft best practices.

Exchange Troubleshooting Assistant
The Exchange Troubleshooting Assistant programmatically executes a set of troubleshooting steps to identify the root cause of performance, mail flow, and database mounting issues. The tool automatically determines what set of data is required to troubleshoot the identified symptoms and collects configuration data, performance counters, event logs and live tracing information from an Exchange server and other appropriate sources. The tool analyzes each subsystem to determine individual bottlenecks and component failures, then aggregates the information to provide root cause analysis.

7. Performance Troubleshooting tools

Microsoft Exchange Server User Monitor
Use the Microsoft Exchange Server User Monitor to gather real-time data to better understand current client usage patterns, and to plan for future work. Administrators can view several items, including IP addresses used by clients, versions and modes of Microsoft Office Outlook, and resources such as CPU usage, server-side processor latency, and total latency for network and processing with Outlook 2003 version MAPI.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=9A49C22E-E0C7-4B7C-ACEF-729D48AF7BC9&displaylang=en
Description of the Exchange Server Performance Troubleshooting Analyzer tool
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/923893
Run the Exchange Server Performance Troubleshooting Analyzer tool when the problem is occurring. The tool will complete the following tasks:
- Identify performance problems that may cause Microsoft Outlook to display the RPC Cancel Request dialog box.
- Analyze the data in the Microsoft Exchange Server User Monitor tool (Exmon.exe) event trace log file (.etl) to determine whether a load issue is caused by one or two users or by many users.

Performance Analysis of Logs (PAL) Tool
The PAL (Performance Analysis of Logs) tool is a new and powerful tool that reads in a performance monitor counter log (any known format) and analyzes it using complex, but known thresholds (provided). The tool generates an HTML based report which graphically charts important performance counters and throws alerts when thresholds are exceeded. The thresholds are originally based on thresholds defined by the Microsoft product teams and members of Microsoft support, but continue to be expanded by this ongoing project. This tool is not a replacement of traditional performance analysis, but it automates the analysis of performance counter logs enough to save you time. This is a VBScript and requires Microsoft LogParser (free download).
http://www.codeplex.com/PAL

ExInsight for Microsoft Exchange
ExInsight is a free monitoring and statistics tool that provides a real-time view of the internals of Exchange Server transactions and allows you to evaluate individual user's usage of Exchange Server.
This tool is especially useful for Exchange administrators and developers. By using this tool, you can gather real-time data about the users in an Exchange environment and learn more about the inner workings of MAPI, OWA, POP3, IMAP4, NNTP and other protocols. ExInsight helps you to understand how individual users affect the performance of an Exchange Server, analyze application usage of Microsoft Exchange, and guide troubleshooting of applications that depend on Microsoft Exchange.
http://bitrunes.com/

8. Performance Issues

This section provides information about how to isolate performance degradations in Microsoft Exchange Server 2007. Information is also provided about tools that may assist you in performance troubleshooting.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb397229(EXCHG.80).aspx

Understanding the Performance Impact of High Item Counts and Restricted Views
This topic will help you understand, diagnose, and resolve Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 performance issues related to high item counts in critical path folders and restricted view requests when you use Microsoft Office Outlook running in online mode, Outlook in cached mode with delegate access, and Outlook Web Access. The critical path folders are the Calendar, Contacts, Inbox, and Sent Items folders. Restricted views are data views that restrict information based on search criteria that result in views of only a subset of items in a folder. Performance issues related to these situations are frequently related and can become visible to end-users in the form of slow client access. It only takes a few users who have abnormally high item counts in their critical path folders to cause performance issues which are felt throughout your whole Exchange organization.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc535025(EXCHG.80).aspx

Troubleshooting Slow RPC Request Processing Issues
When you use Microsoft Office Outlook in MAPI mode, Outlook executes client operations as remote procedure calls (RPCs) between the client and the server. If the user is running in online mode, these RPC calls occur synchronously. Any delay by the server in fulfilling these synchronous requests directly affects the user experience and the responsiveness of Outlook. In contrast, most operations that are performed when you run in cached mode occur against the user’s local copy of the mailbox or are issued to the server in the form of asynchronous (background) RPCs. Generally, asynchronous RPCs do not affect the responsiveness or overall experience of the Outlook client itself.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc540464(EXCHG.80).aspx

Outlook users experience poor performance when they work with a folder that contains many items on a server that is running Exchange Server
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/905803?p=1

9. Monitoring

Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Management Pack for System Center Operations Manager 2007
This management pack includes scripts and rules to effectively monitor Exchange 2007 and report on performance, availability, and reliability of its server roles.

10. Some very interesting blog reading:

'Requesting data from the Exchange server...' or 'Outlook is trying to retrieve data…' client messages
http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2005/05/25/405353.aspx
Recommended Mailbox Sizes
http://blogs.technet.com/exchange/archive/2005/03/14/395229.aspx

Update Rollup 3 for Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 2 (KB979784)

2010-03-18T19:54:36Z

Update Rollup 3 for Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 2 (SP2) resolves issues that were found in Exchange Server 2007 SP2 since the software was released. This update rollup is highly recommended for all Exchange Server 2007 SP2 customers.
For a list of changes that are included in this update rollup, see KB979784.
This update rollup does not apply to Exchange Server 2007 Release To Manufacturing (RTM) or Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1 (SP1). For a list of update rollups applicable to Exchange Server 2007 RTM or Exchange Server 2007 SP1, refer to the Knowledge Base article KB937052.
This is a cumulative update rollup and replaces the following:

KB971534 Update Rollup 1 for Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 2 (KB971534)
KB972076 Update Rollup 2 for Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 2 (KB972076)

Download:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=c781326a-7b81-444d-9836-760fa1e3a28a

Microsoft Entourage 2008 for Mac, Web Services Edition

2010-03-11T16:04:14Z

Microsoft Entourage 2008 for Mac, Web Services Edition uses Exchange Web Services as the primary protocol to communicate with Exchange Server. In addition to several calendaring improvements, this new version of Entourage synchronizes notes, tasks, and categories with Exchange Server. This update also enables logging that can be used for diagnostic purposes. For detailed information about this update, see the IT Pros section of the Microsoft Web site.

Applies to: Office 2008, Entourage 2008, Office 2008 Special Media Edition

Supported Operating Systems: Apple Mac OS X

Operating System Versions: Mac OS X version 10.4.9 (Tiger) or a later version of Mac OS
Note To verify that your computer meets these minimum requirements, on the Apple menu, click About This Mac.
Microsoft Exchange Server: Connectivity to Update Rollup 4 for Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1 (KB952580) or later version. You can download this update for free from the Microsoft Web site.
Note Update Rollup 4 for Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1 (KB952580) must be applied to both the Mailbox server and the Client Access server roles.
Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac 12.2.3 Update: You can download this update for free from the Microsoft Web site.
Note To verify that you have installed this update, you can open any Microsoft Office 2008 application to check the version number. For example, open Word, and then on the Word menu, click About Word. In the dialog box, compare the version number next to Latest Installed Update.

Download:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=540b4901-8cac-481c-936c-e56c60ca79c6

Update Rollup 2 for Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 2 (KB972076)

2010-01-25T14:29:00Z

Update Rollup 2 for Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 2 (SP2) resolves issues that were found in Exchange Server 2007 SP2 since the software was released. This update rollup is highly recommended for all Exchange Server 2007 SP2 customers.
For a list of changes that are included in this update rollup, see KB972076.
This update rollup does not apply to Exchange Server 2007 Release To Manufacturing (RTM) or Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1 (SP1). For a list of update rollups applicable to Exchange Server 2007 RTM or Exchange Server 2007 SP1, refer to the Knowledge Base article KB937052.
This is a cumulative update rollup and replaces the following:

KB971534 Update Rollup 1 for Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 2 (KB971534)

Download:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=fa83be11-9d5e-47bc-9a51-a10986f22928

Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 SP2 Installation Tool for Windows SBS 2008

2010-01-14T11:19:00Z

Overview

The Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 SP2 Installation Tool for Windows SBS 2008 provides a step-by-step wizard that simplifies the installation of Service Pack 2 for Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 on a computer that is running Windows SBS 2008. The wizard also detects and helps you repair some problems that are common during installation. Without this tool, Windows SBS 2008 administrators must follow a series of manual steps, which are outlined in the Microsoft Knowledge Base article You cannot install Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 2 on a Windows Small Business Server 2008-based computer.

Download the tool here --> http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=ffd2fe61-9278-489e-9b96-3816394c9cb6

Exchange UM AutoAttendant forwarding to OCS fails => hotfix available KB975050

2009-11-24T12:20:00Z

Our organisation has Unified Communications implemented using Exchange 2007 SP1 and OCS 2007 R2. We were using the Exchange AutoAttendants to route calls to OCS endpoints.

Issue

When an external PSTN user, calling from an anonymous phone line (Caller ID disabled), would select an AutoAttendant menu option that forwarded him to an OCS user, the Exchange AA would not make the transfer and announce this to the external PSTN caller: "transfer failed".

Workaround

As a workaround we programmed our gateway to replace all empty caller ID strings by a fake number, e.g. "+32999999". Using the fake number, transfers did succeed.

Solution

We worked with Microsoft support on this, and apparantly it is a bug in Exchange 2007. We just received a hotfix that resolved the issue. The hotfix is identified by KB975050.

Versions

Although our hotfix has been designed for 2007 SP1, the issue probably also occurs in 2007 SP2. Originally we decided with the support engineer to fix it in SP2, but in the end we opted for a hotfix on our currently installed environment.

Should you experience the same issue, you can ask Microsoft support for a hotffix using the KB number. At the moment of writing this post, the fix is not yet announced on the web, but I will post a link when it becomes available.

Exchange 2007 : Notes from the field available on Chopsticks

2009-11-23T16:18:00Z

View the Presentation on Technet Chopsticks: (NL)
http://www.microsoft.com/belux/technet/nl/chopsticks/default.aspx?id=1473

Update Rollup 1 for Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 2

2009-11-20T16:02:44Z

Update Rollup 1 for Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 2 (SP2) resolves issues that were found in Exchange Server 2007 SP2 since the software was released. This update rollup is highly recommended for all Exchange Server 2007 SP2 customers.

Version:8.2.217.3
Knowledge Base (KB) Articles:KB971534
Date Published:11/19/2009
Language:English
Download Size:38.0 MB - 78.7 MB*

For a list of changes that are included in this update rollup, see KB971534.

Download:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=de91f994-6263-47ef-89d7-6d344997459d

This update rollup does not apply to Exchange Server 2007 Release To Manufacturing (RTM) or Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1 (SP1). For a list of update rollups applicable to Exchange Server 2007 RTM or Exchange Server 2007 SP1, refer to the Knowledge Base article KB937052.

Internet Explorer 8 impacts OWA Load Balancing Scenarios

2009-10-26T10:28:00Z

Hi,

This a reposting of a blog posting that Brad Hugh's made on a potential IE8 issue with OWA Load Balancing Scenarios
http://blogs.msdn.com/brad_hughes/archive/2009/10/15/internet-explorer-8-impacts-owa-load-balancing-scenarios.aspx

Within Internet Explorer 8 you have the possibility to open multiple tabs, and it's quite possible due to the new internal architecture (LCIE) a new process is spawned for this "TAB". And certain things are not shared between these processes such as keep-alives and session-ID.

So when you are load balancing CAS servers and are using "SSL Session-ID" to keep persistency to the same CAS server (required for OWA) then you potentially could have the case where a user needs to re-authenticate again. For example a user click on a new mail, which opens up in a new window causing a new process to be created. This new process will have a new session-id and as a result the connection is balanced to a different CAS server. The other CAS server cannot decrypt the presented cookie from the client and will ask for authentication again.

So have a close look at this blog posting of Brad and see his scenarios and possible mitigations.

Sincerely,

Tonino Bruno | ICT Consultant | Pro-Exchange Community

Exchange 2007: Notes from the field event

2009-10-23T19:37:00Z

Hi,

I wanted to thank all the attendees of this Pro-Exchange event for being with us and making it a real community event. I've learned a thing or 2 and I hope I contributed to some learning as well.

I also wanted to thank Microsoft (Arlindo Alves in particular) for hosting our event. I particurlary enjoyed the sandwiches, but then again when it comes to food I tend to enjoy all of it :-)

For those that missed the presentation or wanted to review it again you can download the presentation here --> http://www.proexchange.be/media/p/308.aspx
And shortly the recording of the event (in dutch) will be made available on Microsoft Chopsticks as well...

If you have any questions with regards to the presentation please don't hesitate to use the forums or email me directly.

Hope to see you again next time..

Sincerely,
Tonino Bruno

Performance Benchmarking Blackberry Enterprise Server 5.0 for Exchange 2007

2009-10-13T19:38:00Z

For those that are interested, here is a new performance benchmark for Blackberry Enterprise Server 5.0

http://docs.blackberry.com/en/admin/deliverables/8864/BlackBerry_Enterprise_Server_for_Microsoft_Exchange-5.0-US.pdf

The interesting part is where you can see the impact of adding a BES server to your messaging environment. According to the document you're processor utilization will increase by 300% while your IO utilization will increase with 230%.

So not much performance improvement for Exchange 2007 in BES 5.0 but you get a lot of new features such as

IT Administrators

Advanced Mobile Management through a New administrative console
Built-in High Availability and Reliability
Enhanced Application Deployment and Management
BlackBerry® Enterprise Transporter Tool
And more great features

End-Users

Remote File Access
Email Folder Management
Enhanced Calendar Functionality
Synchronization of public and private contacts
Flag emails for follow up
Listen to Windows Media Audio (WMA) files
And more great features

Sincerely,

Tonino Bruno | ICT Consultant | PRO-Exchange Community

Exchange Server Supportability Matrix

2009-10-07T14:56:55Z

Now that there are so many different versions of Windows/Active Directory you can easily get confused to what Exchange Server version is supported on which OS/Active Directory
Luckily there is a support matrix that explains this very clearly!

This is a screenshot of the Active Directory Support Matrix

On this page there is information for Support Matrix:

Release Model
Supported Operating System Platforms
Supported Active Directory Environments
Web Browsers That Are Supported for Use with the Premium Version of Outlook Web Access
Web Browsers That Are Supported for Use with the Basic Version of Outlook Web Access µ
Web Browsers That Are Supported for the Use of S/MIME with Outlook Web Access
Clients
The Microsoft .NET Framework
Windows PowerShell
Microsoft Management Console
Windows Installer

Exchange Server Supportability Matrix:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee338574.aspx

Deploying Multi-Role Exchange 2007 Servers and Scalability of CAS/HUB

2009-10-02T19:11:00Z

A couple of months ago Microsoft released an interesting whitepaper which changes how we position, or better “scale”, Exchange 2007 server roles. Especially the Client Access Server and Hub Transport Server role are 2 roles that seem to complement each other well as the Client Access Server uses more Memory resources while the Hub Transport uses more Processor and Disk resources. But still in many large scale deployments you will find these roles on dedicated servers because it had been the initial recommendation coming from Microsoft. Obviously this had a big impact because most likely you where considering high availability for your server roles which increased the number of servers dramatically for your deployment.

Today with this whitepaper Microsoft provides you with the testing matrixes and conclusions about combining the Client Access Server and Hub Transport Server role on a single server. In addition you will also get a clue on how many users/connections you can support on a given hardware configuration using of CAS/HUB load. Keep in mind that scaling a CAS server is difficult as it supports so many functions such as Outlook Web Access, Exchange Activesync, Outlook Anywhere & Exchange Web Services. Understanding how many users can be supported on a given CAS server can be tricky and you first need to determine the load distribution among these different services.

The 4 Cores/8GB Memory configuration was processing 24 messages/second at the same time and is also the server configuration used at Microsoft.

For more information read this whitepaper:

White Paper: Determining the Scalability of Combined Client Access and Hub Transport Server Roles in Exchange 2007
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd901772.aspx

Tonino Bruno | ICT Consultant | Pro-Exchange Community