236 + Global Knowledge + Migration

Tyrant1919

Alright, so I took a class on Exchange 2007 in back in March. It was a week long and held at the Global Knowledge in Dallas. The instructor was top notch. They brought in Richard Luckett. I didn't google him until after the course. He knew a lot of stuff, wish I knew 20% of what he knew.

Anyways, the class was very informative. Unlike the 236 exam, the course did not focus too much on CMDlets and focused on actual installation and configuration stratagies. All the students had a machine to run up to 5 VMs. We started from scratch at installing X 07 and eventually built up to being able to send encrypted e-mail to each other. Awesome class, I'd recommend Global Knowledge to anyone with some extra Training bucks in the budget.

I had to drive back home and decided to sit the exam and see how it was. Man did I choose a misleading prometric. They had like an awesome name. When I got there, it was a TAX prep company, with an overheated room with three computers in it. Worst test center ever. I wasn't happy with the location so I buzzed through it as quickly as possible. Got like a 687 er something. I wasn't too shocked, but I had a look at the exam and went on home.

Got back home, studied for a week and a half. Scheduled a day off at work to take it and passed, but only with like 730~. Definately the questions where they pretty much just asked what the correct syntax of a command was kinda sucked. I'd say that was definately the largest area that I was lacking. Nothing really too surprising. Took 649 afterwards too, pased that one surprisingly.

We actually moved everyone's mailbox over to the X 07 box last Thursday. That day was supposed to be just to make our X 07 box route the messages instead of our X 03 box. But I guess my boss saw this as an oppurtunity to "Get 'er done." Without any notification, we started moving Mailboxes over. By the morning pretty much everyone was moved.

We had calls all day Friday, mostly about OWA and that the new virtual directory changed. So I changed the Exchange directory and pointed it towards OWA. I hope i won't need that, I know it was made because of our X 03 box. A few permissions issues throughout the day. POP is working, Activesync is next on my list on Monday.

All in all, I thought it was fun. Learned some new things. The list above is not nearly all that I did. Had to fix a bunch of AD problems before I could even install X 07. Maybe I'll get to do another migration someday. :^D

blargoe

I had Rich Luckett for Ultimate Exchange 2003 a few years ago. He was absolutely top notch, I agree.

That's kinda scary how your boss was willing to just up and move everyone's mailboxes without much notice, a test scenario, or a plan. I'm glad it's working - but be sure you keep an eye on things.

The /exchange directory for OWA should have still resolved, and automatically redirect you to the new OWA site.

Tyrant1919

We had a plan to move the mailboxes over the weekend and let everyone know that things will be down for a bit Friday. We've been prepping and planning for about two weeks. I guess I wasn't planning on doing it Thursday. The worst part was that we did it without a backup. So if **** hits the fan... I'm just a yesman right now.

We had a lot of users that had a shortcut still pointing to the /Exchange directory, so I just altered the default directory a bit and viola, /exchange works too. I think we'll be ok for the most part. My Boss was a little worried that 15GB of our 16GB of memory was being used. I knew X 07 used it to cache the DB, so I sent him a nice link explaining so.

I monitored the Qs throughout the day, and it performed well. The domains our employees are sending e-mails to... sheesh. Next on my list is to decommision the X 03 box.

Tyrant1919

Ohhh boy, was this weekend a blast :^). Don't even have time to ellaborate.

blargoe

Curiousity, is everyone on Outlook 2007 or do you still have folks on Outlook 2003?

Tyrant1919

Both... Actually, our other exchange admin person is on 2000 :^X

blargoe

That's weird. Does he hate the ribbon menu that much? I don't think 2000 is "officially" supported against Exchange 2007. Might be wrong about that.

You'll want to check all documentation regarding migrating your public folders store, free/busy information, address books, email policies, etc. to 2007 before you turn off 2003 for good. I'd say just use Technet but there's better "plain english" resources out there like msexchange.org that reminded me of a couple of things I needed to take care of.

Tyrant1919

Yep, everything is good. We don't actually use public folders, but I was aware of the free/busy info that 2003 and earlier use. I made a replica on the new server, so it's all gravy.

I don't know why he uses 2000, I guess he just never upgraded :^/. He's the reason I can't uncheck a box in an obtion for the Offline Address book. I should bring that up tomorrow.

Saturday the server was down for a good chunk of hours. My counterparts came in and set the server to circular logging. Yep, the 300GBs worth of space was used up in little less than a day. I blame the full drives on me. I probably should have checked but thought, what the hell could go wrong. Live and learn. I was so worried about other **** that that never slipped my mind honestly.

So we're on circular logging. No good backup has been made of the database yet. I come in Monday and start pounding away on it. I search for some looped messages, but haven't found a thing that would indicate as such in the logs. The Qs also didn't give any hints. There were many recurring errors in the App log about a Calendar problem. I didn't think anything of it.

I decided to completely remove our old 03 box from the picture. It didn't take but an hour to sort through everything. Had to remove a few traces of old crap from AD. It's completey removed and off for that matter. Still logs are being generated at an enormous rate. About 30 or so per second if I had to guess. Circular logging kept the number down to about 50 or less throughout the whole day.

I did some more googling. This time focusing on the App log. I came up with a rollup that would fix it. The calendar in question was way over the 1300 objects specified at when it starts to go astray. I started to do some supportive googling and found a generic logs are being generated to fast that were also fixed by a rollup. So I decided to pass it by the boss, install Rollup 6 I think it was, and reboot at lunch. Let it sit for awhile, YaY, only a log ever minute on average. App log was silent too. At COB, switched to normal logging, restarted MIS, time to go home.

Things left on my to do, create an event to e-mail us if the drives get below a certain % of free space. Activesync seems to be working for everyone, so I'll keep my eye on that. I'd like to switch all of our POP users to Anywhere, but I'm not sure how it likes to work with dialup. I may not do that now that I think about it.

I feel I failed to monitor something as simple as free drive space on the TLog drives. The couple hours of downtime could have been completely avoided. I did like my initial thought of a routing problem. Although overlooking the repeated events in the App log cost me some hours in fixing it. All in all I give myself a grade of 5 Tlogs out of 10 for the move. The excessive downtime was a bummer. Reminds me of the time I killed basewide name resolution to the internet for about 25 minutes :^X.

blargoe

That's a lot of logs for one server on one day, how many users was this again?

Glad you got it all sorted. I've found those events in the app log are important to stay on top of. We use SCOM 2007 and I get those events in my email when they happen. Saved my butt a few times... that's also what I'm using for disk space monitoring.

Have you turned on logging for your send and receive connectors? That's VERY handy info if you ever run into a situation where someone says your org never sent out an email or if you're trying to troubleshoot things like SMTP authentication, message restrictions, message tracking, etc. It's turned off by default.

Tyrant1919

lol, My boss bought the Enterprise Cals instead of the Standard. I have a feeling we're not going to get a refund for our Enterprise Cals :^D. I got him running around to get the Purchase stuff in gear to buy some Standard Cals.