Microsoft Exchange and Active Directory Blog
Testing, testing, testing and checking requirements As Exchange is a central and important system in many companies, it is advisable to test new updates in a test environment. The test environment should correspond as closely as possible to the productive environment. Of course, other applications/processes/services that are dependent on Exchange must also be tested as far as possible. ... Read more
In the last 3 parts of the Exchange 2016 Loadbalancing articles I have already tested F5 and Kemp. Both solutions work great. In the fourth and final part, I would like to briefly introduce a free load balancer. Zen Loadbalancer Community Edition. First of all: In my opinion, Zen Loadbalancer is only suitable for demo or test environments, although I also use it in ... Read more
The third part of the Exchange 2016 Loadbalancing series is about Exchange 2016 in conjunction with the Kemp LoadMaster 7.1 (more precisely 7.1-30-75). The two previous parts deal with F5 BigIP LTM and can be found here: Exchange 2016: Loadbalancing with F5 BigIP LTM 11.6 (iApp) Part 1 Exchange 2016: Loadbalancing with F5 BigIP LTM 11.6 (iApp) ... Read more
As already announced, the second part of this article series "Loadbalancing Exchange 2016 with F5 Big IP" deals with a few optimizations on the part of Exchange Server and Loadbalancer. The first part can be found here. Mailboxes for the "Advanced Monitors" LTM can check two mailboxes in the iApp. The user accounts should be set so that the passwords are not ... Read more
Exchange 2016 does not make any major demands on a load balancer. Exchange 2010 still made a few demands on a load balancer (session persistence, affinity), but Exchange 2016 is far more modest in this respect. In principle, simple RoundRobin is sufficient here. I currently have an F5 BigIP LTM in version 11.6 to hand. Therefore there are ... Read more
The configuration of an Exchange 2016 DAG is almost identical to the configuration of a DAG with Exchange 2013. In principle, it is even a little easier, because the question of whether the roles should be separated or whether all roles can be installed on one server no longer arises with Exchange 2016. There is now only the ... Read more
APIPA addresses (169.254.x.x) in the mail header are somewhat unsightly, this problem occurs in an Exchange DAG and can certainly lead to a problem with one or other SPAM filter. Here is part of a mail header: The cause is an incorrect sequence of network connections. The APIPA address belongs to the "Microsoft Failover Cluster Virtual Adapter", which ... Read more
In Exchange environments with DAG and multiple database copies, the databases should normally be distributed evenly across the database servers. However, this situation can change if a failover has occurred or the databases have been activated on other servers for maintenance purposes. At some point, you may then have a situation where all databases on a server are active ... Read more
With virtual Exchange 2010 servers on VMware vSphere environments, it can happen that a failover of the databases is triggered during a vMotion process of the Exchange database server. The cause is often the heartbeat timeout when the Exchange VM is moved to another ESX host. It can happen that the switches do not recognize the changed port. Read more
On my forays through the Internet, I came across Zen. Zen is an OpenSource load balancer that is easy to install and has a nice web configuration interface. Reason enough for me to write a howto. So I quickly set up and install a VM The installation of Zen is identical to the minimal installation of Debian, a few ... Read more
