Exchange Center

This time next year we’ll (hopefully) be in the midst of project planning for the newly released Exchange Server 2019. After a scheduled late-2018 release, many organizations will be looking to learn, test, deploy, and administer the new on-premises Exchange version after returning from their holiday break. As someone who works in the Exchange Support and Consulting world, this (Jan 2017) is actually a relatively slow period for us. Exchange 2016 has been released for a couple years, its bugs and quirks mitigated, and the rush of early adopter migrations have passed; leaving only the steady flow of migration and deployment work driven by company financial scheduling rather than the Exchange product release cycle.

At a recent Exchange MVP panel discussion at Ignite 2017, a question came up that I’ve been asked at previous panels. The spirit of these questions were around the future of Exchange Server On-Premises in relation to Office 365. Will there be another on-premises Exchange Server version? If so, how will its features stack up against Exchange Online? What role will Exchange Administrators play in the coming years? I wanted to share my thoughts and experiences on this topic, as it appears to be one keeping many Exchange Server Administrators and Consultants up at night.

In my previous article in this series, we discussed Exchange “Alternative Architecture” options for medium-to-large businesses. We specifically covered common storage design options and which were ideal to design the best solution for a customer that has decided to remain on-premises and chosen to not follow the Preferred Architecture. To reiterate, I’m a big fan of Office 365 and the Preferred Architecture but I understand many customers will not follow either of these two routes. Therefore, if they deviate from either of these options they should at least follow the recommended guidance that can increase the uptime and better the performance of their solution.

In my first article in this series, I discussed Alternative Architecture options for Small Businesses who choose to stay on-premises. My intent was to ensure that if a business chose to remain on-premises but did not wish to implement Microsoft’s Preferred Architecture for Exchange, they would at least deploy in a way that will reduce complexity and increase uptime of the solution. While the first article focused on options for small businesses, this article will begin to discuss common deployment options seen in medium to large environments. We’ll focus on popular storage technologies found in this space; RAID and advanced storage solutions (SAN/NAS/Hyper converged). As the type of architecture found in this space is so varied, we’ll focus more on sound design principles and best practices.

In part 1 of this series, I discussed how to connect to the Exchange database cache and the importance of transaction logs in database transactions. In this next part, you'll learn how transaction logging and recovery work in Exchange.

The following blog post is a trimmed-down excerpt from the e-book "Exchange Server Troubleshooting Companion."

Exchange database internals might seem to be a complicated topic, but we’re going to briefly discuss database internals from a very practical perspective.

The following blog post is a trimmed-down excerpt from the eBook "Exchange Server Troubleshooting Companion":

One of the primary talking points of my Storage Configuration Options for Exchange session at IT Dev Connections was around JBOD with Exchange, and what that definition means to various people.

The following blog post is a trimmed-down excerpt from the eBook "Exchange Server Troubleshooting Companion":

Mailbox corruption is not a new problem for Exchange Administrators, Support Engineers, and Consultants. Causes of corruption can vary and include:

Overview

Often times I’ll find myself writing a blog post because the topic recently became relevant due to customer need. Other times I spend hours banging my head against the keyboard trying to resolve an issue and would like to keep others from going through the same ordeal.