Exchange Center

Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 has a very different server role architecture than its previous versions. Exchange 2007 and 2010 had 5 server roles: the Mailbox Server role, Client Access role, Hub Transport role, Edge Transport role, and the Unified Messaging role. That is a lot of roles to need to backup. However, Exchange 2013 has greatly reduced the number of server roles down to two: the Mailbox Server Role and the Client Access Server role. All of the other roles, except the edge transport role which is run on a standalone , have been combined within those two roles. When it comes to backing up and restoring Exchange 2013 this makes Exchange Monitoring much easier for administrators.

Many companies have good reasons to keep their messaging infrastructure on-premises. Exchange 2016 is currently the second latest version of Exchange Server for on-premises deployments.  Common reasons to upgrade Exchange include adding new functionality, such as high availability, moving from an unreliable or insecure system, and moving to a version that Microsoft still supports.

Exchange Server has two core components. First, there is the mailbox component, with all the required client access protocols and well-known mailbox functions. The second major component is the message flow, with receiving, processing, and sending email messages.

Disk space is vital to the health of an Exchange Server. Without disk, you don’t have email, thus Exchange monitoring - disk space is vital. Exchange is dependent on having disk because every time an email is sent it’s written to disk, without it you’re S.O.L.

Now that you’ve finished Part I and Part II of my three-part Managed Availability blog series, I will now provide some information about local .xml monitoring files and overrides of Managed Availability.

How to check, recover, and maintain your Exchange organization

Now that you’ve finished Part I of my three part Managed Availability blog series, I will now go a bit deeper and provide some examples about the functionality and operability of Managed Availability. My virtual test lab contains a two-member DAG based on Windows Server 2012 and Exchange 2013 CU6.

An Exchange Administrator's Task?

Microsoft introduced a new built-in exchange monitoring system called Managed Availability in Exchange 2013, which automatically takes recovery actions for unhealthy services within the Exchange organization.

Before we talk about Exchange Server's Managed Availability features, let's first remember the architecture of Exchange Server.

By the end of 2020, a couple of interesting things regarding Exchange server are going on. The first one we've know about for a long time, is the end of support for Exchange 2010 in October 2020. After almost 11 years, Exchange 2010 is no longer supported by Microsoft. It continues to work, but don’t expect any technical support, update Rollups or even security hotfixes.

Decommissioning the last Exchange server

When you are in an Exchange hybrid configuration and you have migrated the last Mailbox to Office 365, you might wonder what to do with the last (couple of) Exchange server that is still running on-premises. Can you decommission your last Exchange server because all your Mailboxes are in the cloud? From a supportability point of view the answer is still “No, you can’t decommission the last Exchange server because you need it for management purposes” and most customers think this is disappointing. Let me explain why we still need this last Exchange server.