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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.
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.
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.
Securing Exchange servers is hard. I mean it can be a giant pain sometimes. There are what, hundreds of millions or maybe billions of lines of code running on your Exchange servers, right? It doesn’t take much for a typo to get through and open a vulnerability that can then be exploited opening the most important and valuable data within your organization to all kinds of bad actors.
With the work from home going on due to the COVID-19 crisis there’s an increasing demand for tools like Zoom, Skype for Business and Teams. While Zoom is doing a great job for personal use, I prefer Skype for Business or Microsoft Teams for business use.
Since the early days of Exchange Server, the limits of user mailboxes were strictly regulated. In many Exchange organizations, these quota limits were configured on a mailbox database level and were therefore consistent for all mailboxes stored in the same database. This approach was selected because the existing hard disk space was scarce and expensive in the past.
On December 17, 2019 Microsoft released Exchange 2019 CU4 and Exchange 2016 CU15 as part of their quarterly release cycle. As expected, no new features in these Cumulative Updates. According to the Microsoft vision, if you want the latest and greatest you need Exchange Online, if you’re satisfied with a rock solid on-premises deployment you’re good with these versions. And since Exchange 2013 is out of support, no Cumulative Update for Exchange 2013 is released.
On September 17, 2019 Microsoft released its quarterly updates for Exchange. This time, the updates contain Exchange 2019 Cumulative Update 3 and Exchange 2016 Cumulative Update 14. No updates are released for Exchange 2013 or Exchange 2010.