Edit: If you have already installed .NET 4.6.1, check this blog post on how to remove it (You Had Me At EHLO…)
Microsoft Exchange heavily relies on Microsoft .NET Framework. Because of this, Microsoft provides a matrix for the supported Microsoft .NET Frameworks. Mostly unknown is the fact, that Exchange doesn’t support the every Microsoft .NET Framework, and this is causing trouble sometimes. Some admins simply install the latest .NET releases because “it doesn’t hurt”.
After deploying a new Microsoft Exchange organization with Exchange 2016, or after deploying a Microsoft Exchange 2016 into an existing organization, you might notice a strange behaviour regarding the Offline Address Books (OAB).
[PS] C:\Windows\system32>Get-OfflineAddressBook Name Versions AddressLists ---- -------- ------------ Standard-Offlineadressliste {Version2, Version3, Version4} {\Globale Standardadressliste} Standard-Offlineadressliste (Ex2013) {Version4} {\Globale Standardadressliste} Huh?! Where does this Exchange 2013 OAB come from? As you can see in the cmdlet output, there’s no Exchange 2013 in this organization.
Another bug in Exchange 2016 CU2. The Role of a new receive connector is greyed out. You can select “Front-End-Transport”. This is a screenshot from a german Exchange 2016 CU2.
Patrick Terlisten/ vcloudnine.de/ Creative Commons CC0
Solution Use the Exchange Management Shell to create a new receive connector. Afterwards, you can modify it with the Exchange Control Panel (ECP).
[PS] C:\Windows\system32>New-Receiveconnector -Name "Client Frontend Dummy" -RemoteIPRange ("192.168.200.99") -TransportRo le "FrontendTransport" -Bindings ("0.
Some day ago, I installed a new Exchange 2013 CU11 for some test ins my lab. Nothing fancy, just a single server deployment on a Windows Server 2012 R2 VM. I deployed this Windows Server from a template, which was updated with the latest Windows Patches and WMF some days ago. The Exchange setup went smooth. I updated the SSL certificates and the internal and external URLs for the virtual directories.
Microsoft Exchange Server licensing is rather simple. You can choose between two Exchange licenses:
Standard (up to 5 mailbox databases) Enterprise (up to 100 mailbox databases) Standard and Enterprise only differ in the number of supported databases! Feedl free to use Exchange DAG with Exchange Standard and Windows Server Standard! To license your clients, you have to purchase a Client Access License (CAL) for each user or device that accesses your Exchange server environment.
This issue is described in KB2971270 and is fixed in CU6.
I ran a couple of times in this error. After applying changes to SSL certificates (add, replace or delete a SSL certificate) and rebooting the server, the event log is flooded with events from source “HttpEvent” and event id 15021. The message says:
An error occurred while using SSL configuration for endpoint 0.0.0.0:444. The error status code is contained within the returned data.
Microsoft has introduced the Web Application Proxy (WAP) with Windows Server 2012 R2 and has it positioned as a replacement for Microsoft User Access Gateway (UAG), Thread Management Gateway (TMG) and IIS Application Request Routung (ARR). WAP ist tightly bound to the Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS) role. WAP can be used
pre-authenticate access to published web applications, and it can function as an AD FS proxy The AD FS proxy role was removed in Windows Server 2012 R2 and it’s replaced by the WAP role.
In my last blog post I have highlighted how HAProxy can be used to distribute client connections to two or more servers with Exchange 2013 CAS role. But there is another common use case for load balancers in a Exchange environment: SMTP. Let’s take a look at this drawing:
Patrick Terlisten/ vcloudnine.de/ Creative Commons CC0
The inbound SMTP connections are distributed to two Mail Transfer Agents (often a cluster of appliances, like Cisco IronPort or Symantec Messaging Gateway) and the MTAs forward the e-mails to the Exchange servers.
Since Exchange 2007 client connections are handled by the Client Access Server role. With Exchange 2010, Microsoft has introduced the concept of the Client Access Server Array (CAS Array). A CAS Array is required, when internal and external client connections should be load balanced over multiple client access servers. Many client access protocols in Exchange 2010 require session affinity. This means, that the connection between the client and a particular client access server must persist.
The recovery of an Exchange mailbox using a recovery database is usually no big deal. Simply restore the database, create a recovery database and recover the mailbox or items from the mailbox. Sometimes you have the luck that the customer has licensed the Data Protector Exchange 2010 Granular Recovery for Exchange (GRE). This was unfortunately not true in my case. Okay, so let’s do it the old way. The needed tape was available in the library and luckily it was a full backup.
