Running Exchange CCR on Windows Server 2008

Then there is a really good hotfix for you to fix some problems with cluster functionality on Windows 2008.

Under some conditions the cluster cannot form a quorum and the cluster will fail. More info is found on Tim McMichael’s blog.

Fix is named 978790 and downloaded from KB978790

Windows Server 2008 Service Pack 2 and Windows Vista Service Pack 2

Service Pack 2 for Windows Server 2008 and Vista is now released.
Take a look here for more information http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dd262148.aspx

The good thing is that the Exchange 2010 Beta can be installed on a Windows Server 2008 SP2.

Happy patching

AOL and OCS 2007 R2 edge problem

Some people have problem to get the federation with AOL going when they use OCS 2007 R2. This problem is now resolved. Check out this article on how to configure your x64 windows to make the federation work.
http://blogs.msdn.com/scottos/archive/2009/04/03/resolved-ocs-2007-r2-pic-fails-against-aol.aspx

Backup of Exchange 2007 on Windows 2008

With Windows 2008 there is no more NTBackup that you can use to backup Exchange 2007 server, and the windows team did not put in support for Exchange streaming backup in the new Windows 2008 backup software.

There is unsupported workarounds with copying DLL’s and use the old NTBackup, but that’s not the recommended way of doing it.

Thankfully Microsoft listened and acted on peoples requests and they will create an addon or whatever its going to be called to the Windows 2008 backup software that can be used for Exchange backups. It will also use the modern way of doing backup with help of the VSS framework.

The sad story is that it’s not downloadable at this moment, but the word is that it will be this summer.

IPV6 on Windows 2008 together with Exchange 2007 SP1

Exchange 2007 SP1 has support for IPV6 under certain circumstances. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb629624.aspx
Since most people don’t use IPV6 on there’s network I suggest that you disabled it (it cannot be uninstalled). This is done in 3 steps.
· Uncheck the IPV6 checkbox on your NIC settings.
· Edit the hosts file and disable the line “::1 localhost”, that is put a # sign at the front.
· And the last thing is to do is edit a registry value. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip6\Parameters\DisabledComponents and put in a DWORD with value of 0xffffffff
This will turn off IPV6 for everything except the loopback traffic and Exchange does not have an issue with that. For more ref. see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929852
You have to reboot your server after editing this registry value.

Doing all this will also resolve some other issues, the most famous one is the problem with RPCProxy component only listening on IPV4 and make Outlook Anywhere work again.