Test Layout

Recently I was working with an organization that had both an Office 365 tenant and on-premises Exchange 2007. Our project was to merge these two together into a single unit by configuring hybrid mode. As part of this process, there are local AD user accounts that needed to be linked to Office 365 mailboxes in a way that the local Exchange implementation could understand. I've described that process here: http://byronwright.blogspot.ca/2013/11/converting-mail-user-to-remote-user.html The existing Office 365 tenant has some room mailboxes. In order to allow on premises users to book those room, we need to perform a similar process for the room mailbox. Here is the process I used: Create a disabled user account with the same name as the O365 room. Convert the disabled user to a mail user: Set the External e-mail address to be for the O365 object. This should be XX@XX.mail.onmicrosoft.com. Set the local domain as the reply email address. This needs to match the address in O365 because ...

When implementing a hybrid configuration of Exchange Server and Office 365, the configuration wizard automatically limits connectivity to the Exchange server by setting address ranges on the receive connector of Office 365 in the on-premises Exchange. If you want the additional security of limiting access to the hybrid server at the firewall level, you can copy the configured addresses into your firewall rule. Alternatively, if you prefer the following links provide lists of the IP addresses used by Office 365 services. Exchange Online Protection (EOP):   http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn163583%28v=exchg.150%29.aspx Forefront Online Protection for Exchange (FOPE) http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh510075.aspx Various Office 365 services:   http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh373144.aspx

Ran into a strange issue today with an Exchange 2013 DAG. The cluster name object (CNO) for the DAG had been deleted at some point. It must have been a long time ago because I couldn't find a tombstone objects for it to try and bring it back. What was amazing is that the DAG functioned fine except that the File Share Witness (FSW) was offline because the CNO is used to access the shared folder for the FSW. When you create a DAG, a computer object is created that represents the cluster name. This is the CNO. A quick search revealed a number of documents talking about how to recover the DAG object from Deleted Items. However, this was not possible for me. Instead, I had to recreate the CNO. Before we go any further, let me say that the smart thing to do is probably break the DAG and recreate it in this scenario . If you have up to date copies of the data in the remote location, then adding the replica back after you recreate DAG should go quickly. However, I figured I'd give the ...

Got a call from a client that reported user searches in OWA and Outlook were failing. This particular client had recently has some severe SAN issues. So, who knows were the problem could be. However, the place to start is with the indexes, and the index on this server showed as healthy. Next, I looked at the services. Microsoft Exchange Search was running properly, but Microsoft Exchange Search Host Controller was stopped. When I started Microsoft Exchange Search Host Controller, it showed as running for a few seconds and then stopped. In the event log, two related events were showing: Event ID: 1026 Source: .NET Runtime Application: hostcontrollerservice.exe Framework Version: v4.0.30319 Description: The process was terminated due to an unhandled exception. Exception Info: Microsoft.Ceres.HostController.Controller.HostControllerException Stack:    at Microsoft.Ceres.HostController.WcfServer.WcfService.StartService()    at System.Threading.ExecutionContext.RunInterna...

One of the things I've always had issues with is finding a good way to estimate disk IOPS when I'm planning out systems. This is particularly important now with Hyper-V hosts and multiple VMs. Today by luck, I saw someone in a forum talking about web page to provide estimated IOPS. I took a look and I love it. This calculator lets you enter in the type of drive, hard drive size, number of disks, read percentage, and write percentage. Based this it gives you estimated IOPS for RAID 5,6,and 10. The tools is here: http://www.thecloudcalculator.com/calculators/disk-raid-and-iops.html