Ok, yes I know – I said that Part 8 was the last in this particular series – but then Microsoft went and released Cumulative Update 1 (CU1) for Exchange 2013 (on April 2nd) which left me feeling that if I did not cover this – then the LAB series was not properly completed. For those of you who are just joining us – you can find links to the previous parts below.
We are now in the final stretch in this series with this being the second to last part of creating a test lab from scratch with Windows Servers 2012 and Exchange 2013. I could in truth perhaps go on forever as there are loads of things that I have not covered. But that is the beauty of a test lab, once you have one that is up and running – it is yours to do with as you choose and that is what I hope that you will all do.
As we are now in Part 7 of this series, let's recap the previous parts.
In Parts 1 and 2, we established our domain design, covered how to provision the Domain Controller for the LAB in Hyper-V and then how to install Windows Server 2012 on the Domain Controller, and we went through the process of installing Active Directory Domain Services on the LAB domain controller using PowerShell.
We last left off in Part 5 which covered the Directory, organization and Exchange preparation-and then went on to install the relevant Exchange servers using the unattended setup feature.
Here in Part 5 of this blog series, I will take you through the process of installing Exchange on the first Client Access and Mailbox Server art-MBXCAS-01 – this includes Active Directory and Organization preparation. I will then round off with explaining how you can then go onto complete the installation on the remaining servers.
In this, Part 4 of this ENow blog series, I will take you through the provisioning of your Exchange Servers in Hyper-V, summarizing the install of Windows Server 2012 Data Centre (as we have covered the step by step install of Windows 2012 in the first part), and finally installing the prerequisites for Exchange 2013 on Windows Servers 2012.
Times change, people change – and as well all know, technology changes as well. The last part of that sentence could not be more true of Windows, Active Directory and Exchange Server recently.
Face it, most Exchange administrators look forward to their weekly patching projects about as much as you and I look forward to our next trip to the dentist. Throw in the extra complications of switching from a non-clustered environment to one that is clustered and the word root canal comes to mind. When working with non-clustered servers one can usually just use WSUS or other patching products which require simple install patches and then a restart or a reboot of the windows box. If this is done in an Exchange environment with clusters however, the same process could end in disaster.
I have been working on a large Exchange 2010 upgrade to Service Pack 2. The Exchange environment that I have been working within works well, but it has not had a lot of TLC in a while, and aside from the upgrade to Service Pack 2 for Exchange, I also needed to perform an upgrade to Service Pack 1 of the Windows 2008 R2 O/S.
When it comes to monitoring application administrators often disagree with system administrators on what to monitor and which thresholds to configure. By nature, system administrators focus on system related counters and objects to monitor. They do not care about application related monitoring as those information's are out of scope of their daily work. Vice versa the same is true for application administrators.