Exchange Pre-Deployment Analyzer - nice for catching the gotchas before they getcha

atiensivu@gmail.com (Aaron Tiensivu) — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 20:02:36 -0500

The Exchange Pre-Deployment Analyzer performs an overall topology readiness scan of your environment and provides you with a list of decisions that need to be made before you deploy Exchange Server 2010.

The checks performed by ExPDA are similar to the pre-requisite checks implemented (via Exchange Best Practices Analyzer) in the Exchange 2010 Setup program; in fact ExPDA is based off the Exchange Best Practices Analyzer (ExBPA) engine. However, unlike Exchange 2010 setup, this tool focuses only on overall topology readiness and not the ability to run Exchange 2010 on the local computer. The scan also performs a deep analysis of each existing Exchange 2003/2007 server to verify that it has the necessary updates and configuration in-place to support Exchange 2010.

Another good thing to note that hasn't been documented very well, but I have seen happen a few times already:

If you plan on ever deploying Exchange 2007 portions with Exchange 2010, for instance if you are coming from an Exchange 2003 environment and need a few Exchange 2007 servers due to 3rd party applications not catching up to Exchange 2010 yet, make sure you run the schema update for Exchange 2007 before running the schema update for Exchange 2010.

If you run the Exchange 2010 schema update without ever having any Exchange 2007 schema in place, you can no longer install Exchange 2007. You can go back to AD backups and recover, and I have heard of some unsupported/daring changes to schema versions to force it to work, but for pre-deploying, make sure you take this into account.

A common scenario like this is with Cisco Unity or some archival products. Little by little, they are catching up to Exchange 2010 with support.

Update on Office Communications Server 2007 R2 services stuck at 'Starting' with Server 2008

atiensivu@gmail.com (Aaron Tiensivu) — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 13:37:15 -0500

A few months ago I detailed about a problem with OCS services not starting after a reboot, a general loss of network connectivity during boot and the inability to RDP to those servers once this scenario was triggered.

I bumped into a new article from a Paul Adams at MS that has a handy PowerShell script to add in the workaround for the deadlock problem. It is also noted, just from general banter on the Internet, forums and newsgroups, that the OCS servers involved are typically HP servers that used the SmartStart CD/DVD for installation. It could be that HP agents, drivers or services added to the base OS are causing this issue to flare up. Any OCS servers I have seen, so far, that had this problem were HP servers.

The PowerShell script can be downloaded from here, and it refers to an earlier post by the same author detailing the technical reasons as to why and how it can happen. Ideally, I'm hoping a more generic/official fix for it becomes available from Microsoft at some point for the OS. OCS unfortunately is just a possible trigger for this issue, and the issue comes from the underlying operating system.

Update: In a weird twist of fate, this issue/bug does not exist with Server 2008 R2, but OCS 2007 R2 isn't supported under Server 2008 R2 yet.

Aaron Tiensivu's Blog

Exchange Pre-Deployment Analyzer - nice for catching the gotchas before they getcha

Update on Office Communications Server 2007 R2 services stuck at 'Starting' with Server 2008