The Microsoft 365 Virtual Marathon took place on May 27-28 2020.
The recording of my session "Exchange Hybrid - What, Why, and How" is available on YouTube.
Browse all recordings of the Microsoft 365 Virtual Marathon here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrtmT6Ir1MIs0ZES7sKMmqA
Enjoy!
These are the results of the Exchange Server Questionnaire from August 2021.
First of all, I want to thank all of you who participated in the questionnaire. The results are pretty interesting. Even though, that the results are not 100% representative they provide a high-level view of the Exchange Organizations, the mail flow configurations, and the future plans regarding hybrid and Exchange Online.
With 55 replies the questionnaire is far from being a comprehensive representation of the Exchange organizations. But the answers provide an idea of the Exchange landscape used by organizations globally.
Exchange Server 2016 is the dominant version currently in use, followed by Exchange Server 2019. The vast majority of 93% runs modern Exchange Server versions. But there are still older and unsupported Exchange Server versions in use. 7% use Exchange Server 2010 and older.
76% of the organizations maintain up to ten Exchange servers. 20% prefer to rely on just one Exchange server. It is interesting that only 2 (not percent) plan to go hybrid or to move to Exchange Online.
The majority of on-premises Exchange organizations are in the 1,000 - 10,000 mailboxes range. Nevertheless, the SMBs with 1 to 1,000 mailboxes adds up to 50% of the Exchange organizations that took part in this questionnaire. There are just a few organizations that host more than 50,000 mailboxes.
There are Exchange organizations that do not use an SMTP-Gateway solution as part of the mail-flow implementation. Thor organizations that do not use a gateway solution run 1 to 10 Exchange servers on-premises. The majority of those have less than 1,000 mailboxes but there are a few that are responsible for more than 1,000 mailboxes. That leaves the question of why an organization prefers to not secure mal-flow with a gateway.
The use of SMTP gateways is a must, as you do not want to expose your domain member servers to the Internet, not even for the SMTP protocol. A majority of 28 answers for other gateways shows, that there are so many products available and that I did not choose valid answer options upfront.
The Other answers include:
65% of the Exchange organizations of this questionnaire already run in a hybrid configuration with Exchange Online. Only 35% are (still) not using a hybrid setup.
Of those who currently do not run a hybrid configuration only 37% plan on implementing Exchange Hybrid or migrate fully to Exchange Online. Staying on-premises is the only option.
The majority of the organizations still running only an on-premises Exchange organization plan on implementing Exchange Hybrid or migrating to Exchange Online by the end of 2021. None of the participating organizations has plans scheduled after 2022.
It is no surprise that Classic Full Hybrid is the most adopted hybrid configuration. And, no surprise either, none of the other classic hybrid options is implemented. The modern hybrid approach is implemented but with lesser.
The reasons for staying with an on-premises Exchange organization vary. the reasons mentioned are:
There are still organizations that choose an on-premises Exchange organization in favor of Exchange Online. I wonder if company policies for reducing the carbon footprint might drive the migration of on-premises data center resources to hosted cloud services.
Exchange Server vNEXT is in scope for 47% of the organizations. When comparing it with the used Exchange Server version currently in use (~50% Exchange Server 2016) it is an indicator that some companies just skip Exchange Server 2019. Some organizations prefer not to follow the full life-cycle of Exchange Server. s7% of those who do not want to implement Exchange Server vNEXT and want to stay on-premises are single server implementations of Exchange.
The product Exchange Server is still widely used in on-premises deployments. The reasons vary from legal and compliance requirements, network bandwidth constraints, and the overall costs for Exchange Online. Exchange Server vNEXT is a must-have for nearly 50% of the organizations participating in this questionnaire. There are still older and unsupported versions in productive use. Why this is the case is unanswered in this questionnaire.
Organizations running a hybrid Exchange configuration primarily use a Classic Full Hybrid configuration. This might be due to an early implementation in those days when nothing else was available, or due to requirements using Microsoft Teams with on-premises mailboxes. The adoption of Modern Hybrid shows that the Hybrid Agent approach helps organizations that cannot implement a Classic Full Hybrid.
I leave the results of this questionnaire to your interpretation and look forward to your replies, either to this blog post or by social media on Twitter and LinkedIn. Please use the hashtag #ExchangeQuest2021.
There will be a new Exchange Server questionnaire in early 2022, covering various implementation scenarios in more detail. If you want to see a specific Exchange topic covered in the 2022 questionnaire, just let me know.
Again, thank you all for participating in this questionnaire.
You are not able to list public folders in a co-existence scenario with Exchange Server 2007 and Exchange Server 2010/2013 using the Exchange 2007 EMS or EMC.
When you try to execute Get-PublicFolder you receive the following error:
Get-PublicFolder " There is no existing PublicFolder that matches the following Identity: '\'. Please make sure that you specified the correct PublicFolder Identity and that you have the necessary permissions to view PublicFolder.
This might happen after you have removed the first Exchange 2007 mailbox server, but not the last Exchange 2007 mailbox server.
Exchange Server 2007 uses the Exchange System Attendant to access the public folder store and fails if the System Attendant discovery in Active Directory does not provide a proper configuration.
KB 2621350 describes the discovery process:
There two annoying things about these steps
The magic System Attendant mailbox has been removed from Exchange 2010. But the System Attendent configuration node does still exist in the Active Directory Configuration Partition for compatibility reasons. The configured attributes of the System Attendant entry vary depending on the version of the installed Exchange Server.
In regards to the public folder issue, we need to focus on the following:
To fix the public folder access issue for Exchange Server 2007, set the homeMDB and homeMTA attributes. Set the Exchange System Attendant attributes to appropriate values for your Exchange servers.
Repeat steps 4 to 8 for each Exchange 2013 server in your environment.
Repeat steps 4 to 13 for each Exchange 2010 server in your environment.
Wait for Active Directory replication and retry to access the public folders using Get-PublicFolder in an Exchange Server 2007 Management Shell.
It might be required to restart the Exchange 2007 Information Store and System Attendant service of the Exchange 2007 server in question
Use an administrative PowerShell
Restart-Service MSExchangeIS Restart-Service MSExchangeSA
I haven’t noticed any issues in production environments so far. If you encounter any issues in your environment, feel free to leave a comment.
Do you need assistance with your Exchange Server setup? You have questions about your Exchange Server infrastructure and going hybrid? You are interested in what Exchange Server 2016 has to offer for your environment?
Contact me at thomas@mcsmemail.de Follow at https://twitter.com/stensitzki
You are interested in OneDrive and OneDrive for Business? You want to know how you can integrate the OneDrive technology into your IT infrastructure securely?
Here is the list of OneDrive related sessions at Microsoft Ignite 2017
See you at Microsoft Ignite!
The Microsoft 365 Virtual Marathon is happening on May 27-28 2020.
This is a free online event, providing you with 36 hours of non-stop sessions from speakers around the globe. You can join every time.
The virtual conference is a joint effort with SPC.
I speak at Microsoft 365 Virtual Marathon about:
The marathon session plan is available here.
Register now.
You might encounter EventId 106 errors on Exchange 2013/2016 servers.
There are some article available on how to fix this issue on servers having a full installationof Exchange Server 2013/2016.
But you might encounter this error on servers having the Exchange 2013/2016 Management Tools installed only as well. In this case the solutions described will not work as expected.
Running the New-PerfCounters cmdlet requires the Microsoft.Exchange.Management.PowerShell.Setup PowerShell snapin. This PowerShell snapin cannot be loaded on servers having the Exchange Management Tools installed.
Add-PsSnapin : The Windows PowerShell snap-in 'Microsoft.Exchange.Management.PowerShell.Setup' is not installed on this computer. At line:1 char:1 + Add-PsSnapin Microsoft.Exchange.Management.PowerShell.Setup + ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ + CategoryInfo : InvalidArgument: (Microsoft.Excha...owerShell.Setup:String) [Add-PSSnapin], PSArgumentEx ception + FullyQualifiedErrorId : AddPSSnapInRead,Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.AddPSSnapinCommand
The required code library is available on servers having the Exchange Management Tools installed. But the library is not added to the registry by default.
Registry of a server running Exchange Management Tools only:
Registry of a fully installed Exchange Server:
Just export the registry key Microsoft.Exchange.Management.PowerShell.Setup from an Exchange Server, fix Exchange file paths (if required) and import the regiytry file on the server having the Exchange Management Tools installed.
Example registry file:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\PowerShell\1\PowerShellSnapIns\Microsoft.Exchange.Management.PowerShell.Setup] "CustomPSSnapInType"="Microsoft.Exchange.Management.PowerShell.SetupPSSnapIn" "ApplicationBase"="D:\\Program Files\\Microsoft\\Exchange Server\\V15\\bin" "AssemblyName"="Microsoft.Exchange.PowerShell.Configuration, Version=15.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" "Description"="Setup Tasks for the Exchange Server" "ModuleName"="D:\\Program Files\\Microsoft\\Exchange Server\\V15\\bin\\Microsoft.Exchange.PowerShell.configuration.dll" "PowerShellVersion"="1.0" "Vendor"="Microsoft" "Version"="15.0.0.0"
After adding the registry key, you can successfully fix the performance counter issue.
Add-PsSnapin Microsoft.Exchange.Management.PowerShell.Setup New-PerfCounters -DefinitionFileName "$exinstall\setup\perf\WorkerTaskFrameworkPerfCounters.xml”
This script reads Exchange Organization data and creates a single Microsoft Word document. A later version will support exporting to an Html file.
The script requires an Exchange Management Shell for Exchange Server 2016 or newer. Older EMS versions are not tested.
A locally installed version of Word is required, as plain Html export is not available, yet.
The default file name is 'Exchange-Org-Report [TIMESTAMP].docx'.
Most of the script requires only Exchange admin read-only access for the Exchange organization. Querying address list information requires a membership in the RBAC role "Address Lists".
The script queries hardware information from the Exchange server systems and requires local administrator access to the computer systems.
# Example 1 # Create a Word report for the local Exchange Organization using # the default values defined on the parameters section of the PowerShell script. .\Get-ExchangeOrganizationReport.ps1 -ViewEntireForest:$true # Example 2 # Create a Microsoft Word report for the local Exchange Organization with # a verbose output to the current PowerShell session. .\Get-ExchangeOrganizationReport.ps1 -Verbose
The script is based on the ADDS_Inventory.ps1 PowerScript by Carl Webster: https://github.com/CarlWebster/ActiveDirectory