Our RC0 production deployments are going extremely well so far and our TAP Participants are filing a lot of good solid feedback.  Most of the major changes post RC0, including our tools release were driven by the feedback to received during deployments.

We are quickly nearing the end of our RC0 deployments and we are seeing some dramatic changes in the level of work needed to move a customer from an unknown W2K or WS03 environment.   We’ve reduced the labor to deploy to just over 10% when compared to beta 2.

We have both Physical and Hyper-v installs and a wide range of OEM configurations.  Internally, I get 2 questions a lot;  What’s going good and what needs some work.

Going Good

• Hyper-v is helping us gain efficiencies in testing and makes for an easy installation into production. 
• Exchange SCR is allowing customer’s a way to introduce a highly available solution that’s cost effective.
• Time to Migrate is a key factor in making the EBS transition doable for an IT-Admin.  No admin wants to start an IT project on a Friday and not be able to finish by Monday morning when users arrive and expect everything to just work.    We are seeing the integrated planning tools are not only preventing technical hiccups but they are enabling the IT-Admin to have a clear understanding of what needs to happen before and after the migration which is saving dozens of hours compared to previous deployments.   Many deployments are finishing in a single day and virtually all customers were done within two days. 

Needs some work

• Forefront Security for Exchange (FSE) configuration has a learning curve to it.  It’s flexible and infinitely customizable which lends itself to a lot of questions which we need to do a better job at answering.
• Guidance for using TMG to host an e-commerce site.  We have multiple companies that migrated their company web site and e-commerce site behind the Security Server which took some understanding of certificates and load balancing.  We’ll need to provide more guidance on this as well.

EBS ships Exchange Server standard edition and configures specific features out of the box but EBS is also flexible.  If you want to use additional features that are available in Exchange Server Standard Edition, you may do so as long as you meet the feature requirements in terms of hardware needs or CAL needs.  UM has additional hardware requirements for both.

Exchange Edition and CAL details page on Technet has more information.  The thing to be aware of is that UM requires the purchase of an Exchange Server Enterprise CAL for each user.  These are additive CALs in addition to the EBS CAL and are not managed through the licensing tab in the Admin Console.  

Last week, Steve Rubin started an EBS centric blog on http://ebs.workitsafe.com .  Steve has been running EBS in his production environment for about 6 months and has some really good in-depth knowledge of the product and how to tweak it. 

Robert Adie from Digital IP just blogged an article on configuring Microsoft’s Data Protection Manager (DPM) for EBS  It’s a pretty easy step-by-step which would be good to bookmark.   If this interests you, I would check back on Robert’s blog in a bit, he’s got another couple blog posts in the works on some really cool DPM monitoring.

No, I didn’t stutter, I was being redundant about exchange, and you can too. 

EBS installs Exchange 2007 Standard Sp1 which introduces a new low cost way to ‘cluster’ your exchange servers called Standby Continuous Replication (SCR). 

Here’s the big overview of SCR and below are the simplified steps to making SCR work.   It would be great to have someone try this out and make sure my steps are buttoned up.

In this example, <targetmachinename> refers to the stand-by partner and <sourcemachinename> refers to the machine that holds the active role (the EBS messaging server).

To Enable SCR

1.  On Source, run this command:

Enable-StorageGroupCopy -Identity “First Storage Group” -StandbyMachine <targetmachinename> -ReplayLagTime 0.1:0:0

2. Verify that a storage group exists on the Target server with identical settings to the source server.  Remove database limits (send/recieve size).  Move any files out of the directory (if the folder structure does not already exist, create it).

3.  On Source, run this command:

Update-StorageGroupCopy -Identity “<sourcemachinename>\First StorageGroup” -StandbyMachine <targetmachinename>

Failover Steps

Run this command on the Source server:

1.  Restore-StorageGroupCopy -Identity “<sourcemachinename>\\First Storage Group” -StandbyMachine <targetmachinename> -Force

(note the expected warning messages)

2.  On the Target server (the failover machine), create a storage group and mailbox database with identical settings to match the source server.

3.  Run this command to update the AD information for all users:

Get-Mailbox | Move-Mailbox -ConfigurationOnly -TargetDatabase “<targetmachinename>\First Storage Group\Mailbox Store” -Confirm:$False

3.  Mount the database.

4.  Instruct all users to update their Outlook profiles.

Failback Steps

1.  On the Target server, run this command to update the AD information for all users:

Get-Mailbox | Move-Mailbox -ConfigurationOnly -TargetDatabase “<sourcemachinename>\First Storage Group\Mailbox Store” -Confirm:$False

2.  Remove the database and First Storage Group on the Target Server.  Remove all files from C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\Mailbox\First Storage Group.

3. On the Source Server run this command:

Enable-StorageGroupCopy -Identity “First Storage Group” -StandbyMachine <targetmachinename> -ReplayLagTime 0.1:0:0

4.  Instruct all users to update their Outlook profiles.

A correction on the Requirements for License Compliance article on TechNet was posted this week which adds more clarity on the number of servers that SCE can monitor (updated from 14 to 31 servers).   This doesn’t mean you are blocked from having more than 31 servers, just that SCE won’t monitor them for you.

It’s cool to see the initial barrage of fluffy posts are winding down and the more useful, technical focused posts like the this this one by Nick King on the IP Change Tool.  These are the kind of posts to tuck away in your EBS tool belt.

1. Grab a copy of Windows Server 2008, everyone should have one lying around.
2. Download the updated Hyper-v bits here.
3. Type “start /w ocsetup Microsoft-Hyper-V” and follow the setup
4. Start the Hyper-V Manager (Administrative Tools)
5. Create your 3 virtual machines for MGT, SEC, and MGT
   Note: you need to use the legacy network adapter for the second NIC on the SEC machine.

The detailed instructions are here.  This is an awesome way to test out EBS RC 0 if you don’t have 3 machines available.

I made this a while back for an internal T-shirt design but had a couple requests for the original as a desktop background. 

We only had 2 deployments due to the long US holiday weekend.   The good news in the bumps in the road towards deploying pre-release EBS are getting smaller.   The biggest issue we are seeing during the deployments are Domain replication delays.  The good news is that we learned to handle these gracefully during our Beta 2 deployments and most of the areas of setup contain retry logic and then UI retry options as well.   

DEMO!  Bjorn did a demo of the admin console a few weeks ago and I see its up on TechNet now.  I’ll be honest, I didn’t watch it, let me know if it’s good/bad!

First of all - The new MSN toolbar is the first toolbar I’ve seen that is actually worth installing.  Here’s a link to a video on the toolbar in action and why it’s cool.  But!  Come back and read more on the background of the presenter, Stefan Weitz.

Stefan and I used to be friends, back before he became important over in MSN.  We shared an office back in Windows Server-land (they were next to each other but the walls were thin).  We had our own internal vblog about Vista.  We came up with the grand idea of having the Vista logo tattooed on my body, and then wept together when I got bad reviews for hanging out with Stefan too much and not doing my job. 

I had his back though, I was the guy that told everyone how to pronounce his misspelled name.  Does he ever write me now?  Nope.  Does he ever call for a late night taco-bell run? No.  He’s dead to me now.    Here’s a couple oldies but goodies from the Vista_Rocks vblog days..

Our first Vista_Rocks Episode.. we called it Vista_Roolz but Stefan forgot he named the blog site Vista_Rocks so we had to rename our show after the 1st episode.

Sniff.. A shot from our 30th episode show… look at love in his eyes…

Well, I’m glad he’s going well over there in MSN land, making videos as a one man show.. alone.. without a sidekick.

With our new EBS installations, we are see that Forefront’s "secure by default" settings are tighter than our customer’s are used to seeing.  It’s good to follow the general security best practices whenever possible but the blocking of certain attachments by default can also be a problem.   

If this becomes a problem for user productivity, you can change the settings for specific attachment types from "delete:remove contents" to "skip:detect only".   This is set in the Forefront Server Security Administrator under Filtering->File-> Default Filter set. 

This weekend is going to be an exciting one, we are going to nearly double the number of customers running in production on the RC0 build.  I have customers in Germany, Italy, and some across the US deploying this weekend.

(Disclaimer: Only customers participating in the official Microsoft TAP have license to deploy into production)

Update:

This weekends’ deployments went swimmingly!  We hit a couple known issues with our customers doing Beta 2 upgrades.  When upgrading to new hardware, or in our case a new build, you rerun setup which detects ‘replacement mode’ which pulls down reconfiguration data they we store in AD to make the replacement of a server relatively low touch.   It’s not completely painless though, and its NOT a substitute for doing good backups.  Replacement mode returns your server to the settings you used on the day you installed.  If you’ve added roles, changed DNS entries, DHCP scopes, or other items, you’ll need to reconfigure the machine. 

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/ebs/default.aspx

UA content lives under the Library tab and has the following docs

• Windows Essential Business Server Release Notes
• Product Overview of Windows Essential Business Server
• Getting Started with Windows Essential Business Server
• Windows Essential Business Server Installation
• Guided Configuration and Migration Tasks
• Migrating Active Directory Domain Services Scripts, Roaming Profiles, Redirected Folders, and Home Directories to Windows Essential Business Server
• Migrating DHCP Server Service to Windows Essential Business Server
• Migrating the DNS Role to Windows Essential Business Server
• Migrating Microsoft Exchange Server to Windows Essential Business Server
• Migrating from Windows Small Business Server 2003 to Windows Essential Business Server
• Migrating Windows Server Update Services to Windows Essential Business Server
• Windows Essential Business Server Virtualization
• Windows Essential Business Server Administration
• Windows Essential Business Server Backup and Restore
• User Interface: Windows Essential Business Server

If you missed the Private Beta, be one of the first to download it from the public preview program.

Microsoft released the pricing for EBS Standard and Premium editions this morning.  

Standard Edition $5,472 (U.S.) and additional CALs are $81 (each)
Premium Edition $7,163 (U.S.) and additional CALs are $195 (each)

Here’s the press release! 

I haven’t done any digging about the presenter in this video, his name is Johnny Lee and that’s all I know.  This is a really cool use of the Wii remote.  Everyone should enjoy this.

My old AV subscription is up so I’ve started looking at replacing it with OneCare.   One of the features I didn’t know about , and I don’t hear people talking about, was that with OneCare you can monitor and configure up to three computers with one subscription.  That’s pretty cool.

The SDK for the admin console is now live on MSDN.   The SDK allows developers to extend the functionality of the EBS Admin Console to monitor things like Backups, 3rd party applications, or other Microsoft apps.   Here are the links:

Windows Essential Business Server SDK
Windows Essential Business Server API Reference

Be the first to send a pointer with a  working Add-in created with the SDK and I’ll send you an EBS T-shirt.   It’s easier than you think!

I just wanted to say thanks for the incredible deal!  Steve Bell from Snoqualmie Ridge Music gave me an awesome discount when looking for the 3 guitars we awarded to our TAP partners.   If you are ever out in Snoqualmie you need to stop by the music store or you can check out the Steve Bell Band playing at Finnaghty’s Irish Pub on Thursday nights - 9:00 PST.

Here’s one more shot of the guitars and of a couple photos of the EBS team signing them.