May 2008 Monthly Activity Report
Exchange 2007
Migrated the vm’s off of the DEV cluster and onto the new ESX server (behemoth). This was in the thought that the pop-ups experienced by Scott Hogan and myself were due to resource constraints. Even though the servers have moved, there is a considerable fewer pop-ups but they have not disappeared altogether as we would have hoped.
Office Communications Server
The issue of automatic groups has caused me issues this month. The beta tool I was using now crashes after a MS patch. Not sure if the tool is being updated, but have not seen a OTC tool yet on the market. Have been researching the method that OCS integrates with Outlook, to try and see if we can get conversation history without moving to the exchange 2007 server.
Octel Replacement
This project is now down to the proposing of a solution to management, We have decided on the one we will suggest, and have pros and cons for all of the vendors to help explain how we came to the outcome that we came to. This should be proposed in the next couple of weeks.
ProofPoint Lifecycle
The new p845 appliances were put into production, as mailgate02, and mailgate03. This was done after hours, and consisted of taking the old hardware out of the cluster and bringing up the new hardware as the old server names. This allowed us to get the benefit of the new hardware in production before the upgrade to 5.03. The next step is to raise the ratio of mail distribution to a 3:1 ratio favoring the new boxes to see if they perform as expected.
IPhone Beta Testing
At first receiving the IPhone for testing I was pretty sure I was going to hate it, but I have been pretty surprised. The biggest complaint is the ability to dial via voice command; it is hard to find a contact and drive at the same time, the touch screen doesn’t like the bumpy interstate systems. The best feature that I like is the ability to actually read email on the device. Depending on the settings that are set for font size, it is very easy to read. If they get the horizontal screen working it will be even easier to read.
Exchange 2003 Performance redistribution
This month we brought down the mailstores on mailbe16, consolidated them down to one mailstore per storage group. This brings the databases in line with one database per disk lun. This should improve the performance on the read/write times. During this migration, we came across a couple issues, the main one being that I do not have access to move certain accounts. This proved to be frustrating when it came time to bring down the old mailstores.
Over all this month was a lot of changes, most of them pretty significant. The impact to the user base was considerable, but the some of the maintenance had been put off for over a year due to Email Oneness., while the other changes were due to lifecycle replacement.