Monthly Activity Report June 2008
Octel Replacement
This month has been more of a refinement of each of the vendor’s proposals, to compare them side by side. Each vendor has different strengths. A new twist that was thrown at the team is a full exchange 2007 implementation of Unified Messaging to handle the voice mail. This new direction from management has led the team to re-engage one of the vendors who withdraw early. This also has brought the comparison of the other three vendors to a halt while we do our due diligence. This impacts the OCS prototype project.
OCS Prototype
I tried to rebuild the OCS server this month; all do to the address book synch issue. Found out a lot about the issues that are incurred when you remove a OCS server from the environment. Also found out that you need to be familiar with the lcscmd.exe command tools. This commandlets let you do everything from install a role, to unprep the forest. When I finally had it totally removed from the environment, I re-installed the standard edition, on an all in one server. Reinstalled the certificates, re-enabled the users. Now the issue with the address book has changed, it is now a 403 error.
Exchange 2007 prototype
Working on the exchange prototype, I installed the forefront software to get anti-virus support, and started a local backup process to backup the database in case of hardware failure. The major change to this project is the new requirements that are surrounded with the integration of OCS and VoIP into this prototype. This means two new servers will need to be installed. These are Unified Messaging role and the Edge server role. These will be done over the next couple of weeks.
VUexchange Quota Increase
We have had movement on this project, we are moving to a 1gb quota on our exchange system. The hardware has been ordered, and has been shipped. We should be getting them in over the next couple of weeks. We will be doing a more stringent design this time with 1 store per lun, and fewer mailboxes. This will give the iops that Exchange 2003 needs to perform well. We will not only be distributing the load over more stores, but we will be adding more machines to the DR site also.
Listsrv replacement
This project has been repeatedly pushed back on the back burner, mostly do to resource contention. Other projects have taken more urgent priority, but we did have some movement. We came to the decision that we want to keep the same name and addresses for the lists, this helps with the design decisions. We also know that we need to have admin training before deployment because of all the new features that will be available to the community.
Mail FrontEnd Replacement (lifecycle)
The replacements have been ordered, and are on site. We will be looking at putting these behind the CSM, with different options depending on what is found out about the vip to vip communications issue. This is a pretty straightforward replacement.