Ron Steurer

Well, so another month has gone by and actually didn’t get a chance to write last month. We have accomplished quite a bit on the Exchang project the past 6 weeks. We have started our bulk migrations of the VUMC users and are currently moving around a 1000 a week with hopes of uping that to 1500+ a week. We currently have 4 new mb servers that we have built along with tweaking and smoothing out our scripts and build documents that go with it. We find out that we need to hard code this regkey on each mailbox server

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\MSExchangeSA\Parameters\TCP/IP NSPI Port

with port 50920 otherwise when users go to create an Outlook profile and manually type in it hangs and times out.

We are currently have ~ 7330 users on EX07 as of today and 18609 on EX03. I expect to very close to the half way point this time next month if we continue to move 1000+ or even 1500+ users a week. 

See you next month and Happy Halloween!!

Wow, what a fast month again. Our team saw some ups and downs within our environment. A lot of Exchange servers being put and pulled out of the environment for VM issues, physical issues and OS issues. I think we installed Exchange on probably 10 boxes and rotated out of production and back in just as many. We are currently in finished with the migration Exchange users but are catching our breath and doing some clean up on the backend before we really roll up our sleeves and begin to move the then some 22,000 VUMC mailboxes. In preparation of this move for VUMC, we had an issue when attempting to allow ITS-HCWNEM40 to be setup for 2003 public folders. Guy had to work with Microsoft one weekend day and in a nutshell, we are in a holding pattern to determine our best line of action to if any, add public folders within the 2007 environment.

A plethora of Magic and Service tickets still abound our queue as it seems when we resolve 2, 3 more come in.  They can be issues small in nature or great in size with visibility. We as a team do our best to complete them in a efficient and timely manner. One in particular which comes to mind is Kathryn Foote, Matt Halls assistant would accept a meeting request on his behalf then after a few minutes it would go tentative. We found a tracking option to uncheck on Matt’s client which corrected this but believe its caused by a MS patch that came out in June. I’m going to contact MS and determine if this is the correct behavior when both clients have this option checked. Hmm, I don’t think so but I’ll give MS the benefit of the doubt. sigh…….

So as August comes to an end, I have settled in much more than just 30 days ago. We even had a after work bowling get together with a few guys which was fun. Antwan is quite the bowler though. I’ll have to sharpen my skills before I bowl against him again.

See you next month   :-]

P.S. Can’t wait for the NFL season to start in just a couple of weeks.

July was definitely learning month: Learning the environment, infrastructure, protocols, people and politics. I have at least to say we successfully migrated all Law users while dynamically modifying our script to move mailboxes. Everytime we modify the script(s) we decreased the time and increased the number of mailboxes moved. It’s still a work in progress but feel we are close in reaching out target goal of speed and efficiency as we have begun to also move the some 3000 VU mailboxes.

I also built two new Exchange servers and used the build template to follow and tweak. Note to self!! Make sure Windows UAC is disabled when trying to install Exchange otherwise you will be chasing a wild goose.

Here is a link from one of my favorite reference/knowledge sites Petri. http://www.petri.co.il/disable_uac_in_windows_vista.htm

Still tweaking the Mail flow Visio diagram which is a work in progress but a great learning tool that forces me to learn the messaging environment at a much better level.

I also went on call for the first time which I am still learning the in’s/out’s of the piece of the email team.

Overall it was a great first and quick month here. I have lots to learn but have some great co-workers around me to pick their brain and ask questions.

See you next month,

:-]

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!