Page 3 - Contents; Chapter 1; Introduction; Chapter 2; Capacity and Availability Management
iii Contents Chapter 1 Introduction 1 Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 How to Use This Guide . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3Efficiency, Continuity, and Security...
Page 4 - Chapter 3; Change and Configuration Management; Chapter 4; Enterprise Monitoring
Contents iv Tuning Active Director y Integration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30Tuning Outlook Web Access (OWA) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 Hardware Upgrades . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ...
Page 5 - Chapter 5; Protection; Chapter 6; Support
Contents v Chapter 5 Protection 71 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71 Chapter Star t Point . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71Chapter End Point . . ...
Page 7 - Content Lead; Key Authors
vii Content Lead Andrew Mason – Microsoft Prescriptive Architecture Group Key Authors Paul Slater – ContentMasterKent Sarff – Microsoft Consulting ServicesSasha Frljanic – Microsoft Consulting Services Reviewers Jon LeCroy – Microsoft ITGThomas Applegate – Microsoft ITGErik Ashby – Microsoft Exchang...
Page 11 - How to Use This Guide
Chapter 1: Introduction 3 It is not essential to be a MOF expert to understand and use this guide, but a good under-standing of MOF principles will assist you in managing and maintaining a reliable, avail-able, and stable operations environment. If you wish to learn more about MOF and how it can ass...
Page 12 - Efficiency
Microsoft Exchange 2000 Operations Guide — Version 1.0 4 Figure 1.2 Exchange 2000 Operations divided into groups Performance TuningExchange System PoliciesCapacity Management Efficiency Continuity Security UPSRecovery TestingAvailability MonitoringAvailablity Management Storage Management Hardware U...
Page 13 - Chapter Outlines
Chapter 1: Introduction 5 This guide covers all three areas described above. Although the chapters are structuredaccording to Microsoft operations principles, you will find information about all of theseareas in the guide. Chapter Outlines This guide consists of the following chapters, each of which...
Page 14 - Planning and Deployment
Microsoft Exchange 2000 Operations Guide — Version 1.0 6 ◆ Availability monitoring ◆ Proactive monitoring ◆ Availability prediction Chapter 5 – Protection To protect your Exchange environment from failure, you need good protection fromintrusion and attack, along with a documented and tested disaster...
Page 15 - Service Level Agreements; Features
Chapter 1: Introduction 7 to be created at this stage, because waiting until the system is live could be too late. Theoperations team should be using the planning phase (and in some cases the deploymentphase) to test procedures that are defined, such as those for disaster recovery. Planning and depl...
Page 16 - Performance; Recovery
Microsoft Exchange 2000 Operations Guide — Version 1.0 8 Performance Here you show the performance you would expect from each of the previously mentionedfeatures. This would include some or all of the following: ◆ Service availability (this may be given across all services or on a service-by-service...
Page 17 - Summary; Related Topics
Chapter 1: Introduction 9 Summary This chapter has introduced you to this guide and summarized the other chapters in it.It has also provided brief descriptions of both service level agreements and planning anddeployment. Now that you understand the organization of the guide, you can decidewhether to...
Page 20 - Chapter Sections; Capacity Management
Microsoft Exchange 2000 Operations — Version 1.0 12 Chapter Sections This chapter covers the following procedures: ◆ Capacity management ◆ Availability management ◆ Performance tuning ◆ Hardware upgrades After reading this chapter, you will be familiar with the requirements for capacity andavailabil...
Page 23 - Availability Management; Service Hours
Chapter 2: Capacity and Availability Management 15 To deal with this problem, you should continually monitor available disk space on yourservers running Exchange. If the RAID array containing the stores gets close to half full, analert should be sent indicating the problem, and that the Exchange Dat...
Page 24 - Service Availability; Minimizing System Failures
Microsoft Exchange 2000 Operations — Version 1.0 16 Of course, just because you have allowed for a certain amount of downtime per server permonth, this does not mean that you have to use it, and in most cases you will not. On theother hand, just because you haven’t performed offline maintenance one ...
Page 25 - Decreasing Single Points of Failure
Chapter 2: Capacity and Availability Management 17 Decreasing Single Points of Failure You can maintain availability in Exchange 2000, even in the event of a failure, providedyou ensure that it is not a single point of failure. In some areas, such as database corrup-tion, it is not possible to elimi...
Page 26 - Increasing the Reliability of Exchange 2000
Microsoft Exchange 2000 Operations — Version 1.0 18 the disk subsystem becomes a single point of failure once that hot spare is invoked. Ifyou have robust systems in place, you must ensure that any failures are resolved promptly.Make sure that you have notification and monitoring procedures in place...
Page 27 - Minimizing System Recovery Time; Performance Tuning
Chapter 2: Capacity and Availability Management 19 One area where you can guard against problems is database errors. Database errors can becaused by a number of factors, but they are typically hardware related. You will be able tominimize these by doing the following: ◆ Ensure that your hardware is ...
Page 28 - Making Changes to the Registry
Microsoft Exchange 2000 Operations — Version 1.0 20 While obtaining the best performance from your Exchange 2000 computers is always animportant goal, it is crucial to be cautious in your tuning changes. You should track allalterations in case you make a change that inadvertently reduces performance...
Page 29 - No Performance Optimizer
Chapter 2: Capacity and Availability Management 21 and “Edit Registry Information” Help topics in Regedt32.exe. Note that you should backup the registry before you edit it. If you are running the Microsoft Windows NT® orMicrosoft Windows® 2000 operating system, you should also update your emergencyr...
Page 30 - Tuning Considerations; Upgrading from Exchange 5.5 to Exchange 2000
Microsoft Exchange 2000 Operations — Version 1.0 22 Tuning Considerations The efficiency and capacity of Microsoft Exchange 2000 depends on the administrator’schoices of server and storage hardware, and on the installation’s topology. These should bechosen based on expected types and levels of usage...
Page 31 - Tuning SMTP Transport; Mailroot Directory Location
Chapter 2: Capacity and Availability Management 23 servers. These areas are beyond the scope of the Exchange 2000 Operations Guide. If youneed to tune your Exchange 2000 MTA, consult the deployment section of the Exchange2000 Server Upgrade Series, available on the following Web site: http://www.mic...
Page 32 - SMTP File Handles
Microsoft Exchange 2000 Operations — Version 1.0 24 8. Navigate to the following path: Configuration Container\ CN=Configuration,CN=Services, CN=Microsoft Exchange, CN=<organization>,CN=Administrative Groups, CN=<admin group>, CN=Servers, CN=<server>,CN=Protocols, CN=SMTP, CN=1. 9....
Page 34 - Store and ESE Tuning; Online Store Maintenance
Microsoft Exchange 2000 Operations — Version 1.0 26 reduced to 10,000, SMTP will refuse any inbound mail after the queue reaches 10,000messages. You may need to alter the following registry entry if the Exchange 2000 computer isrunning out of memory because the number of incoming messages is too gre...
Page 35 - Online Backups
Chapter 2: Capacity and Availability Management 27 scenario, the online maintenance occurs during the night (by default) when very few usersare logged on, so the load on the Active Directory servers should be very low. The extradomain controller load created by online maintenance should not be a pro...
Page 36 - Choosing the Correct Maintenance Strategy
Microsoft Exchange 2000 Operations — Version 1.0 28 It is critical that the backup time for any database within a storage group does not conflictwith the maintenance times of any database within the same storage group. If it does, backupwill terminate the online defragmentation portion of the store ...
Page 37 - Store-Database Cache Size
Chapter 2: Capacity and Availability Management 29 Extensible Storage Engine (ESE) Heaps When Exchange 2000 is installed on servers with more than four processors, you mightnotice high virtual memory usage by the Extensible Storage Engine (ESE) multi-heap. Thiscan lead to performance problems, espec...
Page 39 - Log Buffers; Tuning Active Directory Integration
Chapter 2: Capacity and Availability Management 31 7. Click Set after changing the Edit Attribute field for the attribute and then click OK. 8. Close the ADSI Edit tool by closing the MMC console application. 9. Wait for Active Directory replication to replicate this new value throughout the forest(...
Page 43 - Hardware Upgrades
Chapter 2: Capacity and Availability Management 35 Hardware Upgrades Exactly when hardware upgrades are required depends on the results of your capacityplanning. If you plan your capacity well, you will be able to predict when hardware upgradesare required, which is particularly important when there...
Page 46 - Prerequisites; Change Management; Defining Change Type
Microsoft Exchange 2000 Operations Guide — Version 1.0 38 Prerequisites By now you have defined a set of acceptable service level agreements for your Exchangeenvironment and you understand the concepts of availability management that werediscussed in Chapter 2, “Capacity and Availability Management....
Page 47 - Step 1 – Request for Change Is Submitted to Change Manager
Chapter 3: Change and Configuration Management 39 Change can be broadly categorized into four groups, each requiring its own style ofmanagement. The groups are: ◆ Major change. Significantly impacts the IT environment, and requires major resourcesto plan, build, and implement (for example, upgrading...
Page 48 - Step 2 – Change Manager Assesses the RFC
Microsoft Exchange 2000 Operations Guide — Version 1.0 40 Step 2 – Change Manager Assesses the RFC The change manager receives the RFC and records it in the change management log. Themanager examines the RFC, checking to see if it is a complete and practical proposal. If inany way the proposal is de...
Page 49 - Step 5 – Change Is Passed to the Change Owner
Chapter 3: Change and Configuration Management 41 change. In this case, expertise with Exchange and hardware is very important. In fact, thechange manager may decide to appoint an OEM vendor representative to the changeadvisory board. The change advisory board determines the hardware upgrade schedul...
Page 50 - Minor and Standard Changes
Microsoft Exchange 2000 Operations Guide — Version 1.0 42 Figure 3.1 The Change Management Process Minor and Standard Changes The advantage of minor and standard changes is that individuals with less authority can bepre-assigned the permissions to perform them. This is perfectly fine, because the ch...
Page 51 - Security
Chapter 3: Change and Configuration Management 43 the user in the appropriate Windows 2000 groups and create the Exchange 2000 mailboxwith the appropriate settings for that user. Over time, your team will build a set of custom tools that are used frequently to administerstandard changes. Those tools...
Page 52 - Configuration Management
Microsoft Exchange 2000 Operations Guide — Version 1.0 44 schedule information, and work orders. It is the responsibility of the change initiator,change manager, and change owner to ensure that you have appropriate documentationabout the change. Change management should also work closely with config...
Page 53 - Tools for Configuration Management
Chapter 3: Change and Configuration Management 45 Another example is hardware tracking. Imagine that your hardware vendor releases a newfirmware version for the standard network adapter that you use in some or all of yourservers. If you track firmware versions of each network adapter, and the relati...
Page 55 - Configuration Management Relationships
Chapter 3: Change and Configuration Management 47 Configuration Management Relationships Many of the main benefits of configuration management come from the relationshipsbetween the configuration items that are defined in the structure of the configurationmanagement database. Getting these relations...
Page 57 - Defining Configuration Items; Maintaining the Configuration Management Database
Chapter 3: Change and Configuration Management 49 Defining Configuration Items When defining configuration items you need to decide how deeply you want to go inrecording the them. Too many configuration items makes the relationships too difficult tomanage and costs start to increase. There are stron...
Page 59 - Exchange System Policies; Administering System Policies
Chapter 3: Change and Configuration Management 51 Security Security is a vital component of configuration management. The only way in which youcan maintain control over your configuration and ensure that the configuration manage-ment database is accurate is by ensuring that only authorized personnel...
Page 62 - Performance Monitoring; System Monitor
Microsoft Exchange 2000 Operations Guide — Version 1.0 54 Performance Monitoring Performance Monitoring is the monitoring of existing system(s) to ensure that optimumuse is made of the hardware resources, and that agreed performance levels can be main-tained. Performance Monitoring allows you to det...
Page 63 - Exchange 2000 Objects and Counters to Monitor
Chapter 4: Enterprise Monitoring 55 Exchange 2000 Objects and Counters to Monitor Every Exchange 2000 performance object has at least one counter associated with it. Forinformation on particular counters, in Performance Monitor, click Select Counters fromList, select a counter, and then click Explai...
Page 65 - Information Store Counters; SMTP Server
Chapter 4: Enterprise Monitoring 57 Information Store Counters MSExchangeIS For this object, monitor the following counters: ◆ User Count – This displays the number of people currently using the Information Store(not the number of connections). It is impossible to properly judge the performance of a...
Page 66 - MSExchangeMTA and MSExchangeMTAConnections
Microsoft Exchange 2000 Operations Guide — Version 1.0 58 rarely greater than zero. A reading of greater than zero shows that the server is receiv-ing more messages than it can process. If this number increases steadily over time, thereis probably a problem with the Exchange Store you are trying to ...
Page 67 - MSExchangeIM Virtual Servers; Windows 2000 Objects and Counters to Monitor
Chapter 4: Enterprise Monitoring 59 MSExchangeIM Virtual Servers If you are running Instant Messaging in your organization, you may find that theorganization quickly becomes as reliant on Instant Messaging as it is on e-mail. It istherefore important that you monitor Instant Messaging Counters. You ...
Page 70 - Centralized Monitoring
Microsoft Exchange 2000 Operations Guide — Version 1.0 62 Centralized Monitoring In an enterprise environment, you can reduce operations costs dramatically if you cancapture performance data in a central location. Doing so moves the load of monitoringfrom the monitored server to the centralized serv...
Page 71 - Event Monitoring; Event Viewer
Chapter 4: Enterprise Monitoring 63 Event Monitoring When Exchange 2000 Server is running smoothly, event monitoring does not seem espe-cially important. However, when performance is poor, you will quickly see the benefits ofevent monitoring. Event Viewer is a useful source of information about Exch...
Page 72 - Log Files
Microsoft Exchange 2000 Operations Guide — Version 1.0 64 One of the difficulties of viewing event logs is knowing which events are more worrisomethan others. In some cases, Exchange 2000 Server issues Stop events, which record tempo-rary issues that resolve themselves in the course of time. In othe...
Page 73 - Availability Monitoring; Monitoring and Status Tool; Adding Services to the Default Configuration
Chapter 4: Enterprise Monitoring 65 NetIQ AppManager contains useful features to help with Event monitoring. It detectswhether any servers have written critical error messages to the Event Log and automatesresponses to actions, including issuing SNMP traps. Availability Monitoring To meet your avail...
Page 74 - Monitoring Resources
Microsoft Exchange 2000 Operations Guide — Version 1.0 66 have other Exchange services that are vital to the user experience in your environment (forexample, if Instant Messaging is used heavily in your organization). Monitoring Resources You can monitor other resources using the Monitoring and Stat...
Page 75 - Status; Disabling Server Monitoring; Centralized Availability Monitoring
Chapter 4: Enterprise Monitoring 67 Status The details pane of the Status container allows you to view the status of servers andconnectors in your organization. The Status container shows the following server states: ◆ Available – This shows that the server is online and all the main services are ru...
Page 76 - Client Monitoring
Microsoft Exchange 2000 Operations Guide — Version 1.0 68 Client Monitoring While it is very important to monitor the availability and performance of servers runningExchange, domain controllers, and the network, none of these directly cover one criticalarea – the experience of the Exchange end user....
Page 79 - Chapter Start Point
5 Protection Introduction By its very nature, Exchange 2000 Server has a public face. You will be offering e-mail andother functionality to a large number of users. In many cases those users will not only beable to collaborate with other users in their own company, but also with others across theInt...
Page 80 - Protection Against Hacking
Microsoft Exchange 2000 Operations Guide — Version 1.0 72 Chapter Sections This chapter covers the following procedures: ◆ Protection against hacking ◆ Anti-virus measures ◆ Disaster recovery procedures ◆ Recovery testing ◆ Backup ◆ Restore Protection Against Hacking Whenever you consider protecting...
Page 81 - Firewall Operations
Chapter 5: Protection 73 To keep your Exchange Server computers secure, look carefully at group memberships.One of the most critical groups you should monitor is the Exchange Domain ServersGroup. Any user or computer account that is a member of the Exchange Domain Serversaccount has full control of ...
Page 82 - Maintaining Firewall Availability
Microsoft Exchange 2000 Operations Guide — Version 1.0 74 operating. In a multi-firewall environment, the firewalls are generally manufactured by anumber of different vendors, which can make management issues even more complex. The responsibilities of the operations department in these circumstances...
Page 83 - Monitoring Against Hacker Intrusion
Chapter 5: Protection 75 Source Destination Service Protocol and port Screened Subnet Internal/Private Network HTTP TCP 80 Screened Subnet Internal/Private Network RPC EP Mapper TCP 135 Screened Subnet Internal/Private Network KERBEROS TCP UDP 88 Screened Subnet Internal/Private Network LDAP TCP 389...
Page 84 - Staying Current
Microsoft Exchange 2000 Operations Guide — Version 1.0 76 You are likely to be protecting against viruses at several levels. These may include at thefirewall level, outside or at the SMTP Gateway, at each Exchange Server and at the clientlevel. You should of course bear in mind that non e-mail bound...
Page 85 - Dealing With Virus Infection
Chapter 5: Protection 77 In some cases you will receive a warning about a new virus before an update to your anti-virus software is proposed. The first thing to do here is to verify that the virus is genuine.Many problems are in fact caused by hoax virus notifications. Ensure that the virus is agenu...
Page 86 - Blocking Attachments at the Client
Microsoft Exchange 2000 Operations Guide — Version 1.0 78 Blocking Attachments at the Client One of the best ways of protecting against virus infection is to block particular attach-ments from running. Attachments may be blocked at the server level, but they may also beblocked at the client. You can...
Page 88 - Disaster Recovery Procedures; Backing Up
Microsoft Exchange 2000 Operations Guide — Version 1.0 80 Disaster Recovery Procedures Chapter 2, “Capacity and Availability Management,” examined ways of minimizingsystem failures. As mentioned there, to reduce overall downtime you need to look at howfrequently a system is down, alongside how long ...
Page 90 - Offline Backup
Microsoft Exchange 2000 Operations Guide — Version 1.0 82 The metabase changes frequently during routine Exchange operations, so you should backup your metabase as often as you back up your server running Exchange. Successfulbackup of the metabase will prevent you from having to reconfigure settings...
Page 91 - Restoring; Recovering Individual Messages
Chapter 5: Protection 83 Restoring To ensure a swift restore of Exchange 2000, you will need the following items: ◆ Available Hardware. ◆ Microsoft Windows 2000 Server and Exchange 2000 Server software, plus any appro-priate service packs and hot fixes. ◆ Any other required Microsoft or third-party ...
Page 92 - Recovering Exchange Stores and Storage Groups
Microsoft Exchange 2000 Operations Guide — Version 1.0 84 Once again, you would be advised to define your SLAs so that mailbox recovery is notpossible outside the period of time you specified in the Administrator program. Whilemailbox recovery is possible outside of this time span, dependent upon yo...
Page 93 - Full Exchange Server Recovery
Chapter 5: Protection 85 Full Exchange Server Recovery In any area where a server running Exchange is liable to fail, you will need hardware toperform the restore. Lack of redundant hardware can often be the most significant factorin downtime resulting from a full server failure. If you standardize ...
Page 94 - Alternate Server Recovery; Recovery Testing
Microsoft Exchange 2000 Operations Guide — Version 1.0 86 However, this does not mean that an Active Directory failure makes Exchange 2000completely unusable. You should be able to recover an Exchange Organization, pro-vided you have access to information about the Exchange configuration, including ...
Page 98 - Providing Support for End Users; Reducing End User Support Costs
Microsoft Exchange 2000 Operations Guide — Version 1.0 90 Providing Support for End Users It is likely that almost everyone in your organization will be an e-mail user. All of thoseusers may require support at some point in time. In most environments, it is critical tomaintain service as much as pos...
Page 100 - Problem Reporting
Microsoft Exchange 2000 Operations Guide — Version 1.0 92 number of protocols supported. For example, you may choose to only support OWA as themeans of access outside the firewall. Not all of these problems are necessarily client issues. End users will be directly affected byproblems at the server l...
Page 102 - Exchange Problem Management
Microsoft Exchange 2000 Operations Guide — Version 1.0 94 If individual users have problems, it is generally inappropriate to post update informationto the intranet. In those circumstances, you should contact the user directly. If the user’se-mail client is unavailable, call or send an instant messa...
Page 105 - Glossary
Glossary Access Control Entry – ACE An object such as a user or group that is present on an Access Control List. Access Control List – ACL A description of security permissions applied to an object, property, or resource. An ACLnormally includes membership (ACEs) and the associated actions or manipu...
