Introduction


Exchange servers don't require a huge amount of ongoing babysitting, but it is important to know how to perform some server-level maintenance tasks. Actually, most Exchange maintenance tasks involve databases or storage groups, as that's where the high-value data are stored. The recipes in this chapter break down into two basic areas: monitoring and controlling your Exchange servers at the server level, and setting properties on the Exchange organization object. These properties affect all of the servers in your organization. For the most part, you'll use the Exchange System Manager (ESM) tool to make these changes.

ESM is an MMC-based application that layers a large number of Exchange-specific customizations on top of the basic MMC interface paradigm: a tree view on the left that shows one or more nodes (some with child nodes, some without), plus a large pane on the right that displays subordinate nodes or settings for whatever's selected in the left pane. This doesn't sound like too much to master; the real trick with ESM is learning which settings are in which property pages, because there certainly are a lot of those around. It's also important to understand the versions of ESM and what they can do:

  • The Exchange 2000 ESM is what we think of as the "classic" version. It can be used to manage Exchange 5.5 and Exchange 2000 servers, and to view (but not change) the properties of Exchange Server 2003 machines. However, you only get the functionality that was available when Exchange 2000 shipped. That means that mailbox moves are single-threaded; there's no Mailbox Recovery Center, and the queue viewing and management tools are feature-poor.

  • The Exchange Server 2003 RTM version of ESM mostly looks just like the Exchange 2000 version; the important differences are all under the hood. The biggest change for most administrators is that the Exchange Task Wizard's mailbox moving code is multithreaded, so you can move up to four mailboxes concurrently. This makes mailbox moves much, much faster under most circumstances, although you have to perform an Exchange Server 2003 forestprep in your Exchange 2000 organization in order to make this work. In addition, there are improvements in how monitoring and status information is displayed, a new, better-organized tool for viewing message tracking data, the Mailbox Recovery Center (described in more detail in Recipe 11.10), and a vastly improved interface for viewing and controlling message queues. Exchange Server 2003's ESM also includes the Internet Mail Wizard for quickly setting up SMTP mail interchange with Internet hosts. These new features come with a tradeoff: you can't configure Exchange 2000-only features like the KMS, the Exchange Instant Messaging service, or the old-school MSMail, cc:Mail, and Schedule+ connectors.

  • Exchange Server 2003 SP1 adds a few new features to ESM, including the ability to set up RPC-over-HTTP connections with a simple property sheet instead of the morass of registry keys and fiddling required with the RTM version.

You can use all three of these versions in the same Exchange organization, whether or not you actually have the corresponding version of Exchange installed. However, Microsoft doesn't support installing the Exchange 2000 version of ESM on an Exchange Server 2003 server (not that you'd want to anyway). One thing they do support is installing and using ESM from other Windows 2000, Windows Server 2003, and Windows XP computers in the same forest. Note that you can only run ESM from a computer in the same forest as your Exchange servers. If you want to run it on a laptop, home computer, or other machine that's not a member of a domain in your Exchange forest, you'll probably need to use Terminal Services to remotely log on to a machine in the forest.



Exchange Server Cookbook
Exchange Server Cookbook: For Exchange Server 2003 and Exchange 2000 Server
ISBN: 0596007175
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 235

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