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:
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. |