Why LDAP policies can bother you

End of last year I run into this issue along with another one related to LSA protection and code integrity check (which will be covered in another post).

This issue might be rarely, but you can run into even your environment is not large and even you followed the Preferred Architecture (PA) for Exchange and used the calculator. If you have this issue, it can have serious and unforeseen consequences and impact your setup.

If you want to read more about: I wrote about this on a guest post on the ENow blog.

Exchange Online migration and TooManyBadItemsPermanetException

I’m sure that a lot of people have seen this issue before when migrating to Exchange Online:

The BadItemLimit was exceeded and therefore the move request failed.

A while a go Ben Winzenz wrote an excellent post on the You Had Me At EHLO blog, where he mentioned that there was a change in Exchange Online and now failed mapping of SIDs will count towards the BadItemLimit.

So far so good, but how do we solve such issues when increasing of bad item limit is not an option and you have to migrate approx. 130.000 mailboxes?

Update 28.08.2018

Due to some issues while removing invalid permissions with Exchange Cmdlets, I enhanced the script. Read more about it here…

Update 03.01.2020

Joshua Bines has also a great script with reporting capabilities(thanks for sharing!). You can find his on GitHub:

https://github.com/JBines/Get-RecipientPermissions.ps1

Introduction

Office 365 Exchange Hybrid: When Autodiscover and legacy PF impacting Outlook performance

I spent last weeks quite some time with Outlook performance issues in an Exchange Hybrid scenario. In addition this is not a normal Hybrid as here multiple Exchange Organizations from different AD Forests without any Trust Relationships are involved.

Thus I’m not talking about the scenario described in TechNet Multi-forest hybrid deployment scenario. It looks more like this:

Outlook Cached Mode and TCP connections

This post was lingering around for a long time, but the last weeks showed me it’s time.

Actually I came across this topic last year just before Ignite. But somehow this topic felt into oblivion. To make it short:

It’s all about the number of TCP connections an Outlook Client establishes in a Cached Mode. Especially when it comes to shared mailbox or delegate scenarios.

What is Outlook Cached Mode?

Read more about it here. But what you really want to avoid it something like this:

Fiddler the allrounder for troubleshooting

In my Ignite session with fellow MVP Andrew Higginbotham Troubleshooting Complex Exchange operational issues, I mentioned Fiddler as a perfect tool for troubleshooting also Exchange ActiveSync clients as well as Exchange servers itself.

After this session a lot of people reached out to me and asked me about how to do this. So I thought a write-up would be a good idea.

Exchange performance:HP NUMA BIOS settings

I was just made aware of a HP specific setting which has a huge impact on performance. But before you start panic, have a look at the conditions:

• you’re running Proliant Gen9 Servers
• these servers are equipped with Intel Xeon E5 2600v3 and higher processors
• you have the default setting for NUMA Group Size Optimization

If you’re not matching these conditions, you can stop reading and relax. If not….you might want to continue reading.

Update 28.08.2017

As mentioned before it affects not only Exchange. Credit goes to Nicholas, who highlighted the following KB for Lync/SfB:

Bug Check 0x133 DPC_WATCHDOG_VIOLATION error on Lync/Skype for Business Edge server

Update 01.08.2017

Another PFE made me aware that the script HealthChecker.ps1 is checking the setting by comparing the values EnvProcessorCount and NumberOfLogicalProcessors

Good example

Bad example

Modern Attachments behind a web proxy

With Exchange 2016 a huge improvement in regards of document collaboration with OneDrive for Business was introduced when you have a Hybrid configured.

You can read more about it here:

• Configure document collaboration with OneDrive for Business and Exchange 2016 on-premises
• Modern Attachments for Exchange 2016 Hybrid Customers

When I introduced Exchange 2016, I was more than happy to configure and make this feature available to my end-users. But after I run through the prerequisites and steps, I wasn’t able to get the option in OWA and with Outlook I received the following error:

The same happened when I was using Outlook for Mac. As different clients, protocols and servers where affected, I assumed a general issue and started troubleshooting.

Update 07.02.2018: Meanwhile a KB article was released

Modern Attachment feature doesn’t work when web proxy used in Exchange Server 2016

Get-IISStats: Updated version available

Over the last months a lot of changes needed to be addressed. The script was intended to extract data from the IIS logs. With PowerShell in combination with LogParser it did a great job. But different versions of Exchange, changed infrastructure and multiple versions of Exchange ActiveSync protocol demanded an update to fulfill these needs.

The latest version focused on code improvement and added support for the new version of Exchange ActiveSync protocol v16.1 .

Get-ExchangeDiagnosticInfo: Deep dive

In a previous post here, I wrote about a few basic commands, which are useful to quickly gather information about transport component of an Exchange server.

In this post I want to give you a deep dive about it and how you can explore what the CmdLet can do for you as it evolves in each Exchange version and can be very useful.

Exchange 2016 and FileMappingSize

Lately I installed my first DAG with Exchange 2016 CU3 in productive environment. In the beginning it went really smoothly. But after all databases have been created, I realized that databases got bounced around the nodes and a lot of errors in the Event Log like these:

Log Name:      Application
Source:        MSExchangeIS
Date:          12/14/2016 9:53:07 AM
Event ID:      1001
Task Category: General
Level:         Error
Keywords:      Classic
User:          N/A
Computer:      FABEX01.fabrikam.local
Description:
Microsoft Exchange Server Information Store has encountered an internal logic error. Internal error text is (ProcessId perf counter does not match actual process id.) with a call stack of (   at Microsoft.Exchange.Server.Storage.Common.ErrorHelper.AssertRetail(Boolean assertCondition, String message)
at Microsoft.Exchange.Server.Storage.Common.Globals.AssertRetail(Boolean assertCondition, String message)
at

The store worker processes kept constantly crashing.