Exchange 2007

Microsoft Virtualization and Licensing Announcements

Few days ago Microsoft announced some significant changes to its licensing and support policies for applications in hardware virtualization environments. There are two key parts of the announcement worth highlighting for Exchange customers:

1. Microsoft now supports Exchange Server 2007 SP1 running Hyper-V or hypervisors validated under the Microsoft Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP).
2. Microsoft is waiving its 90-day license reassignment policy to enable customers who virtualize Exchange to move their licenses between servers within a data farm as often as necessary.

As part of the updated support policies, we have published an article called Microsoft Support Policies and Recommendations for Exchange Servers in Hardware Virtualization Environments. This article includes Microsoft’s support policy and recommendations for running Exchange Server 2003 in a Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 environment. It replaces Microsoft Knowledge Base article 320220, which previously detailed the policy and recommendations for this environment. In addition, this article includes Microsoft’s support policy and Microsoft’s recommendations for running Exchange Server 2007 SP1 in a hardware virtualization environment.

Microsoft Support Policies and Recommendations for Exchange Servers in Hardware Virtualization Environments is a must-read for anyone considering a virtualized Exchange environment.

“Outlook Anywhere” and problems with IPv6 in Windows Server 2008

It’s not a secret, that IPv6 has some “issues”. When I’ve been in Seattle, at last MVP summit, a lot of IT professionals said that, and all of them recommended to disable IPv6 on Windows 2008 or / and Vista machines. Kevin Reeuwijk from “Innovative Technology Weblog” posted a very good article; Outlook Anywhere is ‘broken’ on IPv6 in Windows Server 2008.
So, if you run Exchange 2007 on Windows Server 2008 and want to use Outlook Anywhere (aka RPC over HTTP) you probably get a problem. It would not work if the RPC-over-HTTP Proxy and the Exchange Mailbox installed on the same Windows 2008 Server.
To make the long story short, simply unselect IPv6 from the properties of your NIC AND (it’s very important) make a changes to the HOSTS file. Simply open up your hosts file and make the following changes:

• Comment out the line “:::1    localhost”
• Add the following two lines:

         <IPv4 address>    <hostname of the computer>
<IPv4 address>    <FQDN of the computer>

This will resolve all queries for your computer’s name to its IPv4 address, effectively disabling the use of IPv6 for self-communication. You can confirm that this works by doing a “telnet localhost 6004″.

Outlook Web Access New Mail Notification for Exchange 2007, Soon

Dean, developer of well know “Outlook Web Access New Mail Notification” for Exchange 2003, recently announced that he started work on an Exchange 2007 version of OWANotify.