In early 2009 I wrote an post entitled “Exchange 2007 SP1 Moving Mail Queue/Transport Dumpster”. This post is still one of the most frequently viewed posts on my blog so I thought it was time to post an update for Exchange 2010.

In Exchange 2010, the location of the queue database and queue database transaction logs are controlled by the QueueDatabasePath and QueueDatabaseLoggingPath parameters in the EdgeTransport.exe.config application configuration file. This file is located in the C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\V14\Bin directory. To change the location of the queue database and queue database transaction logs, simple open this file in Notepad and locate the following values under

Change these paths to match your requirements and save the file.

Restart the Microsoft Exchange Transport service for these changes to take effect. Once restarted, you should notice that new Mail.que and Trn.chk files are created at the new QueueDatabasePath location and new Trn.log, Trntmp.log, Trnres00001.jrs, Trnres00002.jrs, and Temp.edb files at the new QueueDatabaseLoggingPath location.

There are a few things to note about this process. Firstly, If the target directory doesn't exist, it will be automatically created if the parent directory has the following permissions:

• Network Service: Full Control
• System: Full Control
• Administrators: Full Control

The existing queue database and log files are not moved. New files are created at the new location and existing database files are left at the old location. These old files are no longer used.

If you would like to change the location of the queue database but reuse the existing queue database files, you must move or copy the database files when the Microsoft Exchange Transport service is stopped.

I recently posted about the availability of Exchange 2010 SP1 and thought I would provide some feedback about the installation process.

Before installing SP1 for Exchange 2010, there are several updates and hot fixes that need to be installed first. An important thing to note is that all the Unified Messaging language packs other than US English (en-US) need to be uninstalled before upgrading the Unified Messaging server role. I have split these up then up by server role:

Hub Transport Role Prerequisites:
Microsoft Knowledge Base article 979099
Microsoft Office 2010 Filter Packs

Client Access Role Prerequisites:
Microsoft Knowledge Base article 982867 *requires a restart
Microsoft Knowledge Base article 979744 *requires a restart
Microsoft Knowledge Base article 983440 *requires a restart
Microsoft Knowledge Base article 977020
Knowledge Base article 979099

Mailbox Role Prerequisites:
Microsoft Knowledge Base article 979099
Microsoft Office 2010 Filter Packs

Unified Messaging Role Prerequisites:
Microsoft Unified Communications Managed API, Core Runtime 64-bit
Microsoft Server Speech Platform Runtime 64-bit
Microsoft Knowledge Base article 979099

In April I posted about some of the new features that will be available in Exchange 2010 SP1. The most notable of these is the ability to provision a user’s personal archive to a different mailbox database from their primary mailbox.

Many people have been eagerly awaiting the release of SP1, the good news is that it is now available for download. For more information, see this Exchange Team Blog entry.

To download Exchange 2010 SP1, click here.

I was running through the Exchange 2010 installation process earlier today, during the installation process, everything went really smoothly and I only had “green ticks”!

Once done, I opened the Exchange Management Console and saw the following error:

‘The following error occurred when searching for On-Premises Exchange server:[myservername.local] Processing data from remote server failed with the following error message: The user "domain\username" isn't assigned to any management roles. For more.... It was running "Discover-ExchangeServer - USeWIA $true -SupressError $true’

It was rather confusing at first as I had completed the installation using an admin account that was a member of the Enterprise Admins group. Digging a little deeper, saw the following error in the event log:

After some further digging, I realised what had happened. A colleague of mine did the AD schema preparation using his admin account a few days ago, during that part of the process, the account being used was automatically added to the “Organization Management” AD security group. When I then resumed the installation process with my account, I was not a member of this group. To rectify the problem, I had to manually add my account to the “Organization Management” AD security group.

On the strength of its market position, Microsoft has recently been placed in the Leaders Quadrant in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Secure E-mail Gateway.

The Secure Messaging solution offers customers a hybrid model of in-the-cloud services – Forefront Online Protection for Exchange – and on-premises software – Forefront Protection 2010 for Exchange Server – to provide defence-in-depth protection.

For the complete report, click here

Client network traffic is area that often generates many questions. This area is frequently the subject of discussion when site consolidation is being discussed which also raises the issues of network cost and sizing.

While there is some information available on how to estimate this client network traffic, this is mostly relevant to Exchange 2007 and Outlook 2007. I am not aware of any changes in Exchange 2010 and Outlook 2010 that will change the client network requirements, so the information below is based on this.

The first bit of information you need are user profiles, use the Microsoft Exchange Server Profile Analyzer tool to collect this information if you don’t already have it. You can download the Microsoft Exchange Server Profile Analyzer tool from the links provided at the bottom of this page.

Next we determine how much traffic is generated by each user profile per day. In the table below, all values are in Kilobytes/User/Day. The table separates sending from all other actions which are labelled as aggregate.

Now that we have these values, how do we use them? The last piece of the puzzle is the formula. The following formula can be used to estimate the network traffic (in KB/Sec) required by your Exchange 2010 clients.

Using this formula and the data in the above tables, if we wanted to calculate the network requirements for 2,500 heavy users who use Outlook in Cached Mode it would look something like this:

Network Traffic (KB/Sec) = 677 KB/Sec. To convert this to Mbps:

Network Traffic (Mbps) = 5.4 Mbps.

This formula assumes all these users are in the same time zone, so they do the majority of the work during an 8 hour day.

This information is based on the original post from MS Exchange Team blog.

Download Microsoft Exchange Server Profile Analyzer (32 bit) here

Download Microsoft Exchange Server Profile Analyzer (64 bit) here

In November last year I mentioned that Windows 2008 R2 support for Exchange 2007 was been announced. The Exchange product team yesterday announced the release of Exchange 2007 Service Pack 3 (SP3).

SP3 for Exchange 2007 enables Exchange 2007 to be installed on the Windows Server 2008 R2 version of the operating system as well as Windows 7 support for the Exchange management tools. Other enhancements include advanced protection options against e-mail security threats, such as spam and viruses and tools which help manage internal compliance and high availability.

For more information about Exchange 2007 SP3, see Microsoft TechNet

Download Exchange 2007 SP3 here

The Exchange 2007 and Exchange 2010 Mailbox Server Role Requirements Calculators have recently been updated. If you use either of these tools often, you’ll no doubt appreciate how much effort must to into keeping them updated.

Apart from some bug fixes, there have been a few enhancements too, for the Exchange 2010 calculator, these include:

• Added two new columns to the primary datacenter “Active Database Configuration / DAG” table.  These columns now expose the total number of databases activated in each site after server failure events.  This change was added to expose cross-site database failover events.
• The calculator now includes an option to activation block secondary datacenter mailbox servers that host HA database copies.  This allows you to design a solution where you can activate the secondary datacenter in the event of a primary datacenter failure mode, or choose to activate a copy in the secondary datacenter manually, but prohibits Active Manager from automatically activating a copy in the secondary datacenter. 
• Added support for 32-cores.

For detailed information on these and other enhancements, see the following links:

• Updates to the Exchange 2007 Mailbox Server Role Storage Requirements Calculator
• Updates to the Exchange 2010 Mailbox Server Role Requirements Calculator

To download the revised version, click here for Exchange 2007 and here for Exchange 2010

I was looking around the attachments section of the MS Exchange Team blog earlier trying to find an older version of the Exchange 2010 Mailbox Server Role Requirements Calculator when I came across “E2010+MBX+Role+Calc+Spoof.xlsx” I was curious to see what it was so I downloaded it.. lets just say it was not the version I was looking for, but it made me laugh..

I recently posted about the new features that will be available in Exchange 2010 Service Pack 1 (SP1). Microsoft have announce the availability of Exchange Server 2010 SP1 Beta. This could be very useful for those currently planning their deployment and looking to have a test some of the new features.

The SP1 beta is available to the public and can be downloaded here