Hosted Exchange Providers

[HungryHippos]

Exchange 2013 hasn't had the best start to life in general...

No co-existence with 2010 until CU1 arrived (something like 6 months after the "launch" of 2013). Poor or no (!) testing of security patches (TechNet)



Good luck to anyone running a business which depends on Exchange!

PS. I don't know if MS have providers patch hosted Exchange in the same way as on-premise, but either way, MS have pushed some total garbage out as patches of late.

I can confirm that MS patches Exchange Hosters in the same way as on-premise.

What annoys me the most about MS at the moment is that they are very anti-competitive, Office 365 gets all the attention and all the updates before anyone else. They don't really seem to care about anything except Office 365 anymore, which is a shame as Exchange Hosters and On-Premise pay them licensing for doing very little per Mailbox/User.

They also seem to have a special version of Exchange 2013 which Hosters don't get, that allows them to split the roles out like you got with Exchange 2010 (good for expanding different things independently, a lot of Exchange 2013 is CPU bound so limits expansion to the number of Mailbox servers you have).

I also feel like I have to wrestle a lot more with Exchange 2013 to get it to do what I want. For example:

1. When adding Databases, you MUST restart the Information Store. This requires outage/downtime. This was not the case with Exchange 2010!

2. When you put servers into Exchange Maintenance Mode, you have to run multiple commands where before it was a simple one line script. They made this process a lot more convoluted.

3. When updating versions of Exchange or adding Databases/copies, I always have to run about restarting Indexing services to force the Indexers to rescan the Database copies to get them healthy again.

4. Sometimes App Pools (various) just crash for no good reason. Happens less in CU2 but not completely resolved.

5. The self-healing health manager seems to be a bit messy. I dug into some of the checks it does and they all seem very arbitrary, for example if you have Databases on the C: in a Mount Points folder, it fails a check for the DB drive having less than 100GB free for the C: drive. I've had to apply a bunch of Monitoring Overrides to get SCOM to quieten down a little.

I daresay there are other things, just these are the ones from the top of my head.

 

[Deleted member 138126]

1. When adding Databases, you MUST restart the Information Store. This requires outage/downtime. This was not the case with Exchange 2010!

How is this possible?! If true, that is a massive step backwards. What is the justification, do you know?

 

[HungryHippos]

How is this possible?! If true, that is a massive step backwards. What is the justification, do you know?

Yes it's to do with the Database Cache Memory. A certain figure is allocated for each Database by the Store, when you create a new Database it needs to re-allocate memory for it which it can't do on the fly, and by the time you restart the IS you may as well just restart the whole Server.

Best to keep your DB creation/removal as minimal as possible, get as much as you can done within one maintenance window.

 

[Deleted member 138126]

Yes it's to do with the Database Cache Memory. A certain figure is allocated for each Database by the Store, when you create a new Database it needs to re-allocate memory for it which it can't do on the fly, and by the time you restart the IS you may as well just restart the whole Server.

Best to keep your DB creation/removal as minimal as possible, get as much as you can done within one maintenance window.

I can't believe it, I am stunned. I'm going to have a go at my Exchange guru friend about this.

 

[Mikey]

Well ever since I've been moved to the new Exchange 2013 platform it's been slow on OWA, Outlook not connecting. Add the "BT" outage last Sunday, time to move on.

I know Customer relations have offered a tiny reduction in monthly cost, but still more ££