Tag Archives: ForeFront

Forefront TMG 2010 Capacity Planning Tool

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Version 1.0 of the ForeFront Threat Management Gateway2010 Capacity Planning Tool has been released.

This tool is to help you with planning and sizing (or verifying) your TMG 2010 configuration, and gives a calculation on the hardware configuration, number of concurrent users and bandwidth requirements using hardware, concurrent users or bandwith as starting point.

For its calculations the tool uses parameters like number of concurrent users and features you want to enable on the TMG. Regarding features you can make your own selection or use presets, e.g. “Mail Protection” for using TMG as an anti-spam/anti-malware e-mail gateway. The calculator has support for load-balancing and virtualization.

You can download the Forefront TMG 2010 capacity planning tool here.

Forefront Protection 2010 Capacity Planning Tool

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The folks at Microsoft released version 1.0 of the Forefront Protection 2010 for Exchange Server capacity planning tool. This tool is to aid you in planning and sizing your FPE configuration.

The tool starts with the question if you want to evaluate your current setup or are planning for a new environment. After that you need to select the required architecture, Standard for small to medium sized organizations or Enterprise for large organizations (e.g. combined Exchange Server roles). You can define the required level of protection (i.e. number of engines on Edge, Hub Transport and Mailbox Server roles) and see the predicted effect on the hardware requirements. After completing the questionnaire you receive the recommended hardware configuration.

You can also see the predicted performance for different setups, i.e. virtual or non-virtual setup, Windows Server 2003 or Windows Server 2008 R2 as well as Exchange level (2007 or 2010).

You can download the FPE capacity planning tool here.

Forefront Security for Exchange SP2 RU1

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With all these “2010″ information you could forget that most customers are still running earlier versions. For people running ForeFront Security for Exchange SP2, Rollup 1 was released yesterday. Besides a new parameter (called feature) for enabling of disabling FSE on a cluster node, RU1 contains no less than 30 hotfixes. For a list of fixes, consult the related knowledgebase article here. You can download FSE SP2 RU1 after submitting a hotfix request here.

ForeFront UAG Exchange Publishing Guide

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The ForeFront Unified Access Gateway (UAG) team published an update on ForeFront UAG content series. One of these guides is the Forefront UAG Content Series- Exchange Services Publishing Solution Guide, which can be downloaded here.

For those interested, the other ForeFront UAG guides are:

Forefront Protection for Exchange Server survey

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The ForeFront Server Protection team is looking for feedback on the Forefront Protection for Exchange Server:

Although we just shipped Forefront Protection for Exchange Server 2010, we are already hard at work planning the next release. To that end, we are very interested in hearing feedback on your experience deploying and managing your current antimalware solution for Exchange. Please take 5-10 minutes to answer the survey questions. This type of feedback directly impacts future product decisions and we would appreciate your valuable input.

To contribute you can enter the survey here.

Microsoft Forefront Protection 2010 for Exchange Server Best Practices Analyzer

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Today Microsoft released the (take a deep breath) Microsoft Forefront Protection 2010 for Exchange Server Best Practices Analyzer (v11.0), or FPE 2010 BPA for short. The FPE 2010 BPA examines servers running ForeFront Protection 2010 for Exchange Server and checks the system configuration as well as the product configuration. Any settings or combination of settings that do not conform to FPE 2010 best practices are reported, enabling administrators to easily identify and address possible issues.

I assume everbody knows how these BPAs work, but in case you don’t proceed as follows:

  1. Download the FPE 2010 BPA from this location;
  2. Install the ForeFront Server Protection Best Practices Analyzer (FPBPA) on a server containing ForeFront Security 2010 for Exchange Server;
  3. Use the default settings and have FPBPA retrieve updates from the internet when required;
  4. Start FPBPA. It will check for online updates;
  5. Click Select options for a new scan;
  6. Enter a scan label, i.e. Initial FPBPA Scan, and click Start Scanning. FPBPA will now scan your ForeFront environment;
  7. When Scanning Completed click View a report of this Best Practices scan.

As you can see from the first issue, I still need to install the RTM :)   The second issue is about a non-configured critical error notification, i.e.  it has no no e-mail recipient specified. The other two issues are about possible misconfiguration of the number of scan processes (as FPE 2010 BPA states, the recommended setting is twice the number of CPUs here).