About Michel de Rooij

Michel de Rooij, with over 25 years of mixed consulting and automation experience with Exchange and related technologies, is a consultant for Rapid Circle. He assists organizations in their journey to and using Microsoft 365, primarily focusing on Exchange and associated technologies and automating processes using PowerShell or Graph. Michel's authorship of several Exchange books and role in the Office 365 for IT Pros author team are a testament to his knowledge. Besides writing for Practical365.com, he maintains a blog on eightwone.com with supporting scripts on GitHub. Michel has been a Microsoft MVP since 2013.

Exchange 2007 Mailbox Role Calculator 17.3

Posted on May 10, 2010 by Michel de Rooij

Exchange 2007? Yes! With all this Exchange 2010 coverage one might forget about Exchange 2007, but not the Exchange team who updated the Exchange 2007 Mailbox Server Role Storage Requirements Calculator to version 17.3.

The major change in this version compared to version 16.9 (released April, 2009!) is a change in the IOPS calculation. This change is to based on the BlackBerry Enterprise Server for Microsoft Exchange 2007 Performance Benchmarking Guide which simplifies the IOPS calculation in combination with 3rd party software.

The update also contains some bug fixes which are contained in the release notes. You can download the calculator here; usage instructions can be found here.

Mailbox Server Role Storage Requirements Calculator

OCS 2007 R2 – UC Voice Specialization

Posted on May 5, 2010 by Michel de Rooij

In the Exchange UM area, it is good to know an exam is now available for Office Communications Server 2007 R2 in relation to Exchange Server 2007 Unified Messaging and Active Directory. This exam, 74-404 Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 – U.C. Voice Specialization, covers the following topics:

Architecting and designing Microsoft Unified Communications Voice Solutions;
Administering users, clients;
Configuring servers and components, integration (e.g. Exchange UM);
Troubleshooting OCS 2007 R2 deployments.

You should also have experience with network infrastructure components supporting OCS 2007 R2.

Check out the prep guide here, you can register for the exam at Prometric.

Exchange 2010 Protocol Documentation 5.0

Posted on May 4, 2010 by Michel de Rooij

The Exchange 2010 protocol documentation set has been updated to version 5.0. No mentioning of what’s new or updated in this set, but always good to have the latest documents available. You can retrieve the individual documents or the complete set here.

Exchange 2010 Message Tracking error

Posted on May 4, 2010 by Michel de Rooij

When trying the Message Tracking tool from Exchange 2010 I received an authorization dialog (while being logged in with proper credentials). After authorizing myself, I received the following error message:

We’re working with an on-premise Exchange 2010 configuration, so what’s that Outlook Live account message doing here?

Outlook Anywhere runs best on 2008R2

Posted on May 1, 2010 by Michel de Rooij

The Exchange team published a nice article on the different performance characteristics between Windows Server 2008 SP2 and Windows Server 2008 R2 when running Outlook Anywhere against Exchange 2010. It seems Exchange 2010 Client Access Server can handle more than double the amount of clients when bound by CPU resources when running on Windows Server 2008 R2 instead of Windows Server 2008 SP2.

The team also expects big improvements in Exchange Server 2007 SP3, schedulded for 2nd half of 2010, because these improvements are caused by differences in the underlying Operating System, which means it will affect RPC/HTTP performance as well.

Another thing to notice is that above 3.000 users the MHz per Outlook Anywhere user for non-CAS roles, when used in combination with other server roles, are nearly flatline. Where Client Access Server shows a linear graph (steepness depending on Operating System used), Mailbox Servers show an average of 0.6 MHz per user and Hub Transport Servers around 0.25 per user. During testing, LoadGen’s OutlookAnywhere_100 profile was used, formerly known as Heavy User with 20 sends and 80 receives per day.

Be advised tests were performed with Basic Authentication; NTLM drops the number of users by only a small 2%.

You can find the article here.