Coming up on today's show, we've covered what's coming for end users and
information protection and email
on recent shows. And now with the availability Exchange Server 2016 preview,
we'll do a first look review for admins. We'll take a look at how we have
translated what we've learned from running the cloud at scale
to improvements in performance and reliability for on-premises Exchange,
including updates to conductivity and more.
Microsoft Office
Office Mechanics
I'm joined by Greg Taylor a longtime Exchange veteran now we're
on the verge releasing Exchange Server 2016, what can I expect as an exchange admin?
Well, I i think you can expect to see a lot of the work that we've done Exchange Online
coming to on-prem
features and innovations. You can expect to see a lot of the performance
and administrative benefits the things that we've learned while running a
service coming to on prem too.
We've had to learn a lot running it at the scale that we run Exchange Online right?
We learn every single day, right?
So let's break this down into three key areas and the first one we'll start
with will be simplification.
Okay. So if you take a look at the setup wizard for the new version of
Exchange the something that should jump out and hit you straightway.
I think there's a few too few checkboxes there's a CAS server role missing. There is.
Right! So the CAS server role as a separate installable role,
the check box is gone, but it doesn't mean the CAS role itself is gone.
What we've done is we've simply collocated all the CAS code onto the back
emailbox server
which as it turns out is what we've been really telling our customers to do
since exchange 2010 it's called multi rolling it's multi-role exchange
and really it's come as a result of us
learning this is the really the best way to deploy exchange the roles
happily coexist on the same box and make the best use of the hardware that's
available to them
so we've even gone so far as to to instill in what we call a preferred architecture
so I the better well we've learned that that things fail
right disc failing and hardware fail and so we have to account for that in our plans
and so we've
our prefered architecture is based on how we deploy in office 365
and we've built of best practice guidance into the product itself
but how does getting rid of the CAS role impact
failure well by getting rid of the CAS role we can actually do two things we can both
reduce the server count increase our availability and improve our ability to
sustain failures let me give you an example
let's just take rowing as an example so in a typical email environment you might
have maybe four CAS and ten mailbox servers
fourteen servers in all and let's imagine that the CAS servers are the rowers of the boat
keeping the connections moving along and one of the rowers and we'll
call him Jeremy for no apparent reason other
and because you know it was Jeremy once in a while I don't like to row. he stopped rowing
right and so the other three guys had to pull jeremy's weight
along with everybody else's which seems a little unfair now if we combine the
roles
meaning we give everyone an oar everyone's now a CAS and a mailbox
server
everyone's pulling weight and we can actually reduce the number of people in
the boat
because we can give everybody an oar, we can get rid of the individual CAS
servers we can reduce the server count to 12 or the rower count to 12
everyone's pulling a oar now when Jeremy decides he's just had about enough
and he's going sit back and watch the world go by
when he gives up there are eleven people who can take over the load
so by actually getting rid of the CAS role
we can decrease the number servers increase our availability
and our ability to recover or do well with failure
very cool and i can stop rowing yeah you can stop rowing
and you did several times How does that actually convert though back to an Exchange architecture
well it means we have a simplified architecture which also means simplified
migration as well
so we take migration this is probably easiest version of exchange
people will ever be able to migrate to if they're coming from 2010
as we did with 2013 exchange you typically move the namespace across
to the new version of Exchange and the new version allows proxy back to the old
and there will really be no change
from from exchange for for Exchange 2016 in that regard but here's where it's kind of
cool
if you already got exchange 2013 you can actually
add an Exchange 2016 server to the environment
there's no need to move the namespace to the new version exchange we will proxy
up to the new version of Exchange from the 2013 Exchange Server
and you have an incredibly easy way to migrate
all we've got do is get the mail boxes to exchange 2016 Why don't you show us what looks like
in terms of the new exchange admin console and how to really do those
migrations
sure so let's have a look at the Exchange admin center now if you're an exchange
2013
this is going to look really familiar we have all the same settings down the left hand
side for managing servers
and mailboxes and mail flow and all that if you're coming from 2010
it will look a bit new but very straightforward simple to use
we have a mailboxes and our meeting room resources and so on
but the area that you'll be hitting for the migration of mailboxes is simply this migration
tab
and we have a nice easy wizard that allows you to move users to a different
mailbox
and all you do as you can imagine is simply pick the users that you want to migrate
and we'll give our
migration batch a name here and we can even choose specific databases that we
want to send mailboxes to
however if we don't exchange will actually take care of that
find a mailbox database to send the mail off to out and take care of balancing them
and then we can either delay the start of the migration
or just let it go ahead and be notified when it's finish. now
generally there's no impact to users there at all we're doing online move so it's really
simple
really smooth and fast. Right, that's really showing how we've simplified not only
architecture but also
the migration into the new version of exchange but what's the second area of focus
that we've done in terms of Exchange server 2016
well the second area is reliability so what we've really done is we've spent a
lot of time
analyzing the data we've obtained by running hundreds of thousands of servers
with millions mailboxes
and we've used that data to become experts in prediction
of server failure allowing us to see patterns where ordinarily wouldn't have
seen them
in the past and then to code into our servers
some kind of self-healing capabilities so they can
detect and resolve failures themselves Right cause it's not really realistic to be able
to send out somebody a technician to one of those hundreds of thousands
Exchange Servers if something goes wrong
so we've actually got some great tools here that we can use to get more
predictive about how
and when failures are going to happen and be able to prevent that Yeah, you bet I
mean
you know the only thing you can really do with hundreds of
thousands of servers is automation you're entirely dependent upon it
about upon letting the system figure out when this an issue
and hopefully resolve against but we have built an enormous a set of tools
where
we can for example as you can see here we can now look at the overall
availability across
all of our state we can have a look at individual DAG availablitiy
and you might see red numbers and think that's bad but when you see
how many servers and how many DAGs we have running
you realize it's a drop in the ocean We can at a moments glance just look at the
network
bandwidth utilization and spot network issues and we even get feedback
from our clients as well telling us
how a client responds, the client responsiveness in
reporting that back to us as well we can see if there are issues with individual
clients
And all this predictive data that we're getting is really the segway into
how we can actually perform
self-healing and really get the servers to be able to detect when something
is going to go wrong right? well that's right, we introduce this is a concept
we called it managed availability in exchange 2013
and the the concept and typically the examples we used to use in 2013 was
an OWA server or CAS server providing OWA access to clients
where when the service became unresponsive but based on latency or
some kind of measure that we had
the server could self correct and it would try a series of actions maybe it
would
restart the OWA application pool and if that didn't solve the problem it might do a IS
reset and it that didn't solve the problem it might even restart the server
right. So we shipped a lot of that technology but we've been improving and
honing it overtime
so baking really that logic in of an experience exchange technician right
into Exchange server code
we've had manage availability for a while now what's new in 2016?
well there's one interesting one I'd highlight and it's a very rare condition
but it's pretty impactful
so we've built something called database diversions detection in to
exchange 2016
and this is a this is code that allows us to detect
logical corruption so logical corruption might occur because of a disc controller
failure
hardware failure maybe a memory issue and so
what we do is on the the various copies the database that we have we calculate
check sums for every single page
on each database copy and we ship them using the log shipping process that we
have
within the database availability group today from active to passive
the passive nodes compare the check sums of their own copy of the database with that
from the active
and detected divergence has occurred and if divergence has occurred that means is a
logical corruption
either in the active or passive and we'll let the admin know this happened
hopefully before the CEO calls them and tells them there is a problem with their mailbox
and them the admin can take some action to resolve that. okay so beyond what we're doing in from a
simplification reliability standpoint what else are we doing?
well as related to the to the same kind of concept to
log shipping and data bases within a DAG, one thing that we've done
is we've made a change that we've asked for several versions to
make which is
how we create our indexes. so on our
on a passive copy of the database we typically always created our search
index
from the active copy in many cases across the WAN. So hold on this is
something a lot of people have been asking for for many releases
of exchange now are actually creating the search index against the passive copy
of the data. we are.
okay great. which is great, we're lowering TCO
we hope there'll be a lot of happy Admins from this change that we're making, yes.
we've also done a lot of improvements speaking of indexing in terms of serach, right?
well we have and and again it's about learning from the service and we learned
from the service by looking at
search patterns that are over maybe six hundred million queries I think we looked
at the patterns, we learned
interesting things about search for example. we learned that people
typically search for just one word
five or six characters commonly they are misspelled words
so we actually written code to optimize for those short brief searches
and for commonly misspelled words so we're actually
better at searching for that and we also learned that people typically
iterate on the same search over and over and one in eight searches get even no results at
all.
and we learned that speed is important we've done a ton of work making
improvements to the speed and responsiveness of search queries
and the the best part I think of all this is this is not just OWA,
outlook 2016 even in cache mode is now searching against exchange so it can take
advantage of all this work we've done. This is one of those really great things in terms
being able to see the telemetry
cause in the old days, in the completely on-premisies days, not a lot of people are
turning on watson reports or customer experience improvement programs
now we can optimize search based on that production data. Completely. yeah.
but beyond search and indexing we're also doing a lot in terms of addressing
connectivity
to the service because I know a lot of people will call and say why is my outlook
client
not connecting to Exchange Server. well that's that's been a problem a
we've seen and suffered with for years and we introduced in exchange
2013 service pack 1
the MAPI over HTTP protocol and
we did that in order to help with these connections and reconnection speeds and we
and also is also a protocol that allows us to debug and troubleshoot activity
problems much easier than we used to have with Outlook anyway
now we've continually improved this and we are now seeing
dramatic improvements in connection and reconnection times with
Outlook to exchange and so this is not just Exchange 2016 these same improvements are
back in 2013 and we would strongly encourage all our customers
if they're not ready considered switching the MAPI over HTTP
that they should. It's the new default in 2016 and that's how confident we are about it.
I know a lot of people are probably wondering what are the requirements looking like from a
hardware perspective
on exchange, cause I know we've done a lot of work in terms of optimizing that for
low-cost maybe existing hardware that people already have right? well
definitely running a service at scale means you have to optimize for the
hardware you have and try to bring the maximum performance out every single
server you have otherwise it becomes a
not very you know financially viable option right? so we have
we have seriously optimized exchange for running on cheap commodity hardware, two
socket, no more than twenty four core hardware
cheap local storage and all of these
all these investments we've made in the service to
help us run a more cost-effective service
show up in on-prem exchange. so much so that our
eventually updated our guidance for on-prem exchange very recently so that we
recommending no more than two sockets and 24 cores in any Exchange Server
the secret of a successful exchange deployments are about scaling
out not scaling up and that's the biggest message
right. It's the biggest thing we've learned. Great so a lot really good under the hood improvements
Exchange Server 2016 coming for admins out there
but, we're doing a lot of other things to right? Oh we're doing a lot of other things there's
document collaboration improvement, SharePoint integration
data loss prevention, improve mobility experience there is a whole
ton of stuff that we are doing in exchange as well.
And of coarse the Exchange Server 2016 beta is now available to allow you to get an early
look at some of these capabilities
first hand
and if you want see more of what's coming for the email experience for users
check out some of our past shows on Outlook. Greg, when will exchange
server 2016 be available? well when it's ready and that will be later this year
Right, so keep watching Office Mechanics for more updates that's about all the time we
have for today. thanks for watching and goodbye for now
Office Mechanics
Office.com/Mechanics