Just ran across this error after a Microsoft DPM 2007 > DPM 2010 upgrade that was backing up an Exchange 2003 server…

Data consistency verification check failed for LOGS of Storage group First Storage Group on <Servername>. (ID 30146 Details: Unknown error (0xfffffc01) (0xFFFFFC01))

It was working perfectly before the upgrade and after I had no luck post clearing out the log files.

Turns out that the guidance from the DPM UI that states you must copy the ese.dll and eseutil.exe from the Exchange server isn’t strictly true…

DPM 2010 is 64 bit only – so the 32bit tools from the Exchange 2003 installation won’t work any more – you must use a 64bit copy (from either Exchange 2007 or Exchange 2010) for this to work now. If you don’t have a copy of these files – then download the trials and extract the files from there.

I’ll shortly be replaceing the current ‘external news’ menu item with a new spangly community….

This will give the users that have the desire the ability to have their own profile like facebook and create groups, events, share images and chat with other members etc…

I’ll also be implementing a new events management component to replace the exisitng ‘difficult to register’ one.

Hope you guys will find it useful.

I’d like to thank Mike, Toby and all at EMC consulting for sponsoring the September meeting of the MMMUG.

I’ve just uploaded the two documents from the meeting – The first is the meeting slides from the presentation by Mike Kiersey – on Exchange virtualisation which is full of juicy nuggets even if you couldn’t attend and the second being EMCs whitepaper on a detailed review of Business Continuity for Exchange 2010 enabled by EMC Unified Storage, Cisco Unified Computing.

Links are below…

MMMUG/EMC  September meeting slides

EMC Whitepaper – Business Continuity for Exchange 2010

Just thought I’d share a couple gotchas that I stumbled across on a recent Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2010 migration.

1. Blackberry Enterprise Server needs to be at least 5.0 SP1 – Once this is updated and so long as everything else is  configured correctly (besadmin permissions etc) the BES should be able to access both servers mid migration.

2. Forms based authentication MUST be enabled on the existing 2003 server to enable the OWA url to redirect correctly. Out of the box – Exchange 2010 likes you to setup legacy.<domain name>.com published to the Internet as it is a redirect – not a proxy. This means both the existing and new exchange servers must be accessible from the internet during the migration to ensure all users (both migrated and ‘to be migrated’ users have access to to webmail).

3. I saw the issue where the move procedure returns an error and a stub mailbox is left on the old Exchange Server – although the deleted mailbox retention should remove this at the next interval – having to change the retention time to enable you to remove the existing server isn’t really an option so if you see this on test mailbox migrations (ensure you test a mailbox for a user that has elevated permissions) install KB940012 on the existing Exchange 2003 server to alleviate the issue.

4. If your user account is a member of any of the protected Windows 2008 R2 security groups (Domain admins, Schema Admins etc…) then active sync won’t work. Seems harsh but Microsoft say that your day to day user account shouldn’t have elevated permissions and you should use ‘Run As’ to perform administrative tasks. So you have 2 options if you’re having this problem;

1. Remove yourself from the protected groups

2. Select the ‘allow inheritable permissions’ on the advanced page of the security tab of your AD user account and then follow this guide to stop sdprop removing permissions.

Just a couple of things to think about if you’re planning an Exchange 2003 to 2010 (or 2007) migration.

Just a high level overview of a procedure I used a couple of weeks ago to overcome database corruption at a business that had a single server and didn’t want a huge amount of downtime.

They were running Exchange 2007 on windows 2003 x64 and their mailbox store was touching 75Gb so we had them archive and delete a large amount of data from their mailboxes. This meant there was 30Gb of white space in the database which was great, but there were latency issues which meant we had to defrag the database.

When we kicked the defrag off – it bombed out after about 30 seconds reporting database corruption.

In this situation – an intrusive database fix using eseutil could be a bit of a nightmare as;

1. You never know how long it’s going to take
2. The possible corruption may be huge
3. You should run it twice to ensure the corruption has been fixed
4. The impact on the end users is hard to determine and could be massive

We called it a night and decided to come back the following day with a spare server. We installed the server into the existing organization as you would with any migration and confirmed mail flow and all services were working on the new server.

After we had enabled circular logging (temporarily and for obvious reasons) and when the time suited the client – we gracefully moved all mailboxes to the new server – there was a little downtime, but only while the users mailboxes were being moved – client access services were unaffected as they were running Exchange 2007 so any client access server can access any mailbox store (Exchange 2003 would need a little more attention).

Once the user mailboxes were moved we removed the corrupt mailbox store and created a new one.

Once we knew the database was healthy we moved all the mailboxes back and bingo – we had fixed the corruption, removed the white space and defragmented the database without running a database fix which should always be avoided wherever possible.

We chose this method primarliy because the downtime was quantifiable – we could communicate with the users how long they’d be down which we couldn’t do with an database fix.

This was just a heads up of the way we completed the procedure… not a technical article you’ll need to do more research into exactly how to complete the procedure – post in the exchange forum if you have any questions or would like to know more…

My name is Tony Brown and I’ve put myself forward to Nathan (the godfather of the MMMUG) with a view to help out in any way I can.

I’ve been using and installing Exchange Server since v5.0  and have a good grasp of all related technologies – I’ve got a truck load of MCP’s under my belt along with the experience you need to put that knowledge into practice.

I’m going to be the lead on the website’s development so if anyone has any idea’s – then please head over to the Exchange forum and let us know what you’re thinking.

I’m going to be blogging about all aspects of Exchange setup and configuration, from desgin to implementation so check back soon for information that you (hopefully) won’t find anywhere else!