Symetrik Domino Consulting

The more I’ve been reading about Exchange 2007 administration, the more it sounds like alot more work (not to mention alot more servers).

I read this blog entry at the Tech Republic Blogs titled “Scripting the remove and disable mailbox attributes in Exchange 2007”

Here’s an excerpt:

The two scenarios can be scripted out in large amounts with normal batch files. A common way to make these scripts is a concatenated formula within an Excel spreadsheet that requires only the username or e-mail address to be added to create the command, which would be copied and pasted to save or run in the Exchange Management Shell.

I do happen to be good with a command line interface and actually enjoy it from time to time as shown in this previous post on my blog about writing a Domino server maintenance script that performs several tasks and a reboot every week in what I call “Preventative Maintenance.”

….but having to use the command line, or run a batch file, and intensifying the process by using Excel just to disable or delete a user sounds asinine.

I’ve just upgraded some of our Domino severs from 6.5.6 FP3 HF63 to 7.0.3 FP1 HF517. I put alot of testing into it so it has been relatively smooth.

I did find that I had some template replication issues, so I went around, deleted every template in our environment except on one isolated 7.0.3 server. I then signed all the templates on that server and used the admin client to create replicas on our hub servers which had also been upgraded to 7.

I had real problems with the following templates: activity.ntf, admin4.ntf, certlog.ntf, dba4.ntf, and webadmin.ntf.

admin4.ntf, certlog.ntf, and dba4.ntf had a bad ACL set, so I couldn’t sign any of them, and the LocalDomainServers group couldn’t replicate. I fixed that and signed the templates and replicated them.

One of them was set to temporarily disable replication, and I fixed that.

All that was left was activity.ntf and webamin.ntf. For some reason, activity.ntf wouldn’t initialize. I had to try several times before I got it working through adminp.

I could never get webadmin.ntf to replicate because the error message that shows up when the temporarily disable replication tickbox is checked kept appearing, but the template did not in fact have that checked.

I starting looking through DDM today, and found that one template and one database generate errors when design runs.

Design error for database ‘help\readme.nsf’: Invalid collection data was detected.
Design error for database ‘dominoblog.ntf’: Invalid collection data was detected.

I looked in R7 admin help, Notes 6 and 7 discussion forums, and google, and “Invalid collection data was detected” appears nowhere.

These are all small things, but wouldn’t expect finicky templates from 7.0.3.

We are considering virtualizing some of our Domino clusters. We don’t want to install Domino partition servers on the same box, but we want to virtual some of the clusters so that we have virtual machines on different physical hardware that are virtualized along with other virtual server (maybe non Domino).

We want to use VMWare.

What is the experience with VMWare and running production Domino mail servers? These servers will be connecting to a SAN for disk storage.

We previously had tried to virtual Domino at our host provider Atos Origin, but in the end had problems with it so we went with a white box solution (1 physical server for 1 Domino server). That was over a year ago though, so the problems with doing so may not exist anymore.

Looking forward to your experience and stories regarding the issue.

Last week, I met with Microsoft regarding one of our sites that is not currently on Domino. We will call this Site A. We built 2 clustered Domino servers for that site in September of last year and put it on hold because we didn’t want to go through the labor/cost of migrating 300 existing Outlook clients to Lotus Notes if we were only going to migrate them back to Outlook a few months later.

We’ve been waiting on how the contract negotiations with Microsoft will go and then determine through the Microsoft design, planning, and scheduling to see how long it will take.

The problem is that this site relies on a 3rd party host provider. We have no guarantee of backups, no resolve if the company goes bankrupt, no compliancy capturing, and then the added cost of paying for the external service.

Their existing mail setup is Outlook 2003 or 2007 accessing POP3 mailboxes with local .pst files. The meeting was to determine how we should proceed in the next few weeks because the management at that site is now very concerned several months after we had planned on bringing this service in-house that data is not secure and protected.
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This meeting took place on January 23rd, 2009 and I’m just getting to editing it so that it can be published.

These are meeting notes and general factoids that I jotted down. This was taken from a planning meeting with the Microsoft Senior Technical Account Manager who is handling the project for us and the Senior technical Engineer who is planning the environment.

The Microsoft Senior Technical Account Manager told me that quote:
Exchange has 60% of the email market worldwide.
20% lotus notes
10% Linux or “something”

The overall Active directory presentation and design was pretty good. It makes sense and the MS guys seemed knowledgeable and understood what we wanted and I felt like when they said they could accomodate what we want that they meant it.

Currently, we have 2 clustered Domino mail servers in 17 sites.
3 Blackberry servers in hub locations.
1 Pair of clustered hub servers (outbound SMTP gateways)
1 pair of clustered inbound SMTP gateway servers.
TOTAL: 41 Domino servers

MS Exchange design:
10 sites will have (2 MBX (CCR) + 2 CAS/HUB + 2 ISA)
4 hub2 sites will have (2 MBX (CCR) + 2 CAS/HUB + 2 ISA + 2 Edge)
TOTAL: 92 Exchange and server that Exchange relies on (Email only)
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