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Deciding whether to implement a new service pack is a common part of an administrator's life. The trick is to know what the service pack includes and to understand how it will affect your Exchange Server environment. As expected, Exchange 2000 Server Service Pack 2 (SP2) provides a rollup of hotfixes and patches. But this service pack also aims to rev up reliability. How? Through significant new functionality for systems management tools such as DSAccess and Message Tracking, support for Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM), enhancements to Microsoft Outlook Web Access (OWA), better memory management for Exchange 2000 clusters, and several smaller changes that pack a cumulative punch.
DSAccess Mark Two
Exchange 2000's use of Active Directory (AD) rather than the Exchange Directory Service (DS) is the most fundamental architectural difference between Exchange 2000 and earlier Exchange versions. Exchange 2000 components (e.g., the Routing Engine service) use DSAccess to access domain controllers (DCs) for server and organization data, to access Global Catalog (GC) servers for mailbox data, and to find, access, and cache directory information from AD. As such, DSAccess is a crucial part of Exchange 2000 and probably the component that comes under the most strain in a production environment. And correct DC and GC placement is key to successful Exchange 2000 deployments. (For information about DSAccess and proper DC and GC placement, see "Learning from Exchange 2000 Deployments," November 2001, InstantDoc ID 22553; and Kieran McCorry, "MAPI Client Directory Access in Exchange 2000," http://www.exchangeadmin.com, InstantDoc ID 21458.)
In response to customers' experience during Exchange 2000's first year of real-world deployments, Microsoft has built in additional robustness and resilience to DSAccess and has added a graphical way to access information about DC and GC access. (SP2 makes obsolete Dsadiag, the command-line utility that provides rudimentary insight into available DCs and GCs.)
The primary concern was the need to provide more information about the DCs and GCs that an Exchange 2000 server accesses. With SP2's DSAccess component, you can expect smarter detection and selection of available DCs and GCs and an improvement in Exchange 2000 failover when the currently selected DC or GC becomes unavailable because of a network or hardware failure. SP2 also includes numerous fixes to better handle error conditions that result from such failures.
SP2 includes code that polls the original DC or GC 15 minutes after a failure to determine whether Exchange can revert back to the original machine. Overall, though, DSAccess now spends less time checking for changes to configuration data and thus improves performance. This change makes sense because an Exchange organization's configuration doesn't change often after the initial deployment period.
Exchange service pack for a spin
The most obvious change is a new GUI for Directory Access, which Figure 1 shows. This GUI appears as a tab in each Exchange server's Properties dialog box (which you access through the Microsoft Management Console—MMC—Exchange System Manager—ESM—console). You can use this interface to view all available DCs, the DC that the server is using to fetch configuration data, the GC that the server is using, and the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) port that DSAccess uses. (You might need to scroll the option text across to the left to reveal the LDAP port.) SP2 also adds event 2081 to the event log. This event reveals the controllers that Exchange 2000 selected when it started up.
The redesigned DS-Access is a welcome improvement, and the new interface illuminates a part of Exchange 2000 that can be a mystery to administrators. These new capabilities alone might be reason enough for you to deploy SP2.
More for MOM
Exchange has always been a prime target for management applications, and efforts are under way for Exchange 2000 to fully support Microsoft's MOM management framework. MOM provides a centralized view of distributed systems and the applications that run on those systems and includes methods to monitor and extract data about server conditions (e.g., disk space, CPU load) and applications (e.g., mounted databases, active services). MOM 2000's Application Management Pack includes an Exchange 2000 Management Pack, which offers Exchange-specific features. (For details about this management pack, see Jerry Cochran's Exchange & Outlook UPDATE article, "A Look at the Exchange 2000 Management Pack for MOM," http://www.winnetmag.com, InstantDoc ID 22880.)
MOM's Exchange 2000 Management Pack can monitor Exchange 2000, but the MOM/Exchange interaction will be more powerful when you combine Exchange 2000 SP2 servers with MOM's next management pack release, which will include upgraded components that can take full advantage of SP2's enhancements. (At the time of this writing, the next MOM management pack is due early this year.) SP2 incorporates the necessary probes that will let MOM interrogate Exchange 2000 for data such as the size of mail queues, outstanding Outlook Messaging API (MAPI) remote procedure calls (RPCs), disk I/O, and database status. MOM also can monitor Win2K DCs and GCs and provide a one-stop monitor for the essential parts of an Exchange 2000 infrastructure.
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