BES Express Installation on Exchange 2010 SP1 – MaxSessionsPerUser key?

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So, “where has the MaxSessionsPerUser key setting in the microsoft.exchange.addressbook.service.exe.config file gone”, I hear you asking?

Research in Motion’s current (as of today) documentation for BES Express 5.0.3 tells us that we need to increase the maximum number of connections to the Address Book service in Exchange 2010 by modifying a key value in a file. To quote the document, they say:

By default, Microsoft® Exchange 2010 limits the maximum number of connections from the BlackBerry® Enterprise Server Express Express to the Address Book service to 50. To permit the BlackBerry Enterprise Server Express Express to run, you must increase the number of permitted connections to a large value (for example, 100,000).

1. On the computer that hosts the Microsoft Exchange CAS server, in :\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\V14\Bin, in a text editor, open themicrosoft.exchange.addressbook.service.exe.config file.
2. Change the value of the MaxSessionsPerUser key to 100000.
3. Save and close the file.
4. Restart the Address Book service.

Now this as I have found, is no longer applicable to Exchange 2010 SP1 (and above of course). Apparently, Microsoft have moved this functionality to the Throttling policies in Exchange 2010 SP1. This means we’ll need to modify (or at least check) the Throttling policy that is applied to our “BesAdmin” user instead to ensure that certain settings are null / blank (i.e. meaning there is no limitation on them).

So if you notice you don’t have the MaxSessionsPerUser key in your file as per RIMs instructions, or you know straight off that you are on SP1, do the following to check using the Microsoft Exchange Management Shell.

1. Check the Throttling Policy called “BESPolicy” that you would have created earlier in the management shell as per the RIM documentation. Run: Get-ThrottlingPolicy BESPolicy

Your output will look like the following if the settings are correct (i.e. null):


2. Ensure that all the “RCA” Values listed are NULL – i.e. blank (refer to the screenshot in this post for a sample of the output I got when running the command). If they are not, then run the following:
3. (Run this if the RCA values are not NULL): Set-ThrottlingPolicy BESPolicy -RCAMaxConcurrency $null -RCAPercentTimeInAD $null -RCAPercentTimeInCAS $null -RCAPercentTimeInMailboxRPC $null

This “BESPolicy” should be the Throttling policy which is applied to your “BesAdmin” user, as per RIMs installation instructions for BES Express and shouldn’t really be applied to any other users or groups in your organization.

Following the above instructions should allow you to continue along with your BES Express installation alongside Exchange 2010 SP1. Hope this helps!

Securing your Microsoft Exchange 2010 Server / services with an SSL Certificate

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Exchange 2010 has definitely simplified the process of applying SSL certificates to your mail services such as Outlook Web Access/App and Exchange ActiveSync. No more muddling about with IIS is required and you can do everything via the Exchange Management Console (GUI) too. I’ll also list a cmdlet at the end for generating a CSR if you wish to go the Exchange Management Shell way.

Exchange Management Console steps:

 

  • Open the Management Console and from the summary / home tab click on “Manage databases”. Now on the list in the left of the Management Console, select “Server Configuration”, then in the list of Actions on the right look for “New Exchange Certificate” and select this.

 

 

  • A wizard will popup and you can begin setting up your new Certificate Signing Request (CSR). Fill in a Common / Friendly name for the certificate. I used the same name as would be used for the actual certificate itself so that I can easily identify it.

 


 

  • Continue the wizard. I won’t be using a wildcard certificate so I will leave the “Enable Wildcard Certificate” selection unchecked.

 

 

  • The next section allows you to select the services you want to use with your SSL / describe the Exchange configuration for the CSR that we are going to generate. Expand out the sections and you’ll see that some are pre-populated for you. Check over this information and tick any services that you want to use. I want this SSL certificate for Outlook Web App and Exchange ActiveSync for mobile devices, so I checked the options for “Outlook Web App is on the Internet” and “Exchange Active Sync is enabled”. In each of those cases, I entered the A name record for the services (The external name used to connect to the services) – i.e. mail.shogan.co.uk – this is important and it is what your SSL certificate will be securing, so double check that it is correct.

 

 

  • Continue by entering some administrative / contact details for your company, choosing a location to the save the CSR request file, then finishing the wizard off. Now, go to your SSL provider’s site and purchase a new SSL certificate. I am using a basic SSL123 certificate in this case from Thawte.

 

  • Go through the steps of purchasing the certificate, and you’ll get to a point where they ask you for the CSR – paste the exact text of your CSR generated in Exchange’s Management Console into the CSR text box on the website and get your certificate ordered. When it is approved and emailed back to you, save the .cer certificate file on your Exchange server.

 

  • Go back to the management console, select “Server Configuration”, select the certificate under the “Exchange Certificates” tab and in the Actions view on the side, select “Complete Pending Request”. Browse for the completed SSL certificate your certificate issuer sent you and finish by completing this wizard.

 

 

  • You now just need to highlight the certificate under “Exchange Certificates” once again, and under the “Actions” panel, click “Assign Services to Certificate”. In this wizard, select your relevant Exchange server name, then click next. On the next screen, select “Internet Information Services”, then “Next”. Check the summary page looks correct then finish the wizard.

 

Your SSL certificate should now be configured and ready for use. Browse to the URL of your Outlook Web App service via https. You should find that you don’t get a certificate warning, and clicking the security icon in your web browser to view the site certificate should show that it is valid and providing encryption.

 

Generate a CSR using the Exchange Management Shell.

 

You can also generate a CSR using the cmdlet below. Just substitute the relevant values with your own. Be sure you aren’t putting any incorrect values in when using this though as you don’t have a nice GUI to explain things to you as you do with the Exchange Management Shell.

 

Set-Content -path “C:\mail_shogan_co_uk” -Value (New-ExchangeCertificate -GenerateRequest -KeySize 2048 -SubjectName “c=gb, s=London, l=London, o=Shogan.tech, ou=IT, cn=mail.shogan.co.uk”  -PrivateKeyExportable $True)

 

The above cmdlet will save the CSR file to C:\mail_shogan_co_uk. You would then copy and paste the text of that file into your SSL certificate provider’s site as part of your SSL purchase process. The cmdlet uses some values that will need to be unique to your organisation – here are the value explanations of parts of the above cmdlet:

 

c = country code
s = city
l = province/state
o = organisation name
ou = organisational unit
cn = common name the SSL certificate is to be provided for

The cmdlet won’t give you any output if it works correctly, but you’ll be able to see the CSR in the Exchange Management Console if you refresh it at this stage.

That is basically it – the steps above should help you secure some Exchange services such as OWA or ActiveSync with an SSL certificate from a trusted authority.

 

How to set up a VMware vSphere Lab in Virtual Machines, with DRS and HA

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I recently wrote a (reasonably!) lengthy article on how to set up your own VMware vSphere lab or test environment consisting entirely of Virtual Machines, running off of one piece of host hardware. This is really handy as a lot of people new to Virtualization often think they need to purchase full on server equipment to create a white box, or find second hand servers off of eBay. Even more often, they make the mistake of overlooking the CPU feature set required to run vSphere – Hardware Virtualization, buying 64bit capable servers (good), but lacking the Intel VT or AMD-V feature-set required for vSphere (bad!)

 

This is when running everything virtualized comes in really handy. As well as keeping your hardware and lab requirements/size down, you have everything you need all in one installation of VMware Workstation. You’ll also be able to test out some really cool features that vSphere / vCenter Server has to offer – such as HA (High Availability) and DRS (Distributed Resource Scheduling). In the article I also make reference to a few best practises to have when configuring the real deal for production use. I hope this comprehensive guide is useful for those of you looking to set something like this up!

 

VMware lab consisting - nested VMs running in Virtualized ESXi hypervisors.

 

Read the article here on Simple-Talk.com to get started and see how its all done!

 

 

SQL Server Full Text Indexing

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So this is more of a mental note to self, based on the summary of a lesson I just completed on SQL Server Full Text Indexing. In summary, to create Full Text Indexes, we need to keep the following in mind:

  • Before a full text index is created, you need to make a full text catalog that is mapped to a filegroup first.
  • Full text indexes can be created on columns with CHAR, VARCHAR, XML and VARBINARY.
  • When using  a full text index with a VARBINARY(MAX) column, you need to specify the column for the COLUMN TYPE parameter so that the Full Text Index Engine knows which filter to load for parsing the data. (for example a filter for Word Documents, Excel, HTML etc…)
  • The “LANGUAGE” setting specifies which “Word Breaker” and “Stemmer” SQL Server loads to tokenise and build inflectional forms for the index.
  • Word breakers can be used for different languages that have a close relationship with fairly acceptable results in most cases, but stemmers are language specific and can only be used on the exact language data you are dealing with.
  • CHANGE_TRACKING controls whether SQL Server tracks changes to underlying data columns – Automatically , manually or is off.



This is my interpretation of the summary provided at the end of lesson 1 in Chapter 5 of the Microsoft MCTS Exam 70-432 authored by Mike Hotek.


Full Text Predicates that can be used:

  • CONTAINS
  • CONTAINSTABLE
  • FREETEXT
  • FREETEXTTABLE


A Thesaurus file can be used to configure synonyms for search arguments. A stop list contains a list of words that you want to exclude from your full text index or search arguments.

SQL Server 2008 – Change Tracking

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I have recently started studying for some Microsoft SQL Server exams (in particular 70-432). In order to reinforce some of the information, I thought it would be a good idea to blog about some of the features of SQL Server 2008 I learn about. This post will be on the built in mechanism for Change Tracking.

Change tracking is a relatively lightweight functionality that associates a version with each row in a table which has had CHANGE_TRACKING enabled on it.

By using this mechanism, it should be easy to read the version number when data is read from the database, and when it comes to writing data back, this version number can be checked to see if it has changed or not, allowing your application to determine whether it is safe to write data back or not, depending on how you handle the situation.

Once the CHANGE_TRACKING option has been enabled for a database, you can choose which tables in the database change tracking information is kept for.

Two other options can also be used. Namely CHANGE_RETENTION, which allows you to specify how long change tracking information should be captured for, and AUTO_CLEANUP, which allows change tracking information to automatically be cleaned up.

If anyone has any extra information or can clarify any of the above points, then please feel free to add a comment 🙂