As a follow up to the post of Eileen’s on how to be a good manager, I found this link in the comments of that post. Thought provoking. As Generation Me (is that what we are calling the young ones coming into the workforce now?) starts becoming a force in the professional world, management styles will need to adapt.

Eileen Brown, well known in the Exchange world and someone I always enjoy seeing pop up in Google Reader, has a very poignant and relevant post that really hit home with me as I’m about to start a new chapter in my life and career in the next week. She gives 7 quick points on how to be a good manager, all of which are spot on and traits I recognize in the good managers I’ve had in the past that and the traits which I strive to display myself in my role as a leader. I especially strive for #7. I always say its easier to be happy than it is to be upset or angry, and you can potentially diffuse a bad situation with a simple, genuine smile mixed with a little #5. Be positive and effective as a manager and the rest of the team will follow.

Thanks Eileen!

Things have been quiet around here lately, contrary to my original intentions and I have no real excuse. The position been working in the last 6 months has been extremely challenging and rewarding, but I’ve known all along that it wasn’t a long term. I’m extremely excited to be taking on a “working” technical mangement position with a fairly good size team in just a few more days.

The tone of my posts will be changing, as I never really enjoyed rehashing what the great blogging engineers were performing so well already. My top posts have been about issues I’ve discovered and resolved in the past, so I’ll continue that theme going forward.

On to bigger and better things!

As Keith Combs points out, Microsoft has really updated the Windows 2008 step-by-step guides. Check it out!

I was making my way through my Google Reader list this morning and I came across a post on one of the Exchange-related blogs that I follow that expressed my exact sentiments on clustering with Windows Server in general and more specifically, Exchange 2007.

In my personal experience, I’ve found Michael’s recommendations to be valid for most environments. I’ve personally managed systems to 99.97% without the use of Windows Clustering. In some sense, however, you are only trading time and effort from existing tasks to managing the cluster correctly but the reward could be slim if you are doing things well in the first place.

Microsoft released the HMC 4.0 which focuses on the performance maximums of Exchange 2007 in a hosted environment, but some of the results can be applied to large Exchange 2007 deployments.

Some highlights from the report include:

• · So the guidance is somewhere between 3,750 and 6,000 Outlook Anywhere clients per CAS depending on the specific deployment.

• If all client connections to CAS appear to come from the internal VIP (behind an ISA or proxy) then it max out at 60,000 client connections because every client connection has the same source IP, source port, destination IP, and destination port mapping.

• RPC Proxy only uses the first IP in the binding order and ignores any additional IPs

• It was determined that the maximum number of SMTP messages a single Hub Transport server (single CPU dual core with 2 GB RAM) can sustain was 69 messages per second.

Exchange:

The Microsoft Exchange Team Blog posted a good article on the process of doing cross-forest impersonation in Exchange 2007 as well as announcing support for Single Label Domains (SLD) in Exchange 2007 SP1.

The Exchangepedia Blog has a good article on the features and implementation of Standby Continuous Replication (SCR) which is a new feature in Exchange 2007 SP1 which gives you the option of creating a one-to-many or many-to-one replication of your storage groups.

Windows:

Microsoft has released the Remote System Administration Tools (RSAT) for managing Windows 2008 hosts from a Vista SP1 client. Here is the 32-bit version as well as the 64-bit version.

Jorge de Almeida Pinto, an AD DS MVP and author of one of my favorite blogs, has posted a good entry on Windows 2008 Core and another entry on free utilities to assist in the reanimation of deleted AD objects.

Microsoft recently updated their Solutions Accelerators Infrastructure Planning and Design series with information on Windows Server 2008 Active Directory Domain Services, Terminal Services and Windows Deployment Services. The Solutions Accelerators is the updated version of the Windows Server System Reference Architecture series that has been a tremendous source of information on recommended best practices in the past.

This is slick…a toolbar for IE, Firefox or any Windows Explorer window that gives you instant access to many Powershell resources.

Microsoft released a very cool utility to assist in the capacity planning for your Exchange 2007 environment, the Systems Center Capacity Planner for Exchange 2007 will allow you to input usage scenarios, redundancy and availability requirements and will output a recommended configuration.

For example, I put in the details for what the details would look like for the existing Exchange 2003 environment I manage today if we were going to deploy Exchange 2007 using the same availability assumptions we have in the current environment. This is the solution the tool recommended:

Topology
Sites with servers: 1
Sites with clients only: 100
Total number of clients: 700

Site: Lenexa
Number of users: 600
Number of servers: 8
Number of SAN connections: 1

Server: Client Access Server 1
Processor: 2-processor, 2.13 GHz, Xeon 3000-Series (1-chip x 2-core)
Minimum memory: 4.0 GB
Disk: DiskArray 1\Volume 1 (Data Files), 146 GB RAID 1 (2 x 146.00 GB SCSI 15,000 RPM)
Disk (OS Volume): Separate two-disk RAID-1 array for OS
NIC: 1 x 1,000 Mb/s
Roles: Client Access

Server: Client Access Server 2
Processor: 2-processor, 2.13 GHz, Xeon 3000-Series (1-chip x 2-core)
Minimum memory: 4.0 GB
Disk: DiskArray 1\Volume 1 (Data Files), 146 GB RAID 1 (2 x 146.00 GB SCSI 15,000 RPM)
Disk (OS Volume): Separate two-disk RAID-1 array for OS
NIC: 1 x 1,000 Mb/s
Roles: Client Access

Server: Edge Transport Server 1
Processor: 2-processor, 2.13 GHz, Xeon 3000-Series (1-chip x 2-core)
Minimum memory: 2.0 GB
Disk: DiskArray 1\Volume 1 (Data Files), 146 GB RAID 1 (2 x 146.00 GB SCSI 15,000 RPM)
DiskArray 1\Volume 2 (Log Files), 146 GB RAID 1 (2 x 146.00 GB SCSI 15,000 RPM)
Disk (OS Volume): Separate two-disk RAID-1 array for OS
NIC: 1 x 1,000 Mb/s
Roles: Edge Transport

Server: Edge Transport Server 2
Processor: 2-processor, 2.13 GHz, Xeon 3000-Series (1-chip x 2-core)
Minimum memory: 2.0 GB
Disk: DiskArray 1\Volume 1 (Data Files), 146 GB RAID 1 (2 x 146.00 GB SCSI 15,000 RPM)
DiskArray 1\Volume 2 (Log Files), 146 GB RAID 1 (2 x 146.00 GB SCSI 15,000 RPM)
Disk (OS Volume): Separate two-disk RAID-1 array for OS
NIC: 1 x 1,000 Mb/s
Roles: Edge Transport

Server: Hub Transport Server 1
Processor: 2-processor, 2.13 GHz, Xeon 3000-Series (1-chip x 2-core)
Minimum memory: 2.0 GB
Disk: DiskArray 1\Volume 1 (Data Files), 146 GB RAID 1 (2 x 146.00 GB SCSI 15,000 RPM)
DiskArray 1\Volume 2 (Log Files), 146 GB RAID 1 (2 x 146.00 GB SCSI 15,000 RPM)
Disk (OS Volume): Separate two-disk RAID-1 array for OS
NIC: 1 x 1,000 Mb/s
Roles: Hub Transport

Server: Hub Transport Server 2
Processor: 2-processor, 2.13 GHz, Xeon 3000-Series (1-chip x 2-core)
Minimum memory: 2.0 GB
Disk: DiskArray 1\Volume 1 (Data Files), 146 GB RAID 1 (2 x 146.00 GB SCSI 15,000 RPM)
DiskArray 1\Volume 2 (Log Files), 146 GB RAID 1 (2 x 146.00 GB SCSI 15,000 RPM)
Disk (OS Volume): Separate two-disk RAID-1 array for OS
NIC: 1 x 1,000 Mb/s
Roles: Hub Transport

Server: Mailbox Server
Processor: 4-processor, 2.20 GHz, Opteron (2-chip x 2-core)
Minimum memory: 8.0 GB
Disk (OS Volume): Separate two-disk RAID-1 array for OS
NIC: 1 x 1,000 Mb/s
SAN connections: 2 x 4 Gb/s
SANs: SAN Array\Volume 1 (Data Files), 1200 GB RAID 10 (8 x 300.00 GB SCSI 15,000 RPM)
SAN Array\Volume 2 (Log Files), 146 GB RAID 1 (2 x 146.00 GB SCSI 15,000 RPM)
SAN Array\Volume 3 (Replica Data Files), 1200 GB RAID 10 (8 x 300.00 GB SCSI 15,000 RPM)
SAN Array\Volume 4 (Replica Log Files), 146 GB RAID 1 (2 x 146.00 GB SCSI 15,000 RPM)
Roles: Mailbox(Local Continuous Replication)

Server: Remote Passive Mailbox Server
Processor: 4-processor, 2.20 GHz, Opteron (2-chip x 2-core)
Minimum memory: 8.0 GB
Disk (OS Volume): Separate two-disk RAID-1 array for OS
NIC: 1 x 1,000 Mb/s
SAN connections: 2 x 4 Gb/s
SANs: SAN Array\Volume 5 (Data Files), 1200 GB RAID 10 (8 x 300.00 GB SCSI 15,000 RPM)
SAN Array\Volume 6 (Log Files), 146 GB RAID 1 (2 x 146.00 GB SCSI 15,000 RPM)
SAN Array\Volume 7 (Replica Data Files), 1200 GB RAID 10 (8 x 300.00 GB SCSI 15,000 RPM)
SAN Array\Volume 8 (Replica Log Files), 146 GB RAID 1 (2 x 146.00 GB SCSI 15,000 RPM)
Roles: Passive Mailbox(Standby plus Local Continuous Replication)

SAN: SAN Array
Disk: Volume 1 (Data Files), 1200 GB RAID 10 (8 x 300.00 GB SCSI 15,000 RPM)
Volume 2 (Log Files), 146 GB RAID 1 (2 x 146.00 GB SCSI 15,000 RPM)
Volume 3 (Replica Data Files), 1200 GB RAID 10 (8 x 300.00 GB SCSI 15,000 RPM)
Volume 4 (Replica Log Files), 146 GB RAID 1 (2 x 146.00 GB SCSI 15,000 RPM)
Volume 5 (Data Files), 1200 GB RAID 10 (8 x 300.00 GB SCSI 15,000 RPM)
Volume 6 (Log Files), 146 GB RAID 1 (2 x 146.00 GB SCSI 15,000 RPM)
Volume 7 (Replica Data Files), 1200 GB RAID 10 (8 x 300.00 GB SCSI 15,000 RPM)
Volume 8 (Replica Log Files), 146 GB RAID 1 (2 x 146.00 GB SCSI 15,000 RPM)

The beginning of my journey through IT was similar to the original poster of this blog, I viewed my advancement and knowledge as competition amongst my peers, many of them friends. I’ve realized, too, in the last few years that my success is mine and mine alone.