If you are based in the UK and run Exchange 2010 UM it is likely that you will install and use the English (en-GB) Language Pack with your UM Dial Plan.

You may then notice that Voice Mail Previews are not being displayed in Outlook or OWA.

Be aware that Voicemail Preview is only available with the following UM Language Packs:

• English (US) (en-US)
• English (Canada) (en-CA)
• French (France) (fr-FR)
• Italian (it-IT)
• Polish (pl-PL)
• Portuguese (Portugal) (pt-PT)
• Spanish (Spain) (es-ES)

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff629381.aspx

If you have installed the Exchange Management Console on your client machine or server other than your Exchange 2010 servers you may come across the error below:

Solution

If you update your Exchange Servers to Service Pack 1/2, ensure you do the same on the machine running the Management Console.

In an Exchange 2010 DAG, you may want to disable database activation on another mailbox server that holds a copy but maintain the replication and replay activities. Below is the command to do so:

Suspend-MailboxDatabaseCopy -Identity DB2MBXSERVER1 -ActivationOnly

I was asked by an Exchange Administrator who was new to Exchange 2010 to see if I could set up a simple script that would check the state of the Exchange databases that may affect it failing over in the event of an outage.

The following script simply checks the state of each database copy and the state of the context index. This can be copied and pasted into a text file and saved as a PS1 file and run in an Exchange Management PowerShell window:

###############################################################

write-host "Mailbox Databases that are not healthy or mounted" -foregroundcolor yellow

$mounted = get-mailboxdatabase | Get-MailboxDatabaseCopyStatus | Where-Object {$_.Status -ne "Healthy"}
$failed = $mounted | Where-Object {$_.Status -ne "Mounted"}

$failed | ForEach-Object {$db_count++}

$db_total = $db_count -1

If ($db_total -eq 0)
{
Write-Host `n
write-host "All database states are ok" -foregroundcolor green
Write-Host `n
}
ElseIf ($db_total -gt 0)
{
Write-Host `n
write-host "Databases need reseeding, mounting or resuming replication" -foregroundcolor red
$failed
Write-Host `n
}

Write-Host `n
Write-Host `n

write-host "Mailbox Databases that have unhealthy content indexes" -foregroundcolor yellow

$indexes = get-mailboxdatabase | Get-MailboxDatabaseCopyStatus | Where-Object {$_.ContentIndexState -ne "Healthy"}

$indexes | ForEach-Object {$index_count++}

$index_total = $index_count -1

If ($index_total -eq 0)
{
Write-Host `n
write-host "All database indexes are ok" -foregroundcolor green
Write-Host `n
}
ElseIf ($index_total -gt 0)
{
Write-Host `n
write-host "Database context indexes are failed" -foregroundcolor red
$indexes
Write-Host `n
}

###############################################################

The script will simply output like this if there is no problems:

If there are any problems, it will list out the indexes or databases that are not reporting as they should be and you can take the corrective actions accordingly.

Cheers

Paul

In Exchange 2010, applying impersonate permissions to a service account is achieved by using Role-Based Access Control (RBAC). See the below command to grant the permissions:

New-ManagementRoleAssignment –Name:FriendlyAssignmentName –Role:ApplicationImpersonation –User:serviceAccount

We recently came across an issue where we were unable to restore a deleted Public Folder. We attempted this using ExFolders, MFCMapi and Outlook and received the following errors:

Exfolders:

MFCMapi:

Outlook:

Solution:

Installing Service Pack 2 for Exchange 2010 allowed us to complete the restore with MFCMapi.

We have set up DAG monitoring scripts for one of our customers which tell us the status of all the mailbox copies and we noticed that one of the database copies had been stuck in a status of “Crawling” for over a day.

To rectify this problem we did the following:

1. Log onto the affected server and open up services.

2. Restart the “Microsoft Exchange Search Indexer” service:

3. Run the following PowerShell command in EMC:

Update-MailboxDatabaseCopy –Identity DATABASESERVER –CatalogOnly

This will update the search index of the database and then you can run the following command to ensure that the database index is now healthy:

Get-MailboxDatabaseCopyStatus -Identity DATABASESERVER

Cheers

Paul

If you want to run any of the Exchange PowerShell commands from a standard PowerShell environment then you simply need to add in the following line in order to run it as if it is an Exchange Management Console:

Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.Exchange.Management.PowerShell.E2010

For example, the script below will output the size of the Exchange Databases to a file and can be run as a scheduled task:

Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.Exchange.Management.PowerShell.E2010

Get-MailboxDatabase –Status | fl name, databasesize | out-file C:dbsize.txt

What we can do then is save the above script to a .ps1 file and then edit the action to start PowerShell.exe and put the arguments as the script that you want to run:

This can be set up with the usual Scheduled Task settings and with the PowerShell snap-in for Exchange added in should be able to use the Exchange PowerShell commands.

Cheers

Paul

Here is a PowerShell command that can be used to fetch the mailbox sizes that are over a certain amount of total item size:

get-mailbox | Get-MailboxStatistics | where {$_.TotalItemSize -ge 600MB}

The script above can be simply amended to the amount of MB or GB in size that you want to find out. So, for example, if you change the value after –ge (greater or equal to) to 6GB then it will search for all mailboxes that are equal to or greater than 6GB in size.

It could be particularly useful for anyone looking to implement database limits to find out if there are any users that would be affected.

Cheers

Paul 

Here’s a quick command that will set the amount of days your lagged database is lagged for

Set-MailboxDatabaseCopy –Identity “DatabaseNameServerName” –ReplayLagTime “7.0:0:0”

The Above command will set a lag retention of 7 days, but change the days to what you need (Please note the Maximum is 14 Days)