Exchange 2010 SP2 GAL Segmentation Support

Question

So Microsoft finally annouced some exciting news that Exchange 2010 SP2 (Non-Hosting Mode) will support GAL segmentation directly right in the product. I'm assuming WebsitePanel will support the changes?

http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2011/01/27/457820.aspx

Cheers, Cole

Answer 1

Hi Cole,

Good News :-)

Please use this link http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/wspdiscuss/thread/e8d18b28-d828-469e-a585-f1606528b2b3, also in order to request a Feature.

Thanks.

---

Best regards, Dmitry Fitsner [e-mail] | WebsitePanel Installations, Support & Consulting | Enterprise Solutions Planning & Deployment & Support. Website: ExpertServices.us

Answer 2

Hi,

To add the question above,

so with the announcement of Exchange 2010 SP2, what's the impact for the current hosters who uses a 2010 non-hosting mode ? do we need to create a new forest (hope not) or can we just revert the AD schema before the workaround ?

 

Regards,

 

Dondy

Answer 3

Hi Dondy,

In my opinion only!

Don’t think so… it would not be the same as it was before. Manual changes etc…

***Microsoft may/would not include GAL separation capabilities!

BTW, have you read J GAL Segmentation, Exchange Server 2010 and Address Book Policies / SP2 - http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2011/01/27/3411882.aspx?

And! You are not alone in this dissatisfaction with it.

Let’s hope/wait MS change own plans / point of view on this BIG issue.

Or… let’s wait at least until SP2 released!

So, we’ll be able to investigate if manual GAL segregation required or how to set with minimum required permissions, also in order to segregate (in case of 100% unsupported configuration). Do we need to create a new forest or just revert back previews manual segregation changes / schema, also in order to apply/before possible workaround for Exchange 2010 with SP2 applied.

 

GAL Segmentation, Exchange Server 2010 and Address Book Policies / SP2 - http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2011/01/27/3411882.aspx

 

“If you intend to resell Exchange 2010 mailboxes by using the feature we are introducing, in what is generally recognized as a hosting configuration, we strongly recommend that you instead evaluate the Hosting mode of Exchange available since the release of Service Pack 1. Should you choose to further customize the On-premises configuration to meet requirements for multi-tenancy your configuration may not be supported by the Exchange team. The hosting mode of the product has been designed with true multi-tenancy capability in mind and is our strategic platform that we recommend customers who wish to host Exchange mailboxes adopt going forward. Likewise, if you are interested in privately hosting Exchange for the rest of your company, it is strongly advised to consider the limitations and extra requirements associated with the multi-tenant version of Exchange and decide if you truly will need the full functionality or if you only require Address Book Policies.”

 

may not be supported – looks like someone is giving us what we want to hear and hide what is really going on ;) 

 

I would like to recommend you do not perform any bulk environment changes at least until solution is tested very well / successfully used by another WSP users.

BTW: A lot of WSP users use Exchange 2010 SP1 (without “hosting” mode enabled) and manual GAL segregation applied/configured (which is not / may not be supported by MS).

Thank you.

---

Best regards, Dmitry Fitsner [e-mail] | WebsitePanel Installations, Support & Consulting | Enterprise Solutions Planning & Deployment & Support. Website: ExpertServices.us ---ORDER ANY ENTERPRISE DEPLOYMENT AND GET A SECOND 25%-100% FREE !!!

Answer 4

I have installed SP2 now in my production environment with no changes to WSP and everything is functioning without an issue. We will be working on getting support for the new addressbook segregation next. I can confirm that following the same directions as you need to in SP1 will work in SP2 as well, seems whatever changes were made in SP2 do not affect any portion of the API WSP uses. We have placed this configuration in production

---

Omar Armenteros Virtuworks

Answer 5

I have posted a fork of the source code project with changes required to enable addressbook policy support in SP2 in an on-premise installation of Exchange. you can find it here.

http://websitepanel.codeplex.com/SourceControl/network/Forks/Virtuworks/ExchangeSP2research

It needs to be compiled and ran as framework 3.5 as described here.

http://websitepanel.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=How%20To%20Run%20Hosted%20Solution%20Services%20with%20WebsitePanel%20v1.2.0

This code does not check for Exchange version, this still needs to be added so placing this code in a non-sp2 on-premise environment will fail.

For existing organizations you will need to manually create address book policys named "orgname Address Policy" and apply them to all existing users which is a pretty simple task using EMC i was able to do about 30 organizations in about 1 hour of work. It can be scripted though.

This code only adds the functionality to create, delete and apply address book policies to new users from the point of it's deployment.

---

Omar Armenteros Virtuworks

Answer 6

 

By install, do you mean you upgraded from HE 2010 SP1 safely? That sounds like good news :)

 

Is there any reason for the upgrade to SP2 to break WSP functionality for HE 2010 SP1 w/ Segmented GAL...?

...and would it be safe to uninstall SP2 to back out if so?

 

Answer 7

What I mean is that I had a non /hosting switch address segmented on-premise installation that I have upgraded to Exchange 2010 SP2 on-premise Non /hosting switch installation. In the process we upgraded all the code required to properly support SP2 Address Book Policy support which is Microsoft's new official Segmentation strategy which makes it compliant. The code for this to work will be included in the next release of WSP which should be occuring within the next 2 weeks, at that point WSP should be pretty much compliant with SP2 non-hosting switch installation which I beleive is the best way of doing this moving forward I am of the belief that MS will drop the /hosting mode switch eventually as it has many limitations. I am pretty sure that it would require an entirely new farm to move from a /hosting switch installation to an on-premise mode installation at least thats what I have seen in documentation. This fix is only for users using the on-premise mode of the provider who wish to upgrade to the SP2 and gain the new ABP support that is included.

---

Omar Armenteros Virtuworks

Answer 8

Hi Omar,

Is this module pre-complied anywhere, as I am having problems with compiling it here.

Thanks!

 

Answer 9

Hi Omar,

I have managed to compile hostedsolutions using v4. But I assuming the sub project needs to be compiled in v3.5 and placed in the 3.5 proxy site on the Exchange server?

 

Answer 10

Yes, that is correct the issue with Framework 4.0 still exists. You need to make sure you copy the two DLL files from the Website Folder (that were 3.5) because it will not compile 3.5 unless all the wsp references are 3.5 there are only 2. I am working through the 4.0 compatibility issues next basically what needs to occur is that the powershell calls in the exchange module need to be called against remote power shell on CAS server rather than local calls that the store. That will resolve that issue I think it might be fixed in the next release hopefully, otherwise soon after that via a fork. If anyone can contribute some programming time I can explain fully what changes need to be coded.

---

Omar Armenteros Virtuworks

Answer 11

Thanks,

Happy to help, if you want to send over a list of all the changes I can get one of the guys here to look at it.

Cheers

 

Answer 12

http://websitepanel.codeplex.com/workitem/list/advanced

I am using the codeplex issue tracker to add items. You can add items you wish to resolve here and we can all work together. My next priority is work item 169. I can send you some emails that I have been explaining what needs to happen for this to be fixed I know all the required steps I just dont have time to actually do the code (and I am not a programmer, but I will do what I have too to get where I need to get) and can use more people with the same attitude to help hammer out a small list of things I think will help all of us and this project gain momentum.

http://www.virtuworks.com/contact/

Contact me at this URL so that I can send you the information back channel.

---

Omar Armenteros Virtuworks

Answer 13

Great,

Message sent as requested, look forward to hearing from you.

 

Answer 14

I compilled your fork without reading this thread. I had to switch WebsitePanel.Providers.HostedSolution do .NET 4.0. Everything is compiled fine and seems to work.

I was able to create new organization, mailboxes, change properties etc. ABP was also created. Should I expect any issues if I didn't follow compilation guilde you mentioned?

Thank you

Answer 15

I compilled your fork without reading this thread. I had to switch WebsitePanel.Providers.HostedSolution do .NET 4.0. Everything is compiled fine and seems to work.

I was able to create new organization, mailboxes, change properties etc. ABP was also created. Should I expect any issues if I didn't follow compilation guilde you mentioned?

Thank you

Hello, mee too I'm interested to see if WebsitePanel.Providers.HostedSolution compiled for .NET 4.0 works.

 

Any information on this will be appreciated!!!

Answer 16

Hello,

just a quick reply here. As usual, do you own tests and checks before doing what I'm going to describe here. If something breaks, expecially in your production environment, you're on your own and I assume no responsibility for that.

We have several Exchange 2010 SP1 installation in production and a few are managed by WSP (we are using Web Services redirection as Ex2010 SP1 doesn't support .NET 4). We decided to check if SP2 would break this setup because other users reported that no change would happen. So we:

• installed a new on-premise version of Exchange 2010 SP1;
• configured WSP and Exchange to work together using usual setup;
• checked that Exchange and WSP were working fine (provision, receive, send, OWA and so forth);
• upgraded that test installation to SP2.

After SP2 upgrading, our test installation was working fine. We didn't notice any problem and we were able to provision new organization, send and receive and stuff.

We then decided to upgrade a small production installation to SP2. That setup was a multi-server config already managing a few live domains and mailboxes. It also had Forefront installed and working.

After upgrading to SP2, everything seems to be working fine. We had no permission issues, which was something we feared and organizations cannot access each other data / GAL / public folders and so on. 

So do you own test and checks before breaking your production installation but it seems that upgrading to SP2 doesn't break WSP, at least as of today. Please also notice that we didn't attempt to install Ex2010 SP1, then upgrade to SP2 and then configure WSP as this was not required in our scenario.

Hope this helps but don't come here to complain my suggestion broke your installation ;-)