Since PowerGUI version 1.8 there have been some great enhancements in PowerPack management. So I finally got round to updating the Exchange 2003 PowerPack and publishing it in the new format. One of the best new features is the ability to update the PowerPack from the application - previously you had to manually download the new version, remove the old one then import the updated copy.
Within the PowerPack Management Dialogue Box you can see the current version of your PowerPack:
So I got asked to write an article for the http://www.simple-talk.com/ website, a well known online technical journal and community hub around SQL and .NET technologies. They’ve recently been branching out into Exchange as well hence they reason they were looking for some Exchange based articles.
The article I have written for them is based around a presentation I have made around some user groups a few times now, i.e. using PowerShell and WMI to manage Exchange 2003.
Back in January I posted about how to find free space in Exchange 2003 databases using Powershell. Not long after this we changed our online maintenance schedules resulting in each database not having maintenance every day. The original script was based on the assumption of maintenance happening every day and there being events in the application log for every database in the last 24 hours.
Consequently I have had to adjust the script so that it would look back a few days to ensure there are logs for each database.
As promised to those who attended the MMMUG on Wednesday night my slides from that evening are available on my SkyDrive.
Enjoy.
One regular task for Exchange admins can be reclaiming free space within Exchange mailbox stores either after a large amount of data has been removed or just a significant amount has built up over time for various reasons. For those of you who don’t know, to reclaim the space the mailbox store has to be taken offline and the database defragged to get the space back on the disk.
Finding good candidates for defragging especially in a large environment with multiple databases and Exchange servers can be a pretty tedious task.
So I was lucky enough to receive an invite from Nathan Winters who runs the MM&M User Group UK (aka Exchange) to present at their next meeting on Wednesday 18th February at Microsoft in London.
It will be an evening around using Powershell to manage Exchange, the agenda is as below:
18:15 - 18:40 Arrival
18:40 - 18:45 Introduction to speakers and the aims of the group
18:45 - 19:30 1st session; Jonathan Medd, Introduction to PowerShell and Using PowerShell to manage Exchange 2003!
Recently I’ve been testing out some different disaster recovery scenarios for Exchange 2003, one of which involved a dial-tone method - i.e. create some new mailbox servers with blank databases to get users up and running quickly and then merge the restored data back in later. One of the types of dial tone method we used was to create new server names rather than re-use existing Exchange server names.
So for example to re-create a four node (3 active, 1 passive) cluster with new names, instead of
I was recently invited to record a webcast by the Product Manager at Quest for PowerGUI, Darin Pendergraft, demoing the Exchange 2003 Powerpack I made for PowerGUI.
They came up with the idea to make some videos / webcasts giving some community members the opportunity to show what PowerGUI can do. A lot of people primarily use it only as a script editor, but the management console side of things is brilliant once you get into it - hopefully these examples will help inspire more people to make some powerpacks.