Setup previously failed while performing the action "Install". You cannot resume setup by performing the action "BuildToBuildUpgrade"

If you are upgrading your cluster Exchange server into SP2 and you did not fallow the release notes step by step in regards to cluster upgrade, most likely your cluster is not coming up, information store and other cluster resources cannot be brought up due to version mismatch , physical nodes exchange version numbs won’t match your CMS version number.

if you are receiving fallowing error keep reading this article the CMS SP2 upgrade it still possible as it is explained later on

Setup previously failed while performing the action "Install". You cannot resume setup by performing the action "BuildToBuildUpgrade"

Release notes

Before I talk about how to fix this I want to give mention about the installation recommended sequence and couple other important information you will need to look at it.

Upgrade your server in below sequence

• · Client Access servers
• · Unified Messaging servers
• · Hub Transport servers
• · Edge Transport servers
• · Mailbox servers

The most places the installation sequence will be C, H, M and easy way to keep memorize to see the letters goes same as Alphabet from beginning to next one ( release notes)

Cluster servers cannot be upgraded by using GUI setup, so you need to execute the setup from command line

Setup.com /mode:upgrade

 

 

If you have Exchange server in different AD site where your Schema master in on another AD site you will receive below errors on setup

to resolve this issue move the Schema master role to DC on the same site as your Exchange Server make sure changes got replicated and run the setup again. When Exchange setup is happy and done you can move the role back to original DC as fist time.

In order to move the schema master register below DLL file on the DC you wish to move to Schema role.

• regsvr32 schmmgmt.dll

Note: some people are very apprehensive moving SFMO roles among DC’s and to me , these worries are pointless.

Now upgrading Cluster servers read the article bb676559 carefully.

Lets say this is your configuration

• Exchange Server 1 ( Active Node)
• Exchange Server 1 ( CMS)
• Exchange Server 2 Passive node

 

• First ( upgrade the passive node Server 2) Reboot log back in and make sure server is happy at this point Server 2 is running on SP2
• Second ( Upgrade the CMS, CMS must be Stopped  Cluster services must be “STOPED” ( see PS Command)
• After stopping Cluster. CMS needs to be moved to upgraded server, Exchange Server 2, via Cluster Fail over and be upgraded to SP2 there.
• Via command “Setup.com /UpgradeCMS”

Stop-ClusteredMailboxServer MBX –StopReason “SP2 Upgrade”

• Third upgrade the Active node AFRTER CMS Upgrade.

Now if you did not fallow the sequence and trying to run CMS upgrade setup will fail. In order to get the setup going you need to change the watermark registry Values.

on the Exchange server click start run , type regedit , hit enter

• HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
• Software
• Microsoft\Exchange
• v8.0

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Exchange\v8.0

You will see separate sub keys for each role installed, since the CMS installation is failing you will see sub key called “ClusteredMailboxServer”

• AdminTools
• ClusteredMailboxServer
• MailboxRole
• Setup

Double click on the watermark and make sure there is nothing in the Value data filed.

This Watermark is very important!  It is how setup notes where it left off, and what still needs to be completed. Since your CMS installation has failed when you try to run it again the setup comes back here reads this valued and wont run again since it knows is has run already. When there is no “Value” you can delete the key as well which will be created on the setup process, the setup will run happily and you will be able to upgrade your CMS to SP2

oz Casey Dedeal,

MVP (Exchange)
MCITP (EMA), MCITP (SA)
MCSE 2003, M+, S+, MCDST
Security+, Project +, Server +

Http://smtp25.blogspot.com (Blog

Http://telnet25.spaces.live.com (Blog)

Http://telnet25.wordpress.com (Blog

Exchange 2010 Installation Prep work.

Below steps are showing prep work installing Exchange 2010. You will need to open “CMD” and navigate to script folder in the Exchange 2010 installation CD or folder in order to run these commands. In my case I have placed Exchange 2010 binaries on second drive folder called 2010. Every new version of Exchange installation is becoming more efficient and easy and evolving in a smart way in my opinion, which is making our job more efficient and painless

You will also need to download and install

• .NET Framework 3.5
• WIN RM 2.0  PS V2
• HTS , install Microsoft filter pack

E:\2010\Scripts>

• For a server that will have the typical installation of CAS, HTS, and the Mailbox role:

sc config NetTcpPortSharing start= auto

 

ServerManagerCmd -ip Exchange-Typical.xml -Restart

• For a server that will host only the Client Access role

sc config NetTcpPortSharing start= auto

ServerManagerCmd -ip Exchange-CAS.xml -Restart

• For a server that will host only the Mailbox role:

ServerManagerCmd -ip Exchange-MBX.xml -Restart

Exchange 2010 Prerequisites ( TechNet)

Exchange Team Blog

oz Casey Dedeal,

MVP (Exchange)

MCITP (EMA), MCITP (SA)

MCSE 2003, M+, S+, MCDST

Security+, Project +, Server +

Http://smtp25.blogspot.com (Blog)

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!!!!Exchange 2010 Deployment Assistant!!!!!!

First quick look to EDA 2010. Exchange 2010 is for sure shinning in many areas and yet another great tool to help us migration existing mail infrastructure to Exchange  2010.

Here is the link to EDA 2010

 

The idea behind this tool is real nice to be honest. I will list some of my feedbacks and if you can think of anything please do leave some comments, hopefully we can contribute to make this great tool even better

Tool should include some basic PS scripts and should be able to generate  reports

• Mailbox count ( number of mailboxes on existing environment)
• Size of the mailboxes and item count ( good to know prior to mail move and capacity planning)
• Some basic Information for mail growth, some guidelines how to measure it  ( capacity planning, leads for design)
• Measure current IOPS on the Exchange servers
• PS scripts showing white space on each database ( capacity planning , after move, it will be great to know estimated data for each mail database
• Some guidelines & best practices how to design the databases given scenario, maybe links to download white papers right from this tool.
• Estimated time for mailbox move, some estimated numbers ** indicating , Exchange is able to accomplish four concurrent move treat each time***
• Build instruction for each server role ( this is already included in the current tool)
• Some reporting capabilities to be represented to upper management during preparation and after start accomplishing move mailbox task.
• Some Design best practices with Exchange 2010, Redundancy configurations (DAG) and DB size considerations , along with some basic DAS and disk recommendations given some basic scenario.
• Some backup recommendations , best practices
• Decommission check list , steps and KB links

 

• Anything I did not mention you guys would like to include, please leave some comments

oz Casey Dedeal,

MVP (Exchange)
MCITP (EMA), MCITP (SA)
MCSE 2003, M+, S+, MCDST
Security+, Project +, Server +

Http://smtp25.blogspot.com (Blog)

Http://telnet25.spaces.live.com (Blog)

Http://telnet25.wordpress.com (Blog

Exchange Online $5 , what is next ?

I talked about several times in regards to improvements in Exchange 2010 and tried to explain why this version is not similar to any other previous versions. The most significant difference is shining on ***Cost*** as I brought up. Here is the article talking about the cost of Exchange mailbox for $5 dollars per users ( BPOS) . The future of Exchange seems to be living in hosted services “ in the cloud “ as it was , intended. We have seen benefits moving into cloud computing and some of us to be honest not liked the idea of running e-mail within the cloud for many valid reasons, per scenario which I wont get into details here. The big and most important point to see or understand to me is that, the cloud computing is here and getting more and more powerfully and eventually, most critical applications will be running from cloud and getting ready for the cloud experience seems real. I am not big supporter of cloud computing but , I foreseen quickly changes in IT will always exist and keeping up with these changes always fun and new learning material is beneficial to most of people I work and worked with so far (-:

The drop from $10 per user per month to $5 for Exchange Online is significant because it brings Microsoft much closer to the price Google charges for its Google Apps Premier Edition (GAPE) suite that is anchored by Gmail. In addition, Microsoft said allowable mailbox sizes would go from 5GB to 25GB, a move that ups Microsoft’s stake in the so-called “bottomless” inbox war with other online providers.

Read more

oz Casey Dedeal,

MVP (Exchange)
MCITP (EMA), MCITP (SA)
MCSE 2003, M+, S+, MCDST
Security+, Project +, Server +

Http://smtp25.blogspot.com (Blog)

Http://telnet25.spaces.live.com (Blog)

Http://telnet25.wordpress.com (Blog

Microsoft Exchange couldn’t find a certificate that contains the domain name mail.smtp25.org in the personal…. EVENT ID 12014

Error:

Microsoft Exchange couldn’t find a certificate that contains the domain name mail.smtp25.org in the personal store on the local computer. Therefore, it is unable to support the STARTTLS SMTP verb for the connector HTS-IronPort with a FQDN parameter of mail.smtp25.gov. If the connector’s FQDN is not specified, the computer’s FQDN is used. Verify the connector configuration and the installed certificates to make sure that there is a certificate with a domain name for that FQDN. If this certificate exists, run Enable-ExchangeCertificate -Services SMTP to make sure that the Microsoft Exchange Transport service has access to the certificate key.

Solution

Open EMS

Get-ExchangeCertificate | FL

You will need to highlight the Thumbprint and paste into fallowing PS command

Enable-ExchangeCertificate –Thumbprint DBA3601A10DF90E0F00462C03940C90B8BA87292 -Services "SMTP"

Corresponding KB 555855

oz Casey Dedeal,

MVP (Exchange)
MCITP (EMA), MCITP (SA)
MCSE 2003, M+, S+, MCDST
Security+, Project +, Server +

Http://smtp25.blogspot.com (Blog)

Http://telnet25.spaces.live.com (Blog)

Http://telnet25.wordpress.com (Blog

EXCHANGE 2010 has been Released !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It has been so long wait for me to be honest (-: and finally Exchange 2010 had been officially released couple minutes ago

At 11:33am pacific time, the Exchange Product Group declared RTM for build 14.00.0639.021. Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 has left the building!

Thanks million for hard work put into this, this is for sure one of most exciting news we all have been waiting

Regards,

Ocd

oz Casey Dedeal,

MVP (Exchange)
MCITP (EMA), MCITP (SA)
MCSE 2003, M+, S+, MCDST
Security+, Project +, Server +

Http://smtp25.blogspot.com (Blog)

Http://telnet25.spaces.live.com (Blog)

Http://telnet25.wordpress.com (Blog

Exchange 2010 is COMING (-:

Below  article is taken from MSExcahnge team site, if you have not seen it yet , here it is.

Exchange 2010 is Code Complete and on its way to General Availability

We are happy to announce that Exchange 2010 is Code Complete!  Our senior leadership team has signed off on the final code, and it has been sent to our early adopters for one final look before its public release. This Release to Manufacturing (RTM) milestone means we are on our way to general availability and the launch at Tech·Ed Europe 2009 (http://www.microsoft.com/europe/teched/) in early November.

For those of you attending Tech·Ed in Berlin this year, be sure to check out the Unified Communications track, which is packed with technical content on Exchange 2010. And be sure to visit us at the Exchange product booth in the Exhibition Hall and let us know what you think of the product. Crystal Flores, who interviewed some of you on video at Tech·Ed North America earlier this year, will be on-hand in Berlin in a few weeks, armed with a camera and interview questions.  A group of us are also marching to Las Vegas for Exchange Connections the same week where our fearless leader Rajesh is giving the keynote.

http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2009/10/08/452775.aspx

Regards,

Ocd

oz Casey Dedeal,

MVP (Exchange)
MCITP (EMA), MCITP (SA)
MCSE 2003, M+, S+, MCDST
Security+, Project +, Server +

Http://smtp25.blogspot.com (Blog)

Http://telnet25.spaces.live.com (Blog)

Http://telnet25.wordpress.com (Blog

Exchange implementation over VM environment

This was asked on the MS forums and I tried to pass on some of my positive experience and end up writing long answer and of course decided to post it here , hoping I could give some positive feed back to some of you out there wondering how exchange would be performing on VM environment.

Dave, I understand you have your own reasons to go for SCC and wondering if CAS , HTS roles would be a good idea placing on virtual environment and my previous implementation experience might be able to answer your questions, hopefully (-:

I had to go for SCC for my own reasons as well, not the limitations but SAN appliance was offering perfect DR solutions (NETAPP) Snapmanager and I was extremely comfortable going for SCC for so many reasons I will just mention couple of them, Netapp has never failed me over 10 years, in multiple very large implementations and Snapmanager offered perfect DR solutions ( it does log shipping and just like CCR) and replicate SAN data to San data.

So I ended up placing two Hub servers on VM, two CAS servers on VM, and  two ISA servers, for redundancy, each server was placed on separate VM farm, so that if one VM farm goes down the mail infrastructure would work without any interruption. I used as mail gateways 2 Ironport on toe different data center and created two sent connectors one with high cost for redundancy. Both Ironport published outside to public DNS for redundancy .Although traditional DNS provides round robin response, in reality it is up to sender who to send the mail too and one thing I did not implement was road balancer in front of Ironport like F5 to be able to provide true redundancy (-: , ran out off $$$$

So VM servers has been working with no glitch over months, mail uptime is 99.9 , I have been extremely pleased with Exchange servers running on VMware ( HTS, CAS) no issues at all. Same goes for SCC , it has been running flawless fail over with 08 server is much better in my opinion, and maintenance is the most part I love about SCC.

This wasn’t the first time I placed Exchange servers on VM farm we have been doing this since Exchange 2003 (except mailbox server) we placed exchange 2003 servers in large environments  40.000 + mailboxes and they have been running with no issues over years (almost 6 years) ,

honestly I have not seen one single issue, but please remember all these implementation have been followed by MS best practices ( memory, HD, CPU etc.) except the VM part (-:

Good luck to you on your implementation

In addition Exchange 2010 is almost out, as I said so many times to me Exchange 2010 is the ***MOST ADVANCE*** version of messaging application ever, and due to critical changed have been done to the application itself , I strongly recommend everyone out there start planning to place Exchange 2010 in your business, it really wont be brainer to figured out business reasons and benefits running your messaging environment with next generation messaging application with incredible changes and stunning performance not to mention full redundancy out the box (-:

Many thanks to Exchange team for incredible hard work and providing us the best messaging application.

Regards,

Ocd

oz Casey Dedeal,

MVP (Exchange)
MCITP (EMA), MCITP (SA)
MCSE 2003, M+, S+, MCDST
Security+, Project +, Server +

Http://smtp25.blogspot.com (Blog)

Http://telnet25.spaces.live.com (Blog)

Http://telnet25.wordpress.com (Blog

How to set & Change sending and receiving mail size in Exchange 2007

Two ways to accomplish changing default size limits if you are on SP1 or later you can use GUI or Shell

• Organization Configuration
• Hub Transport
• Global Settings tab
• Transport Settings
• properties

1024 X 20 = 20480

10 meg	10240
20 meg	20480
30 meg	30720

Set-TransportConfig –MaxReceiveSize 40mb –MaxSendSize 40mb

 

here is the corresponding information

oz Casey Dedeal,

MVP (Exchange)
MCITP (EMA), MCITP (SA)
MCSE 2003, M+, S+, MCDST
Security+, Project +, Server +

Http://smtp25.blogspot.com (Blog)

Http://telnet25.spaces.live.com (Blog)

Http://telnet25.wordpress.com (Blog

This CA root Certificate is not trusted. To Enable trust, install this certificate in the Trusted Root Certification Authorities store.

On previous article we talked about , certificate warning

Information you exchange with this site cannot be viewed or changed by others. However, there is a problem with the site’s security certificate.

 

The errors was causing by expired internal certificate on the CAS server or servers, as the limitation of internal issued certificates, ( expire in 1 year) we need to renew the expired certificate.

here is the link for more information

Here is summary how to deal with this situation

• Get-ExchangeCertificate | FL  ( to see the status of cert installed and the thumbprint
• Get-ExchangeCertificate -Thumbprint 56BB128980C53883BBF09AA0281FBC6471FB04FE | New-Certificate

**** you need to place your thumbprint

• Get-ExchangeCertificate | FL  ( one more time to see the certs)

At this point you will see two of them , pay attention one is “Valid” one is not, it is Invalid.

you want to remove the Invalid one by typing

• Remove-ExchangeCertificate –thumbprint 56BB128980C53883BBF09AA0281FBC6471FB04FE

Dont forget again the replace the correct thumbprint

Now you might need to enable the new cert with services

• Enable-exchangecertificate -services IMAP, POP, UM, IIS, SMTP -Thumbprint DBA3601A10DF90E0F00462C03940C90B8BA87292

last time to make sure issue

• Get-ExchangeCertificate | FL 

verify the Cert is valid and correct services are enable to use this internal cert.

oz Casey Dedeal,

MVP (Exchange)
MCITP (EMA), MCITP (SA)
MCSE 2003, M+, S+, MCDST
Security+, Project +, Server +

Http://smtp25.blogspot.com (Blog)

Http://telnet25.spaces.live.com (Blog)

Http://telnet25.wordpress.com (Blog