The Exchange Server Troubleshooting Assistant (ExTRA)

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Microsoft’s Exchange Best Practices Analyzer (ExBPA) has been around for a few years now and it’s an excellent preventative maintenance and troubleshooting resource. ExBPA was recently joined by the Exchange Server Troubleshooting Assistant (ExTRA) which, according to the Microsoft website:

“[…] Programmatically executes a set of troubleshooting steps to identify the root cause of performance, mail flow, and database mounting issues. The tool automatically determines what set of data is required to troubleshoot the identified symptoms and collects configuration data, performance counters, event logs and live tracing information from an Exchange server and other appropriate sources. The tool analyzes each subsystem to determine individual bottlenecks and component failures, then aggregates the information to provide root cause analysis.”

ExTRA v1.1 brings together a number of troubleshooting tools: the Exchange Server Disaster Recovery Analyzer (ExDRA); the Exchange Server Performance Troubleshooting Analyzer (ExPTA); and the Exchange Server Mail Flow Analyzer (ExMFA). Furthermore, ExTRA is integrated in the ESM Toolbox for Exchange Server 2007.

Beware of automatic updates and hosted virtual machines

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Whilst many organisations will have strict policies regarding patching, others will not and I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve found myself troubleshooting strange errors in a virtual machine, only to find that the underlying host operating system has automatically updated itself and is waiting for a restart. Consequently, it’s worth mentioning that automatic updates and hosted virtualisation server products (e.g. Microsoft Virtual Server or VMware Server) do not mix well. Of course, those running a non-hosted virtualisation solution (like VMware ESX server) won’t have this issue; although even ESX needs patching from time to time.

Microsoft’s support policy for software running in a non-Microsoft VM

Posted on By Mark Wilson

I’m troubleshooting some problems with my Exchange server at the moment and the ExBPA led me to a knowledge base article about running Exchange Server in a virtualised environment. Whilst reading that, I can across Microsoft knowledge base article 897615, which discusses the support policy for Microsoft software running in non-Microsoft hardware virtualisation software.

I’ll paraphrase it as “If you have Premier support and you use our virtualisation software, we’ll try and work out what the issue is (we use Virtual Server 2005 R2 to do that anyway). If you don’t have Premier support, then you should, and you need to proove that it’s nothing to do with virtualisation (i.e. can you replicate the issue on physical hardware). If you have a Premier agreement but you use another vendor’s virtualisation software then we’ll try our best, but you’ll probably have to proove the problem is not caused by the virtualisation software”. The crux of this is the statement that:

“Microsoft does not test or support Microsoft software running in conjunction with non-Microsoft hardware virtualization software.”

This might be worth considering whilst selecting which (if any) virtualisation platform is right for an organisation.