Exchange server 2010 Interview Questions High Availability

Filed under: Exchange Server 2010 exchange2k10 @ 5:04 pm

1. What are the vision and Goals of Exchange Server 2010 high availability?

Vision deliver a fast, easy to deploy and operate, economical solution that can provide high
availability solution for exchange server

Goals 1. deliver a high availability and site resilience that is native to exchange

2. Enables less expensive and less complex storage

3. Simplify administration and reduce support cost

4. Increase end-end availability

5. Support exchange server 2010 online

2. What are the high availability solutions introduced in Exchange Server 2010?

1. Unified technology for high availability and site resilience

2. New framework for high creating high available mailboxes

3. Evolution of continuous replication

4. Can be deployed on a range of storage option

3. What are the High Availability features introduce in Exchange Server 2010?

Mailbox resiliency unified high availability and site resiliency

Database Availability Group a group of up to 16 Mailbox servers that holds the set of replicated
databases

Mailbox database copy a mailbox database (.edb files and log file) that is either active or passive
copy of the mailbox database

Database Mobility the ability of a single mailbox database to be replicated to and mounted on
other mailbox servers

RPC Client Access Service a Client Access Server feature that provides a MAPI endpoint for
outlook clients
Shadow redundancy a transport feature that provides redundancy for messages for the entire
time they are in transit

Incremental deployment the ability to deploy high availability or site resilience after the exchange
is installed

Exchange third party replication API an exchange provided API that enables use of third party
replication for DAG

4. What is high availability?

High Availability is a solution that provide data availability; service availability and automatic recover
from site failures

5. What is disaster recovery?

It is a procedure used to manually a recover a failure

6. What is site resilience?

Site Resilience is a disaster recovery solution used for recovery from site failure

7. What is switch over and failover?

A switch over is a manual activation one or more databases when failure occurs

A failover is an automatic activation of one or more databases after failure

8. What are the concepts deprecated in Exchange Server 2010?

1. Storage groups

2. Database identified by the servers which they live

3. Server names as part of database name

Clustered Mailbox server

1. Pre-installation of failover cluster

2. Running setup in failover mode

3. Moving a CMS identity between servers

 4. Shared storage

Two high availability copy limits

Private and public networks

9. Explain new features in Exchange Server 2010 High Availability?

1. No need to failover a server if a single database fails

2. Failover and switchover occurs at the database level and not the server level

3. With the new HA feature; we can have 100 databases per server

4. Databases are tied to specific server can be float across servers in organization

10. Give an idea on Exchange server 2007 High Availability Architecture changes?

In exchange server 2007 HA, there are four HA features available, they are LCR, SCR, SCC and CCR.
The concept of LCR and SCC has been completely removed in Exchange server 2010. The concept of
SCR and CCR are incorporated with the new HA feature (Database Availability Group) in Exchange
Server 2010.
Exchange Server 2010 Interview Question Management
Filed under: Exchange Server 2010 exchange2k10 @ 5:23 pm

1. Whats new in Exchange Management Console?

In Exchange Server 2010 management console, the following are the new features included

1. Built on remote power shell and RBAC

2. Multiple forest support

3. Cross premises Exchange 2010 Management includes Mailbox move

4. Recipient bulk edit

5. PowerShell command logging

2. What is Exchange Control Panel?

ECP its a new and simplified web based management console and its a browser based management
client for end user, administrators and specialist, ECP can be accessible via URL, browsers and outlook
2010, ECP deployed as part of the client access server role, Simplified user administration for
management tasks and its RBAC aware

3. Who can use ECP and what are the manageable options?

Specialist and administrators administrator can delegate to specialist e.g. help desk operators
Change user name password etc., department administrator change OU and e-discovery
administrators legal department.

End users comprehensive self-service tools for end users fetch phone number, changing name
and create groups

Hosted customers tenant administrators and tenant end users

4. What is ROLA BASED ACCESS CONTROL?

RBAC is new authorization model in Exchange Server 2010, easy to delegate and customize
permission; this replaced the permission model used in Exchange Server 2007. Your role is defined by
What you do RBAC includes self administration, used by EMC, EMS, and ECP

5. Who are all affected by RBAC in Exchange Server 2010?

Administrator Role Groups and Universal security groups

End User role assignment policy we can set read /write

6. How to delegate a Role ?

1. Create the management role

2. Change the new management roles entries by removing old entries

3. Create a management scope if required

4. Assign the new management role

7. What is Remote power shell in Exchange Server 2010?

In Exchange 2010, the management architecture is based on Remote PowerShell included with
Windows PowerShell 2.0. Remote PowerShell provides an RBAC-based permission model making it
possible to grant much more granular permissions (Exchange 2007 used ACLs), standard protocols
that makes it easier to manage Exchange 2010 servers through firewalls, and explicitly separates
client and server portion of the cmdlet processing

8. What are the supportable OS platforms to install Exchange Management console?

In Exchange server 2010 all functions are 64 bit only, admin tools requires 64 bit OS, Exchange
management tools can be installed in 64 bit OS like vista, server 2008 and windows 7,

Remote PowerShell management can be installed in x86 and x64 bit OS

Exchange Server 2010 Interview Questions Federation
Filed under: Exchange Server 2010 exchange2k10 @ 4:45 pm

1. What is federated sharing?

Federated Sharing allows easy sharing of availability information, calendar, and contacts with
recipients in external federated organizations

2. What are the options shared in federated sharing?

1. Free busy information

2. Calendar and contact sharing

3. Sharing policy

3. How federated sharing works in Exchange server 2010?

4. Explain the operation of federation?

5. What are the benefits of federation?

Allow users to act on behalf of specific user

Specific user identified by E-mail address

User not prompted for credentials

Reduces explicit trust management

 No AD trusts, service to cloud accounts to manage

Minimizes certificate exchanges

Verifies domain ownership

6. Explain the federation commands in Exchange server 2010?

Establish federation trust = New-federation Trust

Install signing certificate on CAS servers

Exchange certificate with federation gateway

Prove domain ownership = domainname.com IN TXT AppId = xxxxxxxx

Create DNS TXT record

Add domain to trust = set-federatedOrganizationIdentifier

Add-federatedDomain

Must be accepted domain

7. How to establish federated sharing in Exchange Server 2010?

1. Create trust with certificate exchange

2. Prove domain ownership

3. Add domains

8. What is Microsoft Federation Gateway?

Exchange Server 2010 uses Microsoft Federation Gateway (MFG), an identity service that runs in the
cloud, as the trust broker. Exchange organizations wanting to use Federation establish a Federation
Trust with MFG, allowing it to become a federation partner to the Exchange organization. The trust
allows users authenticated by Active Directory , known as the identity provider (IP), to be issued
Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) delegation tokens by MFG. The delegation tokens allow
users from one federated organization to be trusted by another federated organization. With MFG
acting as the trust broker, organizations are not required to establish multiple individual trust
relationships with other organizations. Users can access external resources using a single sign-on
(SSO) experience
9. What is Federation Trust?

A Federation Trust is established between an Exchange organization and MFG by exchanging the
organizations certificate with MFG, and retrieving MFGs certificate and federation metadata. The
certificate is used for encrypting tokens

10. What is Sharing Policy?

Sharing policies allow you to control how users in your organization can share calendar and contact
information with users outside the organization. To provision recipients to use a particular sharing
policy

11. Prerequisites to create a Sharing Policy

A federation trust has been created between your Exchange 2010 organization and
Microsoft Federation Gateway, and the Federated Organization Identifier is configured.

Although you can create a sharing policy for any external domain, recipients from the
specified domain can access your users information only if they have a mailbox in an
Exchange 2010 organization and their domain is federated

Exchange Server 2010 Interview Question Archiving

Filed under: Exchange Server 2010 exchange2k10 @ 4:42 pm

This topic holds the interview questions and answers on Archiving features in Exchange Server 2010

1. Why Archive?

1. Growing E-Mail Volume everyone wants to have more E-mail because of this the
storage, Backup disk should be increases

2. Performance and storage issue increase in Storage costs

3. Mailbox quota users are forced to manage quota

4. PSTs quota management often results in growing PSTs outlook Auto Archive

5. Discovery and Compliance issues PSTs difficult to discovery centrally, regulatory

retention schedules contribute to further volume/storage issues

2. How Archiving improved in Exchange Server 2010?

Archiving improved by providing larger mailbox architecture, simple migration of PSTs back to server,
discovery options, retention policies and legal hold.

Large mailbox Architecture maintains performance and provides option for DAS-SATA storage to
reduce costs

Archiving enables simple migration of PSTs back to server. If the archiving option sin enabled for a
user, a new Mailbox will be created to the user name archive in which the user can set retention
policies to move the mails to archive mailbox or the admin can set retention policies for the user
mailbox.

Archiving simplifies discovery, retention and legal hold

3. What are the archiving options introduced in Exchange Server 2010?

1. Personal Archive secondary Mailbox Node, they are the PST files of primary
Mailbox

2. Retention Policies folder/item level and archive/delete policies

3. Multi-Mailbox search Role based GUI, admin can assign this permission to legal
team

4. Legal Hold monitor or control a user from delete a mail by legal hold and
searchable with Multi Mailbox Search

5. Journaling Journal de-duplication (unwanted journaling on distributed mails). One

copy of journal per database and

6. Journal decryption HT role will do the decryption and send the decrypted copy for
journaling

4. What is personal archive in Exchange Server 2010 archiving?

It is a Secondary mailbox that is configured by the administrator, this appears along with users
primary mailbox in outlook or OWA, and the PST files can be dragged and dropped to personal archive
Mailbox. Mails in Primary mailbox can be moved automatically using Retention policies. Archive quota
can be set separately from primary mailbox
5. What are retention policies? And what we can do with retention policies in Exchange
Server 2010?

Retention policy is an option to move/ delete certain mails by applying rules. We can set retention
policies at Item or Folder level. Policies can be applied directly within e-mail. We can set expiration
date stamped directly on e-mail. Policies can be applied to all email within a folder. We can configure
delete policy to delete the mail after certain period and Archive policies to move certain mails with the
certain period to archive mailbox

6. What are the Retention Policies in Exchange Server 2010?

1. Move Policy automatically moves messages to the messages to the archive Mailbox
with the options of 6 months, 1 year, 2 years, 5 years and never 2 years is default.
Move mailbox policies helps keep mailbox under quota. This works like outlook Auto
Archive without creating PSTs

2. Delete Policy automatically deletes messages. Delete policies are global. Removes
unwanted items

3. Move + Delete policy automatically moves messages to archive after X months

and deletes from archive after Y Months. We can set policy priority: Explicit policies
over default policies; longer policies apply over shorted policies

7. What is Multi Mailbox Search?

This option delegated access to search to HR, compliance, legal manager. Administrator has to provide
access permission on to use this feature, this will provide an option to search all mail items ( email, IM
contacts, calendar) across primary mailbox, archives. The filtering option in Multi Mailbox search
includes sender, receiver, expire policy, message size, send/receive date, cc/bcc, regular expressions,
IRM protected Items

8. What are E-Discovery features?

Following are the E-Discovery features introduced in Exchange Server 2010

1. Search specific Mailboxes or DLS

2. Export search results to a mailbox or SMTP Address

3. Request email alert when search completes

4. Search results organized by per original hierarchy

Lot more will be added in the original release

9. What is Legal Hold and what are the features in Legal Hold?

New feature in Exchange Server 2010 to monitor or control a user from deleting a Mail or Mailbox, the
features available in Legal Hold are

1. Copy edited and deleted item this option is in Exchange server 2007 to hold the
auto deleted items

2. Set duration for auto delete indefinite or specify time period

3. Auto alert notification sends alerts to users that they are on hold, eliminates
manual process

4. Search dumpster use multi mailbox search to retrieve deleted/edited items

indexed in dumpster folder

10. What is journaling and what are the journaling features in Exchange Server 2010?

Journaling is an option to track mails from particular user or from a group of users. The New Features
in Journaling for Exchange server 2010 are

1. Transport Journaling ability to journal individual Mailboxes or SMTP address and

also this gives a detailed report per To/Cc//Bcc/Alt-Recipient and DL expansion

2. Journal report de duplication reduces duplication of journal reports. Exchange

server 2010 creates one report per message

11. What is journal decryption?

Journal decryption is a new feature in Exchange Server 2010, if a user sends an encrypted message to
recipient and if journaling was enabled for that user, then the Hub transport Server decrypts the
message and sends that decrypted message for journaling. The intended recipient will receive the
encrypted message

12. What is Set Quota in Archive management?

With Mailbox quota Management, we can assign mailbox size for a user. This option can be enabled
from the properties of the user account, and the default settings to Mailbox quota is 10 GB