Exchange server 2013 preview is now available and you can download the bits from here.

In this article we would discuss about deployment scenarios,steps to deploy Exchange Server 2013 and finally post installation checks. Since,Exchange Server 2013 preview does not support upgrade scenarios, we would cover
the upgrade scenarios later in future article.

Steps discussed in this article may differ with the deployment steps after the release of Exchange Server 2013 RTM version.

Before we deploy the first Exchange Server 2013, let us first understand the deployment and co-existence scenarios and pre-requisites to install Exchange server 2013 preview.

CO-Existence Scenarios

Exchange 2013 can be deployed and can co-exist in the following scenarios:

 To summarize:

• Exchange 2003 server and earlier versions are not supported.

System Requirements

Operating System requirement

Exchange Server 2013 can be installed on following 64 bit operating system:

• Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1
• Windows Server 2012 

Domain and Forest Functional Level

• Forest functional level should be Windows Server 2003 Native
• Domain Functional level should be Windows server 2003 Native
• Schema Master should be on Windows 2003 Server SP2 or later version
• Global Catalog should be Windows 2003 SP2 Serveror later version
• Exchange Site should have atleast one Domain Controller and one Global Catalog Server running on Windows 2003 SP2 or later version

Installation steps

The installation task itself is simple and self-explanatory. One just has to select the roles required to be installed. So without taking more time, let’s look at the deployment steps.

Install the Windows features using the following commands mentioned in the screen shot.

 
 
To Prepare Active Directory Schema and Active Directory forest, run the commands as shown below

After the above steps are complete, start the Exchange 2013 setup.

Installation Steps explained

While the step takes time to complete, let us look the setup process in detail to understand what happens in a given step. It is quite possible that the setup may be interrupted due to various reasons and the installation may fail. Unlike previous versions of Exchange, Exchange Server 2013 setup within the setup tool does not provide detailed information about what is happening at various steps. So In case, the step fails at step 5 or step 7, one need to understand what task was running in the background and what was the possible cause of failure.

• Exchange Server 2013 Preview CAS server role has 10 step of installation process
• Exchange Server 2013 Preview Mailbox Server role has 12 step installation process
• Exchange Server 2013 Preview Mailbox & CAS both together has 14 step installation process

Let us look the setup process in detail to understand what happens in background,

Step1: Prepares for the setup.

• Checks the source installation package and
  verifies it against software restriction policy
• Also verifies what roles to be installed during
  the installation

  

• 
• In the above screenshots, highlighted shows the output from two different setup files describing what roles would be installed on the box

Step 2: Stopping Services.

• At this step, the setup would create and then stop the following 3 services
  • msftesql-Exchange (Microsoft Search Exchange)
  • HostControllerService (Host Controller Service
    for Exchange)
  • SearchExchangeTracing (Tracing Service for
    search in Exchange)
• Here is an output from the Exchange Server setuplog file
• 

Step 3: Copying Exchange Files

• Copies the installation file from the source to the target. By default the target location is C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\V15

Step 4: Language Files

• Checks the installation language type and accordingly installs the required language pack.

• 
   

Step 5: Restoring Services

• Checks if the below services are running or not. If not, setup would start them. Generally at this step, these services would be restart.
  • Remote Registry
  • WMI
  • Microsoft Exchange Service Host

 
Step 6: Language Configuration

• Basis on the step 4 above, appropriate language option is configured to be installed

 
Step 7: Exchange Management Tools

• Installs the Exchange management tools on the local system. This includes Exchange Management Shell and Exchange Management Toolbox

 
Step 8: Mailbox Role Component 1 (Transport Server components)

• Registers and configures following services related to Hub Transport Service
  • Microsoft Exchange Active Directory Topology
  • Microsoft Exchange Anti-spam update
  • Microsoft Exchange Diagnostics
  • Microsoft Exchange EdgeSync
  • Microsoft Exchange Health Manager
  • Microsoft Exchange Monitoring
  • Microsoft Exchange Search Host Controller
  • Microsoft Exchange Service host
  • Microsoft Exchange Transport
  • Microsoft Exchange Transport Log Search
  • Microsoft Forefront Filtering Management Service

Step 9: Mailbox Role Component 2 (CAS Server components)

• Registers and configures following servicesrelated to Client Access Service
  • Microsoft Exchange IMAP4 Backend
  • Microsoft Exchange Mailbox Replication
  • Microsoft Exchange POP3 Backend
  • Microsoft Exchange RPC Client Access

Step 10: Mailbox Role Component 3 (Unified Messaging Components)

• Registers and configures following services related to Unified Messaging Service
  • Microsoft Exchange Unified Messaging

 
Step 11: Mailbox Role Component 4 (Mailbox Server components)

• Registers and configures the services related to Mailbox server Service
  • Microsoft Exchange Information Store
  • Microsoft Exchange Mailbox Assistance
  • Microsoft Exchange Mailbox Transport Delivery
  • Microsoft Exchange Mailbox Transport Submission
  • Microsoft Exchange Replication
  • Microsoft Exchange Server Extension for Windows Server Backup
  • Microsoft Exchange Throttling

Step 12: Client Access Role Component 1 (Transport Server components)

• Registers and configures services related to Front end Transport Server
  • Microsoft Exchange Active Directory Topology
  • Microsoft Exchange Diagnostics
  • Microsoft Exchange Health Manager
  • Microsoft Exchange Monitoring
  • Microsoft Exchange Front End Transport
  • Microsoft Exchange Unified Messaging Call Router

Step 13: Client Access Role Component 2 (CAS Server components)

• Registers and configures services related to Front End Client Access Server
  • Microsoft Exchange IMAP4
  • Microsoft Exchange POP3
  • Microsoft Exchange Service Host

 
Step 14: Finalizing the setup

• Setup would confirm the installation completion process

Post Installation Steps

After the setup is complete, you need to register ASP.Net with the IIS. Once registered, you have to restart the IIS services too. To do so, follow the screenshots given below.

Note: Registering ASP is required in the preview version which may no longer be required after the release of Beta 2 or RTM.

Check if the Services are configured and required services are running

If CAS Server is installed, then following services would be configured.

• Microsoft Exchange Active Directory Topology
• Microsoft Exchange Diagnostics
• Microsoft Exchange Frontend Transport
• Microsoft Exchange Health Manager
• Microsoft Exchange Monitoring
• Microsoft Exchange IMAP4
• Microsoft Exchange POP3
• Microsoft Exchange Service Host
• Microsoft Exchange Unifies Messaging Call Router

If Mailbox Server is installed, then following services would be configured.

• Microsoft Exchange Active Directory Topology
• Microsoft Exchange Anti-spam update
• Microsoft Exchange Diagnostics
• Microsoft Exchange EdgeSync
• Microsoft Exchange Health Manager
• Microsoft Exchange IMAP4 Backend
• Microsoft Exchange Information Store
• Microsoft Exchange Mailbox Assistance
• Microsoft Exchange Mailbox Replication
• Microsoft Exchange Mailbox Transport Delivery
• Microsoft Exchange Mailbox Transport Submission
• Microsoft Exchange Monitoring
• Microsoft Exchange POP3 Backend
• Microsoft Exchange Replication
• Microsoft Exchange RPC Client Access
• Microsoft Exchange Search
• Microsoft Exchange Search Host Controller
• Microsoft Exchange Server Extension for Windows Server Backup
• Microsoft Exchange Service host
• Microsoft Exchange Throttling
• Microsoft Exchange Transport
• Microsoft Exchange Transport Log Search
• Microsoft Exchange Unified Messaging
• Microsoft Forefront Filtering Management Service

This conlcudes the deployment steps for Exchange Server 2013

Hope the information helps.

If you notice, I mentioned the word ‘missing’ and not ‘deleted’. I specifically did not mention ‘deleted’ because these system folders are not allowed to be deleted under any normal circumstance.

In such situation, it is often noticed that the administrator would generally help the user by re-creating the folder with the same name and would fail to do so. As a last resort, the administrator might take the backup of the mailbox into PST, delete the user mailbox and re-create one for the user. This would definitely resolve the problem.  But don’t you think there should be an option to get through this with less effort and in less time.

Here’s what you can do. And hey, you don’t have to be an Exchange administrator to do so. As an end user, even you can solve these problems provided you have the rights on the mailbox you need to work on.

Let’s look at it with an example.

For some unknown reason, I cannot see deleted items folder in my mailbox using outlook, OWA or even on my phone and here’s the screen shot for all of them.

'Deleted Items' Folder missing from Outlook

'Deleted Items' Folder missing from OWA

'Deleted Items' Folder missing in OMA

In my case, even If I try re-creating the folder, it doesn’t allow me. If I do so, I get the information as shown in the screen shot.

With the information it shows, it is obvious that the folder with the same name does exist somewhere within the root of the mailbox but is not seen. So, how do we recover it?

We would be using a tool called MFCMAPI.exe to resolve this. The tool is available for download from https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=2953.

Download the tool on the local system and open it. As shown below.

After clicking on ‘logon’, you may be asked for the profile to choose. This is in case you have multiple outlook profiles configured on your machine.

Once your profile is selected, it would show you the accounts which are configured within the profile.

Here, in my case, you can see my corporate mailbox, my Hotmail mailbox, my corporate public folder and a PST associated to my mailbox. I would select the mailbox I need to work on and …

I would be able to see my mailbox in an absolute raw format as shown in the screen shot.

Within the Root-Mailbox, I have IPM_SUBTREE and within that, I have all my folders I normally see within outlook or OWA.

Since I have problem with my ‘Deleted Items’ folder, I would select the folder and on the right, I should see the properties of that respective folder. One property it has is “PR_ATTR_HIDDEN” and it has a Boolean value of either true or false. By default the value should be false. The folder is hidden as due to some reason the value changed to true.

Once, you set the value to false, you may want to close the outlook client and open again for the changes to reflect.

You would now be able to see your ‘missing’ folder in outlook, OWA and other applications you have been using.

Important note: As the tool can be used by an end user on the local system and on a malbox user is owner of, it is highly recommended that the tool be only used in guidance of the administrators as it has the capabilities to make things worse if used incorrectly.

Hope this helps.

We would be using the selected email in the above screenshot which would be deleted and then recovered.

Currently we would use outlook Web App to delete this email assuming that the user is a sales user and has access to his email through Outlook Web App only.

In previous versions of Exchange (like Exchange 2000/2003/2007), it was possible for the end user to recover deleted emails from the dumpster using OWA and outlook both. This feature is now restricted to Outlook ONLY in Exchange 2010.

Since the user is using OWA in this case, it is not possible for him to use the “Recover deleted Items” feature and hence the only option left is calling the helpdesk and asking the exchange administrator to recover it from the database.

The user has just used shift delete button to delete the email in picture below and the email is not visible in deleted items folder as well. This is where the email has by-passed the “deleted items” folder and is gone into the dumpster of the user mailbox.

Now…the real game starts for the administrator. Until exchange 2007, there was only one option left and it was restoring from the previous backups and retrieving the deleted email.

But now, the exchange 2010 Discovery Management feature would allow the administrator to search within the user’s mailbox (including dumpster) and pull the email item in question. Let’s see how.

NOTE: The administrator who will perform the task to recover this deleted item for the user should be a member of the “Discovery Management” group so that it can perform searches within the user’s mailbox. I have already added the administrator to the group from the Exchange control Panel and this is how it looks.

Now, let’s quickly jump onto the Exchange management shell to perform the recovery steps.
In the shell, we would give the command as shown in the below screenshot.

Let me first explain you the command we just gave.

Search-mailbox: as the word sounds, it is used to search within user’s mailbox.

-Identity: Here we need to give the mailbox name which we need to search. In this example, we searched the mailbox of user “hiteg”.

-searchquery: here, we can give the details like the subject of the email, the FROM field, the TO field of the email, etc. You can also think as of it is a search filter. In this example, we are looking for an email item with the subject “company deal”

-targetmailbox: the target mailbox would always be “discovery search mailbox”.

-targetfolder: the target folder can be any folder/subfolder where you would want the search query results to be exported within the “discovery search mailbox” mailbox. In this example, we want the data to be exported to the “Hiteg_Data_Recovered” folder within the “discovery search mailbox” mailbox.

Now that we have got the results, we let us login to the “Discovery search mailbox” mailbox and check the email item that we just recovered.

NOTE: By default, no user/administrator has rights to login to the “Discovery search mailbox” mailbox and access data from it. Users who are members of the “Discovery management” group ONLY have rights to login to the “Discovery search mailbox” mailbox. In this example, the administrator account has the rights to login to the “Discovery search mailbox” mailbox. Hence I would use the administrator’s credentials to login to the “Discovery search mailbox” mailbox.

In the above picture, you can see the “Discovery search mailbox” mailbox and a subfolder with the name “Hiteg_Data_Recovered” and the actual email item which was deleted.

Hey, wait. We are still not done. The email is still not in the actual user’s mailbox. Right now, it is just in the mailbox of “Discovery search mailbox”. We now need to move this email item from the “Discovery search mailbox” mailbox to “hiteg” mailbox and to do so, we have numerous ways to do it. I would follow the simple way again.

I hope by now you are very much comfortable with the only command we gave above to recover the email so I would use the same command. We would now search the “Discovery search mailbox” mailbox and we would target the “hiteg” mailbox for any search results.

Here’s how we do it.

We literally gave the same command and just changed the source and the destination mailbox locations.


Also, If you check the output of the command, interestingly, you would see that the “ResultItemCount” is “2” . But we actually had just one email to be recovered.. rite?

Well, when we recover from the “Discovery Search Mailbox” mailbox, there’s a summary email also which automatically gets created to the actual email.

Let’s login to the mailbox of HITEG and check if he recovered the email.

The above screen shot shows the search result summary and the below email was the actual email which was deleted.

Isn’t this wonderful!!! The administrator had to give just two commands and the email is back in the user’s mailbox.

Note: the above task can be performed through Exchange control panel as well if one is not comfortable in using Exchange management shell.

Well…since I am done with recovering single item in exchange 2010, I would come up with another blog and another topic to discuss.

I hope the topic was helpful