Tools for Troubleshooting Issues with High Availability Deployments

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Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 will reach end of support on April 11, 2017. To stay supported, you will need to upgrade. For more information, see Resources to help you upgrade your Office 2007 servers and clients.

 

Applies to: Exchange Server 2007, Exchange Server 2007 SP1, Exchange Server 2007 SP2, Exchange Server 2007 SP3

This topic describes tools that are useful in troubleshooting issues with Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 high availability configurations.

Exchange Management Console Toolbox

The Exchange Management Console provides you with a central resource of diagnostic, troubleshooting, and recovery tools in the Toolbox. These tools address issues that you may encounter with configuration management, mail flow, performance, and disaster recovery. For high availability issue troubleshooting, these tools are helpful. For more information about the tools available in the Toolbox, see Using the Toolbox.

The following tools are useful in troubleshooting networking issues that you may experience in your Exchange high availability deployment:

  • Network Monitor

  • LogParser

  • Netstat

  • Exchange Management Shell commands

Network Monitor

Network Monitor (Netmon.exe) is one of the Microsoft Windows Server 2003 administrative tools. Netmon is used to monitor network traffic at the packet level. Netmon is not installed by default, but you can install it yourself from Control Panel. Netmon is useful for identifying what network activities are occurring at the same time an issue is occurring. For example, you can use Netmon to capture network activity on the Exchange server and correlate the times of events in the event logs with the network activities that appear in the Netmon capture. (For example, Exchange servers contacting domain controllers, global catalogs, or Domain Name System (DNS) servers.)

Procedure

To install Network Monitor

  1. Open Add or Remove Programs

  2. Click Add/Remove Windows Components.

  3. Select the Management and Monitoring Tools option, and then click Details.

  4. Select the box for Network Monitor Tools, and then click OK.

  5. Click Next to initiate the configuration change.

  6. After the installation has completed, click Finish.

Log Parser

LogParser (LogParser.exe or LogParser.dll) is a helpful tool that can help you analyze Netmon captures. LogParser can read Netmon .cap files natively. It can also export .cap data to .csv files for use in Microsoft Excel. For example, to export the Netmon capture named NetMonCapture.cap to the .csv file named NetMonOutput.csv, open a Command Prompt window and run the following command:

C:\Program Files\Log Parser 2.2>logparser -i:NETMON -o:CSV "select * INTO NetMonOutput.csv from NetMonCapture.cap"

The path location in the preceding example is the default installation location for LogParser. If you install LogParser in a non-default location, you must specify the installed location. To download LogParser, see Log Parser 2.2.

Netstat

Netstat is a command that you issue from a command prompt. It enumerates current network connections and lists them with information about process ID, protocol, local address, foreign address, and state. For a list of options, type netstat /? at a command prompt.

Event Logging Levels for the Microsoft Exchange Replication Service and the Windows Cluster Service

You must use the Exchange Management Shell to set the Microsoft Exchange Replication Service (MSExchangeRepl) logging level (for either LCR or CCR configurations) and the Windows Cluster service event logging level for CCR. The possible logging levels that you can set are Lowest, Low, Medium, High, and Expert. The default logging level is Lowest.

Note

You should always return the logging level to the default setting after completing your troubleshooting activities.

The following examples show you how to use the Get-EventLogLevel and the Set-EventLogLevel cmdlets in the Exchange Management Shell to increase logging levels. The first example applies to the Microsoft Exchange Replication Service and shows how to increase the logging level to Expert:

Get-EventLogLevel -id:"MSExchange Repl" | Set-EventLogLevel -Level expert

The following example shows you how to increase the logging level for the Cluster service to Expert:

Get-EventLogLevel -id:"MSExchange Cluster" | Set-EventLogLevel -Level expert

Tools for Troubleshooting Single Copy Clusters

You can use the Cluster Server Recovery Utility (ClusterRecovery.exe) and the Cluster Diagnostics and Verification Tool (ClusDiag.exe) to troubleshoot single copy clusters. In addition, you can look at the Windows event log and the Cluster.log file to examine events that occur in the single copy cluster.

Cluster Server Recovery Utility

The Cluster Recovery utility is a tool that collects several pieces of functionality that are particularly useful in a server cluster after a disk on the shared bus has failed. The Cluster Server Recovery utility is included in the Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit Tools. Alternatively, you can download the Cluster Server Recovery utility from Cluster Server Recovery Utility (ClusterRecovery.exe).

Cluster Diagnostics and Verification Tool

The Cluster Diagnostics and Verification tool performs basic verification and configuration analysis checks on a pre-production server cluster and creates log files to help system administrators identify configuration issues prior to deployment in a production environment. ClusDiag can capture all relevant log files and event logs from each node of a server cluster and merge them into a single file for easy analysis and troubleshooting. Administrators can analyze these log files with built-in filtering, merging, and bookmarking functionality, and generate various diagnostics reports. ClusDiag can also create text-based and graphical reports of cluster disk and network configurations as well as generate a graphical view of the cluster resource dependency tree.

You can download Clusdiag from Cluster Diagnostics and Verification Tool (ClusDiag.exe).

For More Information

For more information about troubleshooting issues with an Exchange Server 2007 high availability configuration, see the following topics: