Robert MacLean

The Zen of Hosting: Part 5 - HMC and Exchange

Published on Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

A little note from the editor (he he—like I have an editor). The previous post was late due to circumstances I can’t even explain, sorry about that (to make it up, I’ve posted this a few hours earlier). Also, if you’ve been reading on the site, the formatting has been slightly off due to security permissions, which I’ll remember to fix in the future. Anyway, hope you enjoy the posts, and now back to the regular scheduled (he he) broadcast.

So part 4 was a really massive post because there’s so much that HMC does for AD, but this post is a lot shorter because HMC provides similar functionality for Exchange as AD. The primary similarity is that it uses properties in AD to completely separate companies so that even on a GAL level you cannot see other companies’ email addresses (see the end of part 4 about the security issues).

Exchange management is also an area where I learned not to trust that the management web interface is showing me everything HMC could do, because in reality, it’s just a subset. For instance, if you want to create a distribution group, there’s no option in the interface—or even in the samples. However, if you dig through the SDK, you’ll find the details of how it can be done, and the SDK has a sample in the documentation that you can copy, paste, and edit to use.

The biggest headache with the Exchange deployment for me wasn’t HMC, which was really easy in comparison, but setting up the auto-discover system and the certificates for that. At the end of the day, there were three critical things I used to get it sorted:

  1. Making sure DNS was correctly set up. I’ll cover DNS issues in part 11 (yeah, I’ve written that far in advance).
  2. Using http://www.testexchangeconnectivity.com—a prototype website from the Microsoft Exchange team—which allows you to run tests of common Exchange systems over the internet.
  3. Lastly, setting up the auto-discover redirect, which isn’t normally needed but is essential in a hosted environment. The reason it’s so essential is that unless you’re going to automate your DNS provisioning (which you should anyway—and HMC doesn’t do this out of the box) and automate the purchasing of SAN (Server Alternative Name) certificates—which are extremely expensive and I wouldn’t know where to start with that (BizTalk, maybe?!)—you’re going to have to set up a single certificate and direct all customers through one interface. The easiest way to do it is from an article I found on the Exchange team blog: More on Exchange 2007 and certificates—with real-world scenarios (search for The Other Method).