Well I guess the title of this article perhaps might belong in a techno nerdy film (or perhaps not); but as it indeed suggests I have been playing around with Exchange 2007 SP2 (like many Exchange admins) but more to the point the new (and long awaited) VSS plug in for Windows 2008 Server.

The Exchange Plug-in for Windows 2008 contained within Exchange SP 2 has been on my radar over the last few weeks, mainly because I was asked to write a separate article for a very well known technical website (more on this in a later post I cannot say too much here) based around Exchange 2007 Disaster Recovery and as with all my articles I had performed quite a bit of research.

For those of you whom have missed it – or indeed just perhaps might not care, Service Pack 1 for Exchange 2007 was a but of a milestone for Exchange Server as it was made compatible (or perhaps more to the point was supported on Windows 2008 SP1) – however; public outcry was not far behind this particular event; as many Exchange Admin quickly noticed that in a rather cruel deviation from history there was no native support to back-up Exchange within Windows.

For the benefit of those of you whom have not been with us for the last 10 years  in essence; Windows Server from Windows NT 4.0 and Exchange 5.5 once Exchange was installed on the host platform the native Windows back-up tool was upgraded to support Exchange backup. This was enjoyed all the way through many versions of Windows and Exchange up to Windows 2003 x64 and Exchange 2007 (RTM, SP1 and 2) however in the event of Windows 2008 support for Exchange 2007 (from Exchange SP1) this support stopped.

The only way in which you could back-up Exchange here on in (on a Windows 2008 platform) was via a file backup – which of course meant dismounting your databases – performing the backup and then remount databases – all possible, but a little messy and meant downtime on your store.

Quick tip this one, and indeed one which solves a pretty simple issue when trying to remote to a server which has Powershell v2.0 installed.

To give you a very quick overview I have been writing a few scripts for Exchange which execute both locally and on remote machines to perform certain tasks (where the remote execution takes advantage of the secure remote management features which Powershell v2.0 provides via WinRM). The Servers which I have been using these scripts on are Windows 2008 based with Exchange 2007.

Initially when executing  the remote portions of my scripts (at the point where I attempt to establish a remote Powershell session to one of the servers) I would receive the following error message:

PS C:\> New-PSSession -ComputerName lab-dc-01
[lab-dc-01] Connecting to remote server failed with the following error message : The client cannot connect to the destination specified in the request. Verify that the service on the destination is running and is accepting requests. Consult the logs and documentation for the WS-Management service running on the destination, most commonly IIS or WinRM. If the destination is the WinRM service, run the following command on the destination to analyze and configure the WinRM service: "winrm quickconfig". For more information, see the about_Remote_Troubleshooting Help topic.
    + CategoryInfo          : OpenError: (System.Manageme....RemoteRunspace:RemoteRunspace) [], PSRemotingTransportException
    + FullyQualifiedErrorId : PSSessionOpenFailed
PS C:\>