In the first part of this article – which I wrote many moons ago (located here: Exchange 2007 CCR – Going Pro (as in Production) – Part 1 – some food for thought (or perhaps not)…) I rambled about a number of things which initially stemmed from the perspective of should you consider CCR in a production environment and indeed the considerations which you should take into account before setting out.

Given that the purpose of this series is to run through CCR in production I will now assume that you would like to implement CCR in a live environment – and therefore I would like to share further with you one of my experiences of such an implementation.

As mentioned the primary focus of the first part was to get people thinking about if they should explore use CCR as their mailbox server of choice and explored the base hardware and indeed data centre environmental issues which might influence your choice.

I finished the first part of the article with the following summary statement which gave the following overview of part 2 (which your are reading now):

I hope that you have enjoyed this part as much I have writing it. I know that it is a bit of a ramble – but I hope that it gets people think about their CCR deployments and what they want to achieve, perhaps some of you will now not go with CCR – perhaps some of you will now change the way in which they look at it. Remember that CCR does not have to be used in isolation – you can combine it with SCR for example to further increase recovery times but reduce other costs.

In the next part I would like to further expand on effective cost cutting and go through some recommendations for recovery – I will then move onto builds and scripts which might help you along the way.

A long time ago I posted a VBSCRIPT and CSV file which when executed created over 300 user accounts in Active Directory which was designed to give you a number of test accounts which could be used within a LAB environment to test Exchange Server.
As mentioned the original script was based around VBSCRIPT and Exchange 2003 and also required a little bit of manual intervention in order for it to work within your specific environment.

Predominantly it was designed to work against Windows 2000 / 2003 server AD environments – however as time has elapsed its underling functionality has been superseded with the advent of Powershell / Windows 2008 and Exchange 2007 and 2010 to the point that under certain system configurations it will no longer work.

Therefore given the above (and that I have been rebuilding my test lab) I am pleased to present to you with an updated CSV file and script (where the script is now Powershell based) – which supports the following scenarios:

• Can be executed via Powershell versions 1.0 and 2.0
• Can be run on the following Operating Systems: Windows 2008 and Windows 2008 R2 (will also support Windows 2003 with Powershell installed)
• The accounts created can be configured with mailboxes for Exchange 2007 and Exchange 2010

So, if you are creating a test lab which is based around the above technologies and would like an easy way to get over 300 unique accounts into your Active Directory environment please feel free to download the following file to either your LAB Domain Controller or Exchange Server: