Hello all –
I have a mob of disenchanted users about to lynch me because of a problem that I cannot get to the bottom of. I recently migrated Exchange 5.5 to 2K3, consolidating three sites in the process. Now we have one Exchange Server at headquarters that hosts all mailboxes and public folders. The problem is with the users at the remote sites. Approximately every three business days, I have to restart the Exch Srvr, because over the space of a few hours, many users at the remotes sites are unable to connect to it. (“Trying to connect..” in the Outlook status bar). Only a restart of the Exch Srvr fixes the problem -- not a restart of the remote Outlook clients, nor of the PCs themselves. Additionally, users local to the Exch Srvr (same LAN) are not affected. I would suspect a WAN bandwidth problem, but no other applications are affected.
All users connect with Outlook 2K3 in cache-mode. Since there is presumably a lot more traffic being generated (cache mode or not) between our WAN sites, I’ve also had to look at the routers and firewalls involved. But for the sake of approaching this as an Exchange problem as opposed to a Cisco problem, can I ask if anyone knows anything about Exchange that might explain this behaviour? Has anyone seen a case where the routers and firewalls have been especially burdened in an Exchange Server 2003 consolidated site configuration? Maybe with excessive tcp connections that do not time out? (although this and other Cisco troubleshooting measures have revealed nothing).
If Exchange Server is the problem, it is as though it is accumulating traffic statistics pertaining to slower-link mailboxes, and never clearing them out. Even if it is a Cisco problem, maybe some Exchange admins have run into this before in cases of consolidated sites.
Thank you in advance for any ideas.
I have a mob of disenchanted users about to lynch me because of a problem that I cannot get to the bottom of. I recently migrated Exchange 5.5 to 2K3, consolidating three sites in the process. Now we have one Exchange Server at headquarters that hosts all mailboxes and public folders. The problem is with the users at the remote sites. Approximately every three business days, I have to restart the Exch Srvr, because over the space of a few hours, many users at the remotes sites are unable to connect to it. (“Trying to connect..” in the Outlook status bar). Only a restart of the Exch Srvr fixes the problem -- not a restart of the remote Outlook clients, nor of the PCs themselves. Additionally, users local to the Exch Srvr (same LAN) are not affected. I would suspect a WAN bandwidth problem, but no other applications are affected.
All users connect with Outlook 2K3 in cache-mode. Since there is presumably a lot more traffic being generated (cache mode or not) between our WAN sites, I’ve also had to look at the routers and firewalls involved. But for the sake of approaching this as an Exchange problem as opposed to a Cisco problem, can I ask if anyone knows anything about Exchange that might explain this behaviour? Has anyone seen a case where the routers and firewalls have been especially burdened in an Exchange Server 2003 consolidated site configuration? Maybe with excessive tcp connections that do not time out? (although this and other Cisco troubleshooting measures have revealed nothing).
If Exchange Server is the problem, it is as though it is accumulating traffic statistics pertaining to slower-link mailboxes, and never clearing them out. Even if it is a Cisco problem, maybe some Exchange admins have run into this before in cases of consolidated sites.
Thank you in advance for any ideas.