As of yesterday, Microsoft’s Exchange 2010 team announced the release of the Exchange 2010′s RTM here: http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2009/10/08/452775.aspx#comments. This is exciting news because I can finally request the RTM and begin migrating my systems to the new Exchange. I have been waiting a few months now for this release because it will be the start of many changes to my web hosting services as well that I need to take further steps to secure and improve performance on.
For those of you who don’t know what an RTM is, this is the Release to Manufacturing version that usually becomes the full version within a few months automatically. Unlike Release Candidates, the RTM version of any software packages will become the full version meaning they don’t require any re-installation or pose any security threats to use in production.
Exchange 2010 is important for me because it will introduce the send as function like hotmail and other providers have. I have many email addresses, but my University at Buffalo address is my most important, so I send as my @ Buffalo address. With 2010, this will no longer be the case because I will reply to email as the address it was sent to. I believe this will prevent a lot of confusion to contacts that don’t recognize my university address.
With Exchange 2010, I will also be upgrading the hardware that hosts my email infrastructure. I will be supporting Server 2008 R2 which is the latest operating system for Windows Server. I believe this was only fully released a few days ago and it is very similar to Windows 7. For those of you who don’t keep up with new releases of Windows, Windows 7 will be released to everyone late this month. I am currently using the RTM version of Windows 7 and I find that it is about 10x faster and more stable than Windows XP. Compared to Windows Vista, I’d say its about 50x more stable, faster, and more efficient. Since Server 2008 is Vista’s server operating system, I prefer to stay away from Server 2008 entirely.
For those of you who are thinking about upgrading to Windows 7, I’d strongly recommend it! First, if you are running Windows Vista, you’d be nuts not to goto Windows 7 within a few months of its final release. Windows 7 is practically the same but much more efficient. You will find that everything will be much easier to use on Windows 7 than Windows Vista. For those of you on Windows XP, it might be time to bite the bullet and upgrade (like I did). For the most part, if your system runs Windows XP fine, it will not have any issues running Windows 7 fine. I did find a few minor problems with XP applications (mostly MIDI musical instrument related) not working on Windows 7, but support is fairly good otherwise. Just one word of caution to the developers out there, if you want to run Visual Studio 2005/2008 on Windows 7, don’t install any Microsoft Office 2007 compatibility pack or PDF package. These will make Visual Studio’s Installation fail (on my preliminary tests).
Now to get into some security updates. I plan on migrating all of my systems to a more secure environment shortly after Exchange 2010 is fully implemented. I will have 1 gateway server that serves as a connection point for all services within Matthouse to keep everything tightened down. Within the next few months you can expect performance increases on sites that I host including my own (this one).
I have a lot more to blog about, and I hope to get around to it all as time permits. My next blog will hopefully be something about mail filtering.
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Tags: exchange 2010, matthouse, Microsoft, release candidate, rtm, upgrade, windows
Posted in Hosting / Server Administration, Technology