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Adam_198867's avatar
Adam_198867
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May 13, 2015

Exchange 2013 iApp and Outlook Connections

I've setup the latest Exchange 2013 iApp and everything looks good. I'm not positive that the Outlook clients are actually using the F5 however. We're still in testing phase and I've modified the hosts file on the client to point the webmail and autodiscover dns entries to the F5 VIP. When creating an email account the autodiscover works and it sets up the account fine. However, when you right click in the system tray and choose 'connection status' it shows:

 

Proxy Server - One of the CAS servers Server Name - the DAG GUID

 

Is this the expected behavior? I would have thought the connections would show the F5 somewhere.

 

Also, if I go to Control Panel and look at the actual mail profile settings, the Server is set to the long string of characters @domain name.

 

deployment
devops
iApps
microsoft

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  • mikeshimkus_111's avatar
    mikeshimkus_111
    Historic F5 Account
    May 13, 2015

    Hi Adam, what do you have configured for internal/external URLs for Outlook Anywhere (I assume that's the protocol you're using)?

     

    The mail server displayed as a GUID is normal with Exchange 2013. You'll see that if you connect via the VIP.

     

    If you take a look at the connection stats for the Outlook Anywhere pool, you should see active connections when the client is open. You can also do a "show sys connections" from the tmsh command line on BIG-IP to see who's connected.

     

  • Adam_198867's avatar
    Adam_198867
    Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
    May 13, 2015

    That was actually something I had thought of from reading a few questions on DevCentral. I ran the Get-OutlookAnywhere command last night and the two CAS servers came back with empty fields for the external address and the internal address was the CAS name themselves. I was going to ask my Exchange guy if this was correct. Is it?

     

  • mikeshimkus_111's avatar
    mikeshimkus_111
    Historic F5 Account
    May 13, 2015

    It's not. We recommend that both the external and internal OA FQDNs point to the OA virtual server IP. Once Autodiscover updates (which can take 15 minutes to 24 hours in my lab), your clients should try to connect to the VIP FQDN instead of the CAS.