Moments ago, Microsoft announced the release of Exchange 2013 RTM CU2 on the Microsoft Exchange Team Blog:
As announced earlier this year at TechEd, CU2 contains a number of fixes as well as new/improved features, including:
- Per-server database support increased back to 100
- OWA Silent Redirection
- Addition of the DAG Management service
- Changes to Managed Availability
- Improved PowerShell Help Updating
- OWA Search improvements
- Malware Filter Rules
- What didn’t make it (yet), is the official support for running a File Share Witness in Azure as well as support for IIS Application Request Routing as a reverse-proxy solution for Exchange. However, both have been announced and will probably be availably any time soon – no committed dates yet:
The Exchange Product Group is in the final validation stages to support Windows Azure for Witness Server placement. Specific guidance on using Windows Azure for the Witness Server placement will be available via TechNet at a later date. Support for this scenario will occur once the guidance has been released.
Personally, I love to see some of the features “return”, like OWA Silent Redirect. But to be honest, I’m most curious about the DAG Management service. Although at the moment it seems to only exist to take some of the load off the Replication service, I wouldn’t be surprised to see some more changes related to this feature in future releases.
Installation
Please keep in mind that Cumulative Updates are full builds of Exchange, as a result they might take a while to install. Also keep in mind that they might wipe any of the customization you have made to e.g. web.config files.
As for the preparation, CU2 also requires an AD schema update. Make sure to read the deployment notes from the original article for more information. When I find some time, I’ll try to figure out what changes are made and report them here.
Until then: have fun!
Michael
