Designing an Exchange Server 2003 Cluster

Design and Exchange Server 2003 Cluster Consulting Services

When you are designing your Exchange Server 2003 Cluster you should not forget to plan it in advance. Even though Exchange is a standalone product it relies on several features provided by network services (like DNS and especially Active Directory).

And if your implementation plan has some bugs in several parts (like the placements of domain controller and global catalog servers) your Exchange implementation won’t work as you have planned. And if you want to provide a new solution for your employees that does not work as proposed your employees usually won’t accept this new platform anyway.

So for a successful implementation and acceptance of Exchange or any new product, a good design is very important. And if you plan your implementation using the tools provided by Microsoft and other resources you will succeed. One of the best tools that has been published may be Exchange Best Practice Analyzer. It will give you a chance to improve your configuration and design as best as possible.

 

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Best Practices for Exchange 2003 Clustering

After having determined the number of servers you have to implement you will need to determine the way you will configure your server. There are different ways and different opinions to do so.

In general your Exchange Server Cluster should not be a domain controller itself and should be able to save your databases and transaction log files with reliability. That means you should use RAID1 or RAID5 to be secure against hardware crashes of your hard disk.

If you would like to check your configuration against the recommendations of Microsoft, you should use the Exchange Best Practice Analyzer, a download from the Exchange site. Don’t forget that there are some updates available to improve the tool itself.

  

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Communication between Exchange Server 2003 and Active Directory

Exchange Server 2003 communicates a lot with Active Directory. Nearly all communication information is stored in the configuration partition of Active Directory. And the information on the store of the users’ mailbox is saved as user property.

That means that if a message has to be routed; Exchange Server determines whether the mailbox is on the local server  by taking a look at the entries of the global address list (GAL). The GAL is created using the recipient update service (RUS) which has a look at the directory information and creates an entry for all objects that are email enabled. This process runs every minute. The RUS communicates with the global catalog server via GC-LDAP .

If the recipient is not on the local server and the message needs to be routed to another server Exchange recognizes this via the GAL entry. Exchange server then has a look in the configuration partition and determines the way that server connections via connectors are available. This is done via GC-LDAP, too.

If the server recognizes that the recipients SMTP domain is not one it is responsible for, it tries to look for a way of sending the message outbound. This is generally done using the configured SMTP connector. The configuration of the SMTP connector is saved in Active Directory, too.

 

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