Recommended Exchange Deployments are Multi-role Now

At the last free "Tech Ed style" event in NYC held at the Microsoft Offices, we had Ross Smith IV present on

Exchange 2010 High Availability/Database Availability Groups. If you don't know Ross, he's a VERY senior Microsoft employee who wrote the Exchange Storage and Server Role Calculator. He knows Exchange, period. End of story. So, when he said that everyone should deploy Exchange 2010 in a multi-role configuration to improve performance and not break apart the roles, you need to take his recommendation seriously. This was the 1st time I had heard this. I had a long conversation with him about this in NYC, and he explained that for performance and the ability for leveraging failover capacity it is better to keep all the roles together. In theory, you could deploy less. Since if you were going to deploy 2 CAS and 2 Mailbox, you could in theory just deploy 3 consolidated roles. Well, Microsoft TechNet finally released some guidance on this. That only took 6 months. Don't forget to use a hardware/VM load balancer when deploy your multi-role Exchange Servers.

TechNet article title: Understanding Multiple Server Role Configurations in Capacity Planning
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd298121.aspx

-Ben

Exchange 2010 DAG has a weakness and it's Public Folders

Ehlo All,

One of Exchange Server 2010's best new features is Database Availability Groups. This is a high availability solution for mailbox servers. So, while Microsoft advertises how you can use JBOD and no RAID for disk subsystems for Exchange Server 2010 Mailbox Servers (see the Microsoft User Group presentation on this topic), there is one weakness with this. DAG does not work for Public Folders. So, do not put your Public Folder database on a non-RAID Mailbox Server. Plan on deploying a mailbox server that runs the Public Folder database with a well protected and appropriate disk subsystem. This is unfortunate especially since every Exchange environment deployment I've seen and worked on uses Public Folders. Maybe a future service pack or E15 can fix this. This isn't an easy fix though due to how Outlook clients communicate with Exchange 2010 though. Stay tuned.

-Ben

Recap from November NY Exchange Server User Group Meeting - Exchange 2010 High Availability Technical Presentation and Demo

Ehlo All,

[UPDATED 11/18/09: Added PPTX presentation. See URL below.]

If you missed last night's NY Exchange Server User Group meeting presented by Angi Livermore of Microsoft and official presenter at the NYC Launch Event for Exchange Server 2010 a few weeks ago, you missed one of our best of all time.

Here are some highlights:
- Exchange Server 2010 technical demo of High Availability (called Database Availability Groups). Presentation by Angi can be found here [PDF] or here [PPTX - more clear version].
- most number of attendees (50) at a meeting ever!
- standing room only (we ran out of chairs)
- during my demo of OWA 2007 versus 2010, I found a bug in Exchange 2010 OWA relating to posting Notes. It's not possible based on the 2010 OWA provided by Microsoft for UC Trials. Oops. I'll blog about this later.

Other Notes from the meeting
- OS requirements to run Exchange Server 2010 DAG feature is Windows Server 2008 and later AND Enterprise Server or higher.
- Clone a VM, no need to change the SID. The application we all know called NewSID is not necessary anymore. Turns out it was a myth! NewSID developer (who now works for Microsoft) explains in this blog posting.
- Exchange 2007 will be supported on Windows 2008 R2. Microsoft reversed course on this. Microsoft Exchange Team stating such on this blog posting.

-Ben