Designing and implementing Microsoft Exchange Server on premises can be a complex and challenging task. That's why Microsoft as partners offers preferred architecture for simpler, easier, and less expensive implementations. Why follow Microsoft design guidance? For information contact: 973-475-5732
Boris Lokhvitsky and Robert Gillies discuss design best practices for Exchange on-premises from Microsoft Services.
Topics include:
- Evolution of Exchange design (Exchange 2003 – 2016) (8:20 mins)
- Design for simplicity (12:10 mins)
- Eliminate failure domains (17:23 mins)
- Place your DAG members in different racks (different power, network, cooling, etc)
- Exchange’s building block architecture (19:10 mins)
- Scale out, not up
- Better to go with more servers with lower specs than with fewer servers with higher specs
- More servers equals higher availability
- PLA is Microsoft Consulting Services’ Exchange guidance (20:35 mins)
- Builds on the Preferred Architecture
- 4 database copies across 2 sites; witness in the 3rd site
- Unbound namespace
- Direct Attached Storage (not SAN)
- JBOD (not RAID)
- Layer 7 Load Balancing
- System Center for monitoring
- Exchange Online Protection for message hygiene
- Exchange storage design (24:00 mins)
- DAS vs SAN
- JBOD vs RAID
- SATA vs SAS vs SSD
- SAN considerations (28:54 mins)
- 256 KB stripe size required
- 64 KB NTFS allocation size
- Deduplication is unsupported
- Test SAN with JetStress
- Native Data Protection vs RAID (32:17 mins)
- 3 database copies eliminates need for RAID
- Consider DAG an application level (or software) RAID
- RAID adds overhead
- Pull a disk from the RAID when testing with JetStress to account for RAID rebuild overhead
- Cache requirements (34:00 mins)
- JBOD disks may need to be presented as single disk RAID 0 to use controller cache
- Controller cache must be flash or battery backed (FBWC or BBWC)
- Configure cache at 100% write operation
- Do not use pinned, preserved or disk cache
- Thin vs Thick provisioning (35:54 mins)
- Recommended disk layout (38:12 mins)
- RAID 1 for OS, Exchange install, transport queue and logs
- One hot spare for DAG AutoReseed
- JBOD (RAID 0) for Exchange DBs and logs
- Site resiliency (40:00 mins)
- Bound vs Unbound namespace
- Database copies across sites
- Backups vs Native Data Protection (47:13 mins)
- Passive copies protect from hardware failure and physical corruption
- Lagged copies protect against logical corruption, viruses, or, accidental deletions
- SafetyNet protects transport pipeline and can replay messages recently delivered to the database
- BitLocker considerations (50:53 mins)
- Virtualization (54:11 mins)
- Running Exchange in Azure
- Exchange in AWS is unsupported
- Compliance (1:01:50 mins)
- Network (1:05:10 mins)