Exchange 2010 design with Dags

[TheHuth]

As with every Exchange 2010 rollout, each network presents its own quirks. I appologize if this topic has been beaten to death, but I need some help with my Exchange 2010 network architecture.

We currently have Exchange 2003, and have already purchased the licenses for Exchange 2010. My task is to perform the entire upgrade. The first part of this project is of course designing the appropriate network architecture for the Exchange 2010 environment. Our company has one main data center. Its sort of like a corporate headquarters with a portion of the building dedicated to hosting the majority of our corporate servers. We also have around 15 satellite offices. In our current Exchange 2003 environment we have 3 servers located here at the data center. The first is the main hub transport and also the largest mailbox server. The second is for CAS (basically OWA and OMA) only, and is located in our DMZ. The third is also a mailbox server. Then at three of our satellite offices we have mailbox servers.

For Exchange 2010, we plan to implement a lot more servers at our satellite locations. Here is a basic idea of how my managers would like to see the environment set up. One beast of a server here at the corporate office. It will be licensed for Exchange 2010 enterprise. This server will definitely be set up as a mailbox server, and possibly CAS and Hub depending. Windows/Exchange will be installed physically on this server. We will also likley set up at least one more virtual machine on the LAN for CAS/Hub (eliminating CAS/Hub on the main mailbox server), and then an additional virtual CAS server in the DMZ for OWA and OMA. Then after that we have plans for 11 more servers at our satellite offices.

Now the curveball. My managers want to see DAG implemented across the entire corporate network. On our beastly data center server we want to host a primary copy of one database (for the users here), and a secondary copy of each satellite office servers. Then of course our satellite offices would each keep a primary copy of its database.

There are several reasons for this design. 1) to minimize WAN traffic for outlook connectivity to branch office users. 2) Disaster recovery. 3) Eliminating Wan traffic for backups.

Assuming I were to use Dags, I would use the currently set up subnet for the MAPI traffic. I would then need to create a new subnet for Replication traffic.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Even if its "your completely out of your mind", although it'd be helpful if you told me why.


Thanks Everyone.

 

[58sniper]

Servers in the DMZ are not supported or recommended. Microsoft has even recommended 2003 servers not be in the DMZ.

Having multiple mailbox servers in multiple sites replicating back to the datacenter means a LOT of log traffic traversing the WAN. Then you have to have hub and cas to support them in those sites. Your OWA access could be interesting if your sole ingress is the data center.

The premise behind DAGs and CAS arrays is to allow for a more centralized solution, with many users connecting to a server/DAG/array. But also allow for site failover and high availability. Your proposed strategy could be full of network latency and overly complex designs.

I'd urge you to rethink your strategy. In my deployments (15,000-80,000 users each), we have servers in 2 locations per region (North America, EMEA, APAC, etc). One is the primary data center, and the second is for disaster recovery only.



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[TheHuth]

Thank you very much for your response. I actually came to that conclusion a bit ago, and have been writing up my new design plan. I'm going to start a new thread. Please take a look at it, because any advice you could give me would be greatly appreciated.