Exchange 2010 First Look

Exchange 2010 can provide
- High availability and site resilience which is native to exchange
- Usability of less expensive and less complex storage.
- Simplify Administration and reduce support costs

High Availability Feature names
- Mailbox resiliency: Name of Unified High availability and Site Resiliency Solution
- Database Availability Group: A group of upto
mailbox server that host a set of replicated databases
- Mailbox Database Copy - A mailbox databse (.edb and Logs) that is either active or passive.
- Database Mobility: The ability of a single mailbox database to be replicated to and mounted on other mailbox servers
- RPC CAS: Cas feature that provides a MAPI endpoint for Outlook clients
- Shadow Redundancy: A transport feature that provides redundancy for messages for the entire time they are in transit
- Incremental Deployment: The availbility to deploy high availability / site resilience after Exchange is installed
- Exchange Third Party Replication API: An Exchange provided API that enables use of third party replication for a DAG in lieu of continuous replication.

High Availability Solution
- Uses enhanced CCR and SCR Technology
- Can be deployed on wide range of storage option
- Clustering is native to Exchange and Does not depend on Windows based clustering.
- Reduces the need of SAN infrastructure

Improvements in Exchaneg 2010
- All clients connecty to CAS Server
- Database level failover
- Failover is managed by Exchange
- Use of Database Access Group provides database level failover

High Availbility Terminology
- High availbility: Provides data availbility, service availbility and automatic recovery from failures
- Disaster recovery: Process to provide manual recovery from failure
- Site Resiliency: DR solution used for recovery from site failure
- *over: Short for switchover / failover.
- Switchover: It is a manual activation of one or more database after a failure.
- Failover: It is an automatic activation of database after a failure.

Exchange 2010 possible *overs
- Database or Servers within a Datacenter
- Datacenter level switchover

Exchange 2007 brought forward concepts
- Extensible Storage Engine (ESE)
* Database and log files
- Continuous replication
* Log shipping and replay
* Database seeding
* Store service and Replication Service
* Database health and status monitoring
* Divergence
* Automatic database mount behavior
- Concepts of quorum and witness
- Concepts of *overs

Exchange 2007 dropped concepts
- Storage Groups
- Databases are global objects and are no longer identified by Server names
- Clustered Mailbox Server no longer exists
- Two high availbility copy limits (now 16 copies of mailbox database are available)
- Private and public Networks

High Availability Fundamentals
- Database Availability Group: It is a base component of HA and site resilience. It provides a group of up to 16 servers that hosts a set of replicated databases. It defines the boundaru for Mailbox database replicatio, Database and Server *overs, and Active Manager. It manages membership and proivdes heartbeat of DAG member servers

- Mailbox Database replication: It Provides continuous replication of mailbox databases. It supports encryption and compression and supports multiple replication networks

- Active Manager: It is an Exchange component that manages *overs. It runs on every server in DAG and selects best available copy on failovers. It keeps track of where the database is active and provides this information to other Exdchange component such as RPC CAS and HUB Transport. Active Manager has two roles
* Primary Active Manager (PAM): It runs on the node that owns the cluster group. it gets the topology change notifications and reacts to the server failures by selecting the best database copy on *overs.
* Standby Active Manager (SAM): It runs on every other copy of DAG. It responds to the query about which server hosts the active copy.
Both the roles are necessary for automatic recovery.

Transition Steps
- Verify the pre requisites are met for deploying Exchange 2010
- Deploy Exchange 2010
- Use Exchange 2010 mailbox move feature to move mailboxes from Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2010


Unsuported Transitions
- In place upgrade to Exchange 2010
- Using database protability between Exchange 2010 and non-exchange 2010
- Backup and restore of earlier versions of Exchange to Exchange 2010
- Using Continuous replication between Exchange 2010 and 2007


Exchange 2010 improvements
- Onlive Move Mailbox: It supports moving mailboxes Between Exchange 2007 SP2 and Exchange 2010 without causing downtime to the users. Move is performed asynchronously by a new service called Microsoft Exchange Mailbox Replication Service (MRS) running on CAS

- RPC CAS: It replaces RPC endpoint client access on the Mailbox role to the CAS role. It does not replace for Public folders. Clients connect directly to the Public Folder store to access Public Folder databases

- Shadow Redundancy: It helps HUB and Edge Transport Servers in keeping the copy of items until it is delivered to the next hop. It also helps in upgrade or maintenance.

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