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Turbo charge your Exchange on-premises and hybrid environment: Notes from the field

Dive into expert tips on deploying Exchange 2016 or 2019, hybrid integration, design principles, and best practices for availability, functionality, and cost reduction. Learn about Preferred Architecture, namespace design, load balancing, and database group design. Whether you're virtualizing Exchange or considering migration to Office 365, this field-tested guide will help you build a robust and efficient environment.

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Turbo charge your Exchange on-premises and hybrid environment: Notes from the field

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  1. Turbo charge your Exchange on-premises and hybrid environment: Notes from the field Steve Goodman BRK3129

  2. Why are you turbo charging Exchange Server? I want to deploy Exchange 2016 or 2019. What’s the best way to do it? I’m virtualizing Exchange. Where do I put the turbo button? So I want to get it right first time and then make sure it stays healthy. What tools do I need? I don’t want that. I’m going to the cloud. So I need to do this Hybrid thing, right?

  3. What’s the best way to deploy Exchange Server?

  4. Design Principles for Exchange Design for Availability • Reduce complexity and simplify the solution • Ensure you use redundant solution components Design for Functionality • Exchange is part of a Productivity Suite – deliver what users expect from modern email • Large Mailboxes – remove the need for third-party archives and journal • Hybrid Integration – Do you have a need for Teams integration, Conditional Access or Outlook Mobile? Design to reduce & minimise the cost of ownership (TCO) • Use commodity hardware – Redundant Array of Inexpensive Servers • Leverage native product capabilities – Exchange Native Protection, Lagged Copies, JBOD • Use storage that minimises cost and administrative overhead

  5. Start with Preferred Architecture Structured Recommended Supported Predictable way to deploy Exchange Server Reduce risk by deploying Exchange as it was designed to be deployed, leveraging experience Microsoft learnt from Office 365 If you can’t use Preferred Architecture, take as much of it as you can and leverage it’s best practices You don’t want to be deploying in a custom way. Whilst a custom design can be supported, it introduces risk and complexity Custom Best Practices Preferred Architecture

  6. Preferred Architecture Primer Namespace Design Single unbound namespace per datacentre pair Layer 7 Load Balancing with no affinity Equal distribution of traffic across datacentres using round robin DNS or Geo-DNS For multiple DC pairs, either single WW namespace or regional namespaces. Datacentre Design At least two well-connected datacentre pairs Each datacentre in it’s own Active Directory site - essential for Transport site resilience Third well connected site recommended for File Share Witness placement mail.contoso.com DC2 DC1 DC3

  7. Preferred Architecture Primer 1+2 3 11 5 7 9 4 6 10 12 8 mail.contoso.com DAG01 Server Design All servers are physical Commodity hardware – 2 Socket, BB Cache, 12+ LFF disks Single RAID1 OS/Exchange Remainder of disks use JBOD with 4 DBs/disk At least one auto-reseed disk reserved as a hot spare Database Availability Group Design Active/Active with active copies distributed equally across servers and sites Four database copies, two per site. Scale out DAG for resiliency Native protection using lagged copies & single item recovery and/or In Place Hold Single NIC for client and data replication DC2 DC1 DC3

  8. What if I can’t implement all of Preferred Architecture? What if you need to backup? What if you don’t believe you can use JBOD? What if you need to virtualise? What if you don’t have a well-connected third site? What if you don’t have a second site? Turbo Charging Tips If you don’t follow Preferred Architecture to the letter ensure you use follow best practices and maintain a supportable environment. If you can’t do that, seriously consider Office 365!

  9. Namespace Planning and Load Balancing

  10. Namespace Models for Exchange What is a namespace? • It is the name (e.g. mail.contoso.com) clients use to connect to Exchange The Unbound Namespace • Clients can connect to more than one datacenter to access their mailbox • Exchange routes the client traffic to the appropriate datacenter where the mailbox is active. • It is expected that proxying between datacenters will occur though consider latency. The Bound namespace • Client connect to a specific datacenter to access their mailbox based on where it is active. • Exchange routes traffic to an appropriate server, but most routing of client traffic between datacenters is avoided.

  11. Load Balancing Options Layer 7 Load Balancing • A single name is shared across protocols (Outlook on the web, ActiveSync, MAPI/HTTP etc) • SSL bridging is used, though SSL passthrough and SSL offloading are supported Layer 4 Load Balancing • Typically per-protocol namespaces are used (owa.contoso.com, eas.contoso.com, mapi.contoso.com etc). • A single namespace is supported, but you will lose per-service monitoring. • SSL-pass through is used DNS Round Robin • A single name is shared across protocols • Typically used to distribute traffic across Load Balancers in different datacentres • In the event of a server failure, HTTP timeouts ensure the client attempts to connect to another server or Load Balancer

  12. Load Balancing Options and Recommendations Load Balancing Recommendations • Use Layer 7 load balancing with SSL bridging and no affinity • Use an unbound namespace • Configure per-service health monitoring for each Virtual Directory /healthcheck.htm • Round robin load distribution as a first choice, with least connection based as a second choice • TCP timeouts configured to be longer than the OS timeout Turbo Charging Tips • Monitor the impact of load balancing on client latency • If load balancing across datacentres geographically distributed, a 20ms latency between client and each datacentre could add significant delays, especially in online mode • When planning namespaces, load balancing and client access reduce the number of hops between the client and the mailbox.

  13. Virtualizing Exchange. What you should know.

  14. Exchange 2016 Virtualization A valid deployment model for some scenarios. Stay true to the virtualization requirements. Design as physical, deploy to virtual.

  15. Virtualizing Exchange Server YOU AREHERE • Exchange is not designed to be virtualized, but it is supported and a valid model for some scenarios. • You must follow the requirements for virtualization • Design for a physical environment and deploy to a virtual one • You won’t be able to achieve Preferred Architecture, but you should take on-board key concepts, including: • Namespace Design • Datacentre Planning • Database Availability Group Design Custom Best Practices Preferred Architecture

  16. What is supported • Hyper-V and any Hypervisor on the SVVP • Both Mailbox and Edge roles are supported (including Hybrid, of course) • Host based failover resulting in cold-boot is supported, even with DAGs • Block-based storage including virtual disks, SCSI & iSCSI pass through • Fixed and Dynamic disks, though sufficient storage must be available • Fixed VHDs on SMB3 based storage • Planned VM migration using Live Migration/vMotion is supported, by the vendor. Watch for cluster timeout issues. • JetStress testing

  17. What is not supported • Dynamic memory, memory overcommitment and similar • Hypervisor snapshots • Different disks/Linked clones • No server applications can be installed on the root OS • NAS storage, including NFS is not supported, even if presented as block-storage to the OS – apart from SMB3 • Guest OS disks should be on different spindles to Exchange databases • More than 2:1 CPU oversubscription, though 1:1 is recommended

  18. Turbo-charging tips for your virtual deployment • Scale out rather than up. Lots of smaller machines spread across your virtual infrastructure are better for availability than a small number of large virtual machines on a few hosts • Use anti-affinity rules to ensure Exchange DAG nodes are not co-located with each other, or other potentially impacting workloads • Reserve memory and CPU for Exchange VMs so it always gets the resources it requires • Use Exchange high availability features and only consider using Hypervisor features to supplement these, not replace them. • Remember to design for physical and deploy that way. Ensure Exchange in a virtual environment is kept as simple as possible

  19. Your toolkit for Deploying Exchange Server.

  20. Tools for Planning and Deploying Exchange • Generate Message Profile • https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/Generate-Message-Profile-7d0b1ef4 • Exchange Server Role Requirements Calculator • https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/office/Exchange-2013-Server-Role-f8a61780 • Exchange Processor Query Tool • https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/office/Exchange-Processor-Query-b06748a5 • Transport Database Sizing Tool • https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/Exchange-20132016-3355cb9e • JetStress and the JetStress Field Guide • https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/office/Jetstress-2013-Field-Guide-2438bc12 • Exchange Environment Report • https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/office/Generate-Exchange-2388e7c9

  21. Exchange Hybrid 101

  22. Why Exchange Hybrid Extend your on-premises org to Office 365 Facilitate a better migration experience Provide co-existence with on-premises Suitable for both smaller and larger organizations on Exchange 2010+

  23. Why Exchange Hybrid? User Experiences • Free Busy just works • No recreating Outlook Profiles • Migrations without user interruption • Seamlessly connect on-prem & service • One Global Address List • Secure Mail Flow • And much more… Migration Experience Exchangeon-premises MRS Mailbox data Office 365

  24. Should I turbo-charge my Hybrid with Exchange 2016? • If you are running Exchange Server 2010 and are planning to migrate mailboxes to Exchange Online, then you probably shouldn’t add Exchange 2013 or 2016 servers • If you are running Exchange 2013 and are planning to migrate mailboxes to Exchange Online, then you almost certainly shouldn’t add Exchange 2016 servers • Adding Exchange 2016 servers to your existing Exchange 2010 environment to help improve the migration experience is unlikely to turbo-charge your migration and can potentially have a negative impact on user experience

  25. Should I install an 2013 or 2016 server? Exchange 2010

  26. Should I install an 2013 or 2016 server? Exchange 2010 Exchange 2016

  27. How you can turbo charge migration to Office 365 • Ensure you start with a healthy Exchange environment • Optimize the route from Exchange Online to Exchange to ensure traffic reaches Exchange Servers without interference. Less is more. IDS/inspection is not helpful. • Use multiple migration endpoints against different servers to increase throughput: DC2 DC1

  28. In summary…

  29. In Summary Use Preferred Architecture whenever you can. It is your starting point for success. Follow Microsoft documentation for supported virtualization Environments and best practices, but scale out not up. Always use the Role Requirements Calculator to plan Exchange. If you are running Exchange 2010 or higher you have what you need.

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