Architectural Changes to Microsoft Exchange 2010 Makes Load Balancing Even More Important for Your Organization.

As an Application Delivery Control Technology vendor, jetNEXUS all too well understands the vital role that business applications play in maintaining a productive and effective working organisation.

Communication applications in particular, such as Microsoft Exchange 2010 sit at the heart of corporate communication, making it part of the essential life blood of most business organisations.

As such, it is absolutely imperative that these business critical applications run seamlessly with superb performance and robust security.

Advanced Load Balancers, or Application Delivery Controllers, as termed by Gartner, play a pivotal role in ensuring this. Those unfamiliar with the terminology around this technology may want to read one of our archived blogs: An ADC is not just a Load Balancer with more features.

Application Delivery Controllers possess several key features that work within a network to maintain application availability and fluency. When discussing load balancing in conjunction with Microsoft Exchange 2010, an ADC solution would serve two main purposes:

1. It will reduce the impact of a single Client Access server failure within any one of your active directory sites.
2. It will ensure that the load on Client Access Servers and the Hub transport computers is distributed evenly.

In earlier versions of Microsoft Exchange 2010, Outlook would connect directly to the server hosting the relevant Mailbox or refer directly to a global catalogue server. Microsoft have since implemented architectural changes so that these connections are handled by a Client Access server role. In order to achieve fault tolerance and for better management, both external and internal connections should be load balanced across the array of the Client Access servers in any deployment.

Further to this, Microsoft recommend that a load balanced array of Client Access Servers be used for each Active Directory site and for each version of Exchange. It is not possible to share one load balanced array of Client Access Servers.

But what do architectural changes mean to your deployment? In response to these operational changes, network managers and system architects will need to reconfigure their Load Balancers in accordance with Microsoft recommendations to ensure that application delivery remains uninterrupted.

Microsoft suggest that “Before you configure load balancing, you should understand the loads that are placed on an Exchange 2010 Client Access server.” Microsoft Tech Net
We have taken the liberty to list a few pointers for consideration when configuring your Load Balancers for Exchange 2010 Client Access Server:

• Different types of traffic that the Exchange 2010 Client Access server receives
• Understanding the key technologies and the options of load balancing solutions
• Understanding Affinity
• Reverse Proxy Solutions
• How to use existing Cookies or HTTP Headers

There are many more to add to this list but we don’t want to scare you off! This may seem like a long and laborious task but when taking into consideration the integral role that Exchange 2010 plays in business communication, it is not only worthwhile but imperative to ensure it runs with optimised performance and high availability.

You will be relieved to know that the jetNEXUS ALB-X Application Delivery Controller is specifically developed and tested to operate within Microsoft Exchange 2010 environments. The ALB-X 2.0 has successfully completed solution testing, meeting all Exchange Server 2010 requirements and features on the Microsoft Technet list of qualified suppliers. :)

For more information please visit our jetNEXUS and Microsoft Exchange 2010 brief or contact info@jetnexus.com to understand how jetNEXUS can help you manage your Exchange 2010 deployment.

Save yourself the hassle, download a trial version of the jetNEXUS ALB-X here today.