1. 11/7/2018 6:14 PM
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2. 11/7/2018 6:14 PM
BRK3129
Turbo charge your Exchange on-premises and hybrid environment: Notes from the field
Steve Goodman
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3. Why are you turbo charging Exchange Server?
I want to deploy Exchange 2016 or 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?

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

5. Design Principles for Exchange
11/7/2018 6:14 PM
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
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
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6. 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

7. Preferred Architecture Primer
11/7/2018 6:14 PM
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
DC1
DC2
DC3
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8. Preferred Architecture Primer
11/7/2018 6:14 PM
Preferred Architecture Primer
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
mail.contoso.com
DAG01
DC1
DC2
DC3
1+2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
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9. 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!

10. Namespace Planning and Load Balancing

11. Namespace Models for Exchange
Microsoft Ignite 2015
11/7/2018 6:14 PM
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.
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12. 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

13. 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.

14. Virtualizing Exchange. What you should know.

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

16. Virtualizing Exchange Server
YOU ARE HERE
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

17. 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

18. 11/7/2018 6:14 PM
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
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19. 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

20. Your toolkit for Deploying Exchange Server.

21. Tools for Planning and Deploying Exchange
Generate Message Profile
Exchange Server Role Requirements Calculator
Exchange Processor Query Tool
Transport Database Sizing Tool
JetStress and the JetStress Field Guide
Exchange Environment Report

22. Exchange Hybrid 101

23. 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+

24. Why Exchange Hybrid? Free Busy just works
Microsoft Exchange
11/7/2018
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
Exchange on-premises
MRS
Mailbox data
Office 365
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The information herein is for informational purposes only and represents the current view of Microsoft Corporation as of the date of this presentation. Because Microsoft must respond to changing market conditions, it should not be interpreted to be a commitment on the part of Microsoft, and Microsoft cannot guarantee the accuracy of any information provided after the date of this presentation. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS, IMPLIED OR STATUTORY, AS TO THE INFORMATION IN THIS PRESENTATION.

25. 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

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

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

28. 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:
DC1
DC2

29. In summary…

30. 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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11/7/2018 6:14 PM
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32. 11/7/2018 6:14 PM
© Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS, IMPLIED OR STATUTORY, AS TO THE INFORMATION IN THIS PRESENTATION.