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Windows Server Forum / Exchange Server / Design / July 2005Exchange 2003 server as AD controller
Hi, We're a small company with under 100 employees and are looking to migrate our Windows 2000 (2x PIII 733GHz, 1.5 GB RAM) and Exchange 5.5 Standard server to a server running Windows 2003 (2x P4 3GHz, 4GB RAM) and Exchange 2003 Enterprise Edition. Currently, the Exchange 5.5 W2K server is the main AD server (holds the FSMO roles) and we've had no problems with it acting as an AD server, in fact it has performed better than expected... We've spoken to a few Microsoft partners and they have made proposals to do a migration into a new AD forest (which is not the issue), but in the process, they want to add an additional 2 servers to act as the AD controllers and the Exchange 2003 server to be a member server... I do realise that this is the recommended design for Exchange, however, adding an additional 2 servers into our network is going to increase the complexity of the network as well as cause more problems during disaster recovery I.e. more tapes, more servers to restore... What I want to know is, considering that we have under 100 employees who are not heavy e-mail users, is it possible to configure the Exchange 2003 server to act as an AD controller (considering that SBS acts as an AD controller as well as an Exchange server)? Secondly, if we choose to make the new Exchange server an AD controller and the performance is poor, can we simply demote/remove AD from the exchange server without any problems (provided that there is another server acting as an AD controller)? Thanks for the help! "I do realise that this is the recommended design for Exchange, however, adding an additional 2 servers into our network is going to increase the complexity of the network as well as cause more problems during disaster recovery I.e. more tapes, more servers to restore..." I don't see that the same way. It can be simpler to restore Exchange to a dedicated server after bringing up the name resolution, AD etc. vs having it integrated on the same server. Tapes can hold both and can back it up across the network with the built-in NT backup if you want. Can Exchange run on the same server as the DC. Absolutely. Why is it a best practice to separate it then? Because if Exchange runs on a DC, it will only ever use that DC as it's directory. It will never fail over or use the other AD server as a DC and so you can get better resiliency if you separate the server roles. In your case, it wouldn't bother me to run Exchange on the same server if that met your needs and you were OK with the complexity, possible down time, etc. vs an extra server to run Exchange. It's a choice to make. My preference and a best practice in many organizations would be to separate the server roles. For 100 light users, that may not be the most effective use of resources; not enough information to tell from this post, but I'm sure your partners have more information to go by. IIRC, just demoting a DC that runs Exchange has some issues associated with it. I don't recall exactly what those issues are anymore. Al > Hi, > [quoted text clipped - 26 lines] > > Thanks for the help! Al, Thanks for the reply. I did a little more research and am aware of the problems of running Exchange and AD on the same server, such as the problems you mentioned below plus other such as it's not possible to remove AD from the server once Exchange has been installed... DO you know where I can find any benchmark on the performance impacts on a server running both Exchange and AD? Thanks > "I do realise that this is the recommended design for Exchange, however, > adding an additional 2 servers into our network is going to increase the [quoted text clipped - 55 lines] >> >>Thanks for the help! I don't. Although you may be able to extrapolate some information based on the AD and Exchange sizer tools. Just keep in mind both will have disk impact and you wouldn't want two busy systems to compete for the same spindles. Al > Al, > [quoted text clipped - 69 lines] >>> >>>Thanks for the help! Thanks for the advice. This has been taken into account and the server will have two arrays, one for the OS and the other for the exchange environment. Cheers > I don't. Although you may be able to extrapolate some information based on > the AD and Exchange sizer tools. Just keep in mind both will have disk [quoted text clipped - 76 lines] >>>> >>>>Thanks for the help! |
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