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Haim Beyhan - 04 Oct 2006 09:41 GMT

Hi,

We're using Windows 2003 AD in 3 sites.
We're upgrading from Exchange 5.5 to Exchange 2003 and from Outlook 2000 to
Outlook 2003.

Currently we have 2 Exchange 5.5 servers in 2 sites connected by Internet
Mail connector.
Site 1 has 50 local and remote users, Site 2 has 15 local and remote users
and Site 3 does not have an Exchange server and has only 2 local and 1
remote user which connect to site 2 to get their mails. Site 1 has SMTP mail
filter and antivirus gateway which currently gets all the organization mail
from internet and then route everything first to Exchange server and then
Exchange server transfers the necessary to other site. Some of the users in
site 2 has also some pda and blackberry users which use a 3rd party software
in order to synchronize.

All the sites are connected with vpn over the internet. 1. and 2. sites have
3Mbit internet lease line and 3. site has SDSL 5Mbit line.

Can I consolidate these 2 servers into one server?

Do you think the site 2 users can work without problem or will it be too
slow for them to get emails with attachments?
I think about the following scenario. If one user in site 2 wants to send an
email to all the users in site 2 with an attachment, what would happen ?

I thought users in site 2 might use RPC over HTTP for this purpose but still
I don't know the performance.

Will I need a frontend server on dmz or can use ISA 2004 for RPC over HTTP
and pda synchronization?
Does frontend server requires additional license for it? When do I really
need a frontend server?

Thanks in advance.

Haim Beyhan

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Missy Koslosky [MVP] - 11 Oct 2006 23:17 GMT

I would indeed consolidate everything to a single server. The site 2 users
shouldn't have any issues connecting to the other site to get their mail,
especially using Outlook 2003 with cached mode enabled.

If a user in Site 2 wants to send an email with an attachment to other users
in Site 2, the message would be sent from User A's Outlook client to the
Exchange Server in Site 1. User B and User C's Outlook clients will retrieve
the message from the server in Site 1. But this really isn't an issue - I
personally haven't been co-located with an Exchange Server since 2001, and
this has never felt like a problem to me, and I'm a heavy email abuser.

Do you have a VPN between the sites? That's generally simplest, but RPC over
HTTPS works well too.

With the number of users you're describing, I would not worry about
performance at all.

You can use ISA to publish RPC over HTTPS - it's probably simplest. For your
situation, I would not suggest that a front end server is necessary.

Missy

> Hi,
>
[quoted text clipped - 35 lines]
>
> Haim Beyhan

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