Re: Exchange 2003 Front-end design

  • From: Dan HINCKLEY <dah@xxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: "[ExchangeList]" <exchangelist@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Fri, 17 Dec 2004 09:30:49 +0100

At 05:53 12/17/2004, you wrote:

http://www.MSExchange.org/
Currently trying to decide on the best Front-end deployment of Exchange 2003 for our organization...

I am leaning towards using windows 2003 server NLB (network load balancing) on 3 servers in our DMZ. These three servers will all perform SMTP Gateway, OWA with SSL, RPC over HTTPS duties and each will have GFI Mail Security and Mail Essentials running on them... These servers will not be clustered - at least they will not share an external NAS or SAN device for storage. They will rely on their own disk stores individually.

A little info about our domain..
- I am estimating no more than 50 to 75 OWA users at any time. RPC over HTTPS will be used sporatically at best. We receive on average 4 million e-mails per month, 85% of which is marked as SPAM.

one small point here: we now pay for an external spam filtering service, and it removes 85-90% of the spam w/no false positives. It is quite wonderful how this drops the load on your ES infrastructure. It also means we can limit SMTP connections to the IP of the filtering service.

I expect this number to drop drastically when GFI is installed on the Exchange 2003 FE servers and can reject emails destined for non-existent e-mail addresses on our domain.


Regards,

Chris Wall
Sr. Exchange Administrator
MCSE, MCSA
T - 919.460.3236
F - 919.468.4889

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