Datasheet

16
Chapter 1
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Designing and Planning Messaging Services
Gathering Business Requirements
Besides collecting the technological requirements, remember to include what business
requirements you have for the Exchange Server 2007 design. You should consider the
following in your plans:
IT strategy: Administrative model, migration strategy, etc.
Budget: How much is available for hardware, how much for software, etc.?
Licensing and maintenance requirements: What licenses are available, what are “end-of-
life” products, details about maintenance contracts, etc.?
Acceptable downtime for messaging: Current Service Level Agreement on messaging, the
current disaster recovery strategy, etc.
Security policies: Special considerations regarding the companies security policies, such as
message encryption, SPAM filtering, or virus protection.
Regulatory requirements: Does your company’s market segment have any special require-
ments for archiving or tracking (SOX, etc.)?
Client access needs: What kind of access do the clients expect (mobile, voice, fax, etc.)?
Messaging information: How is messaging currently used, how many messages are
received/sent internally or from the Internet, and what external connections exist?
Consider Domain Controller and Global Catalog Servers
In planning your Exchange Server 2007 placement, always consider domain controller or
global catalog servers. These factors are especially important as Exchange Server 2007 does
not start without communicating to a global catalog server. Thus it is vital that you consider
the following in your planning:
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At least one domain controller of the same domain as the Exchange server must be avail-
able in the AD site where you plan to install Exchange Server 2007.
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At least one global catalog must be available in the same AD site where you plan to install
Exchange Server 2007.
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For redundancy reasons, it’s always good to have at least two global catalog servers avail-
able in an AD site where Exchange Server 2007 will be installed.
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If you use 64-bit domain controllers, it increases the directory service performance signif-
icantly, even though 32-bit domain controllers are still supported.
Especially in large organizations with more than 20,000 objects in your Active
Directory, you should consider upgrading to 64-bit domain controllers.
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As in previous Exchange versions, the recommended 4:1 ratio of Exchange cores to
global catalog cores applies for Exchange Server 2007. For example, if you have two
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