Datasheet

EXCHANGE SERVER ARCHITECTURE 5
◆ Document.
◆ Don’t believe everything you read from a vendor; their job is to sell you things.
◆ Don’t put off maintenance that might affect your up-time.
◆ If you get in trouble, call for help sooner rather than later. A few hundred dollars for a
phone call to your vendor or Microsoft Product Support Services is better than a few days
of downtime.
◆ Share your knowledge and configuration information with coworkers.
◆ Accept certain inalienable truths: disks will fail, servers will crash, users will complain, viruses
will spread, and important messages will sometimes get caught in the spam filter.
◆ Get to know your users and communicate with them.
◆ SharePoint provides a good alternative for sharing many types of data you might find in public
folders; get to know it.
◆ Make regular backups of your Active Directory.
◆ If a consultant is telling you something that you know in your gut is wrong, double-check his
work or run his recommendation by another colleague. Second opinions and another set of eyes
are almost always helpful.
◆ Be careful with RegEdit, Active Directory Service Interfaces Editor (ADSI Edit), and any advice
you read on the Internet (or in books).
But trust us on the EMS.
In this chapter, we will cover the changes to Exchange 2010 not only to give experienced
Exchange administrators the proper perspective on Exchange 2010, but also to educate newly
minted Exchange administrators on just how powerful Exchange has become.
Exchange Server Architecture
Since Exchange Server 2003, a number of significant changes have been made to the architec-
ture of Exchange Server. These changes positively improve the performance and scalability of
Exchange Server, but they also make some pretty significant changes in the platform on which
you support Exchange Server.
x64 Processor Requirement
For a long time, one of the most discussed (and perhaps the most controversial) enhancement
to Exchange 2007 (and now Exchange Server 2010) was that Exchange 2007 Server used 64-bit
extensions. That meant your production servers would have to have x64 architecture–based
Intel Xeon and Pentium processes or AMD64 architecture–based AMD Opteron and Athlon
processors. There was an x86 build of Exchange Server 2007 that could be used for evalua-
tion, classroom, or lab purposes, but not in production. There is only an x64 build of Exchange
Server 2010.
Although many people are thrilled with this change in the architecture, there are, no doubt,
folks screaming, ‘‘What? I have to buy new hardware just to upgrade?’’ A good response to this
concern is that on most messaging system upgrades, the hardware is usually replaced anyway.