Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 Architecture

Overview

What is Exchange Server 2013

The Exchange server 2013 At its core Microsoft Exchange server 2013 is an Email, calendaring and
address book system that runs on a centralized Windows Server Operating system. However with the
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release of exchange Server 2013 Now the 8 major release of the Microsoft Exchange server in the over
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15 year history of the product the Microsoft has made significant improvements in the areas of global
scalability, mobile and tablet client support security compliance reliability unified communications and
integration with SharePoint 2013 and Microsoft Lync 2013. For those exchange export who are already
very familiar with the product, the basics of the Exchange server with a centralized exchange server
holding mail messages, contact address book, calendar appointments and other user information the
exchange environment provide a server based storage of information. Users throughout the organization
contact to the exchange server from Microsoft Outlook from a web browser from a mobile phone or tablet
system or from a variety of other client systems to get access to their email and other information.
In larger Organization multiple Exchange server can be added to the environment hosting mailbox
information of the users. The Microsoft has split the roles of servers in an Exchange environment has split
roles of servers in an exchange environment where some servers are dedicated for antivirus and
antispam filtering and other servers are dedicated to client system connections throughout the
organization.

Understanding Evolution of Exchange Server

For those new to Microsoft Exchange this section covers the history of the exchange product line
sometimes as a newcomer to a technology it is hard to jump right into the technology because everyone
working with the technology refers to previous versions without taking into consideration that some people
might not remember what was in the last revision or in the product a couple of revisions back. So this
section is intended to give you a little history of exchange so that the version numbers and major notable
features and functions make sense

Microsoft Exchange Server 4.0

The first version of MS exchange server despite the 4.0 designation was exchange Server 4.0. for a bit
trivia prior to exchange server 4.0 Microsoft had MSMAIL 3.0 and MSMAIL 2.0 prior to that it was a
product called network courier Mail that Microsoft bought in the early 1990s. Microsoft Exchange server
4.0 had nothing in common with MS-MAIL 3.0 they were completely different products and different
technologies. The first rollouts of Exchange server 4.0 back in 1996 were on Windows NT Server 3.5.
Which anyone with old NT 3.x experience knows was a challenging operating system to keep fully
operational. Blue screens in which the OS would just lockup were common. Anything that caused a
system error usually resulted in a blue screen which meant that every update, patch or SP (service Pack)
addition installation of antivirus software and so on frequently caused complete server failures, however
exchange server 4.0 was a major breakthrough and organizations started to migrate from MSMAIL or at
that time CC: mail as another popular mail system to exchange server 4.0 one of the biggest reasons
organizations were migrating to exchange server 4.0 was that in 1996 the internet was just opening up to
the public. the specifications for the WWW (World Wide Web) had just been released. Organizations
were connecting system to the internet and of first real application that took advantage of the internet was
Microsoft exchange server 4.0 shipping and being a much more solid infrastructure to work from
exchange server 4.0 was much more reliable than MSMAIL was for centralized organizations email
communication

Microsoft Exchange server 5.0

The Microsoft Exchange Server 5.0 came out in 1997 and was built to run on windows NT 4.0 which
proved to add more reliability to the exchange server product.in addition exchange server 5.0 supported
the first version of outlook that to this day has a similar mailbox folder concept with the inbox, sent items
calendars and address book, and other common folder duplicated by mail systems throughout the
industry. With the support for the Microsoft Outlook 97 client. The exchange server also included
calendaring directly within the exchange server product. Exchange server 5.0 the calendaring product
was schedule + which was an add on to exchange server 4.0 meaning that a user email and calendaring
werent tied together so exchange server 5.0 tied email calendaring and address books all together. With
a service pack to exchange server 5.0 Microsoft also released the first version of OWA (Outlook Web
Access) so that those who accessed the new WWW (World Wide Web) could get remote access to their
email on exchange. In 1997 this was a big thing as web mail was a new concept and exchange server
5.0 had web mail built in to the messaging product. The Exchange server 5.0 also had better third party
support for things such as fax gateways, unified voice email add in products and documents sharing
tools, leveraging shared public folders in exchange. With better reliability third party product support and a
growing base of customers now migrating from MSMAIL and CC:mailto exchange the Microsoft exchange
market share started to skyrocket

Microsoft Exchange server 5.5

Microsoft Exchange Server 5.5 released came out in 1998 which until just a few years ago some
organizations were still running in their networking environment because of its reliability and stability as
an email system. With exchange server 5.5 Microsoft worked out the bugs and quirks of their first two
revisions of the exchange product and significantly better integration occurred between Email, Contacts,
calendar and task than in previous releases of exchange. The Microsoft also expanded the support for a
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larger exchange database used to store message. So instead of being limited to 16 GB of mail with
earlier release of exchange organizations could upgrade to the enterprise edition of exchange server 5.5
that provided more than 16GB of data storage. With larger storage capabilities exchange server 5.5
greatly supported large corporate, government and organizational messaging environments
Along with Exchange server 5.5 Outlook web Access was improved to provide a faster and easier to use
web client of site connectors was expanded with exchange server 5.5 to provide a larger enterprise
exchange environment with distribution of administration message routing and Multi language support

Microsoft Exchange server 2000

The Microsoft Exchange Server 2000 came out in 200 right after the release of windows 2000 server and
the first version of Microsoft AD (Active Directory) the biggest change in exchange server 2000 is that it
used AD for the global address list GAL instead of windows NT having its list of network logon users
and exchange server 5.5 having its own directory of Email users. The AD (Active Directory) combined a
network and email user account into one single account making the administration and management of
exchange much simpler. The exchange server 2000 also went to an ActiveX version of the OWA client
instead of a straight HTML version of the WEB access. Thus providing users with drag and drop
capabilities pull down bars and other functionality that made the web access function much easier for
remote users. The exchange server 200 server which is required run on top of windows server 2000
became much more reliable than exchange server 5.5 which run on top of Windows NT 4.0, because
exchange server 5.5can run on top of window 2000 server many organizations made the shift of
exchange server 5.5 on top of windows server 200 server. These organization also gained better
performance and reliability which is why many organization did not migrate from exchange server 5.5
however windows server 2000 provided exchange server 2000 a stable OS platform from the beginning.
Also by 2000 Novell popularity was dramatically decreasing and organization were migrating from novell
group wise to exchange server 2000.

Microsoft Exchange server 2003

The Exchange Serve 2003 was a major update to the exchange Email system that supported AD (Active
Directory). Although exchange server 2000 had AD support organizations found the exchange server
2003 on top of the AD 2003 provide a more reliable experience better performance and integration
support between exchange and AD. The exchange server 2003 added mobility for users to synchronize
their Mobile device, tab to exchange. In addition OWA got yet another major face lift mirroring the OWA
interface with the normal Microsoft Office Outlook client. With better remote support exchange server

2003 became more than an office based messaging system it also greatly enhanced an organization
ability to provide remote and mobile users with email anytime and anywhere
A Exchange Server 2003 running on top of windows Server 2003 took advantage of additional OS
enhancements making exchange server 2003 an even more reliable and manageable messaging system.
Windows Server 2003 clustering finally worked so that organizations that put exchange server 2003 on
top of the Windows Server 2003 were able to do active- active and active passive clustering. In addition
clustering went from two node clusters to four node clusters providing even more redundancy and
recoverability. The exchange server 2003 also introduced the concept of a recovery storage group RSG
that allowed an organization to mount an exchange database for test and recovery purposes. Prior to
exchange server 2003 an exchange database could only be mounted on an exchange server typically
with the exact same server name and for the sole purpose of making the database accessible to users.
The recovery storage group in exchange server 2003 allowed an exchange database from another
exchange server to be mounted in an offline manner so that the exchange administrator can extract
corrupt or lost messages or possibly even have database in a ready mode to allow for faster recovery of a
failed exchange server
Note : the last supported direct transition path from Microsoft from exchange server 2003 was with
exchange server 2010 product in which a connector and transition tools enabled integration of exchange
server 2003 and 2007 environments to coexist. The exchange server 2013 does not support exchange
server 2003 at all and if an organization still has exchange server 2003 servers, it must either transition
first to exchange server 2010 or export its mail out of exchange server 2003 before beginning the process
of implementing exchange server 2013.

Microsoft Exchange server 2007

The Exchange Server 2007 was released in 2007 and changed the direction of exchange in several
ways. The exchange server 2007 completely eliminated the concept of routing group being separate from
AD sites. Prior to exchanges server 2007, organizations would have both active Directory sites and
exchange routing group and in most organizations they were identical and effectively required separate
parallel configuration. The exchange server 2007 eliminated the separate routing group and instead
looked to AD sites and services to identify the subnets of various and used the routing topology specified
in AD to move email along the same path and route as AD replication
A Exchange server 2007 also eliminated the exchange Bridgehead server as role that simply routed mail
from bridgehead server to bridgehead server. The bridgehead server evolved to the HUB Transport
server could be seen as a major central point of failure because every inbound, outbound or even user to
user email must pass through a HUB transport server. However because every piece of mail goes
through the hub transport server polices and rules can be set so that every email messages can be
filtered so that a single policy can be applied to not only Hub transport to hub transport message but also

even messages between users with mailboxes on the same exchange server OWA in exchange server
2007 was also dramatically improved being more than 90 % feature complete with the full 32 bit version
of outlook. Web users have full control over mailbox rules and out of office rules, access to digitally rights
managed content and both provision and deprovision of their windows Mobile devices within the Outlook
Web Access interface.

Exchange server 2007 SP1

The exchange server 2007 Service pack 1 was released late in 2007 and was seen by many as the first
real version of exchange server 2007 with the addition key components of the product version. The
exchange server 2007 SP1 enabled the access of public folder in OWA something that many organization
could not upgrade to in the initial exchange server 2007 release because OWA users needed access to
their public folders exchange server 2007 SP1 also included standby continuous replication that provide a
second tier replication for exchange databases. Where exchange CCR provide a primary and secondary
copy of the exchange database using instant failover clustering technology, SCR allowed for a replica of
the exchange database to be created to a remote site with replication occurring in a 20 minute delayed
manner. SCR provided organizations the capability to replicate information across a WAN network to
potentially an offsite data center along the lines of high availability and disaster recovery came the
concept of a stretched or geo cluster in exchange server 2008 that provided a geographically distributed
cluster to split the exchange CCR replication data. With the exchange CCR cluster split across a WAN
link if a primary server failed. The secondary CCR cluster server would immediately become available for
users to automatically reconnect to their mail. Stretch clusters for CCR provide not only high availability
for mail but also disaster recovery in a single solution

Microsoft Exchange Server 2010

The Exchange server 2010 is the most recent release of the exchange prior to the current exchange
server 2013. A exchange server 2010 took the technological enhancements introduced in exchange
server 2007 and further extended the capabilities in terms of performance, reliability and scalability. The
most notable in Microsoft exchange server 2010 was the introduction of database availability groups or
DAGs, for storage. Where exchange server 2007 introduced an online primary and secondary copy of
mail across mailboxes with cluster continuous replication, exchange server 2010 provided up to 16 copies
of a users mailbox that could be situated on servers within a database or across multiple sites. With
multiple copies of a users mailbox on multiple server around the world, true high availability and disaster
recovery has been achieved. High availability and redundancy had been so improved that many
organizations no longer back up their exchange servers as data is available and replicated for real time
redundancy. Additionally with exchange server 2010, outlook web assess was not only renamed outlook
web app to match the office apps concept but closer feature parity between OWAN and the traditional
Outlook client was achieved. Users are able to access their email either through a full client or from a web
client and be able to have full access to emails, calendars, global address book, mailbox rules, mobile

phone full management and the like. Many organization only provide outlook through OWA when offline
folders are not required, eliminating the need to deploy and support client software. Behind the scenes to
exchange server 2010 were also significant improvement in reliability such as the inclusion of a worker
thread that defragmented the exchange database as well as the ability for exchange writes to be
sequential to the exchange database instead of random writes to disk that drastically improved overall
performance for exchange. With sequential reads of defragmented disk, exchange server 2010 performed
40% more efficiently for organizations which allowed for greater density of users per exchange server and
virtually eliminated the concept of database maintenance that was a crux of exchange in the first decade
of its existence. And by the year 2010 the use of mobile phones and tablet devices became common
endpoint platforms with users desiring assess from more than just a desktop or web platforms with users
desiring access from more than just a desktop or web console. As such exchange server 2010 provided
full connectivity to exchange from multiple endpoint platforms as well as voice prompt enabled exchange
so that a user could call into exchange and navigate her mailbox access calendar appointments, listen to
messages that are text to speech converted for audio listening and even have voice mail messages
converted from voice for text based viewing of voice messages. The exchange server 2010 integrated the
world of voice mail, email and client desktop access and mobile access into the common platform.
While the list can go on with advancements made in exchange server 2010 to wrap up the content on
exchange server 2010 the enhancements to email retention achieving and eDiscovery search were
significant in exchange server 2010. Organizations were able to eliminate third party achieving products
and rely solely on exchange server 2010 for the long primary mailboxes in exchange, but also have email
archives where data can be stored from a data management perspective eliminating the need for users to
have multiple personal store .PST files spread around with old mail messages stored and also from the
ability of the organization to implement and enforce data retention for legal compliance reasons. The
exchange server 2010 enabled eDiscovery of content stored in users mailboxes with the ability to query
message content, extract messages and put mailboxes on litigation hold to prevent users from purposely
or accidentally deleting legal message evidence. You will find exchange server 2013 extends all of these
core enhancements introduced in exchange server 2010 further improving users experiences in their
messaging voice content and information management systems.

Microsoft Office 365

The Office 365 is Microsoft cloud based exchange server, SharePoint and MS Lync offering. As much as
office 365 is not direct line with the exchange on premise offering its a parallel branch of exchange server
worth nothing. The office 365 was released in 2011 and provided organizations the option of setting up
and implementing exchange server 2010 on premise or pay a monthly fee for exchange server 2010
mailboxes hosted by Microsoft. Through frequent update of Microsoft office 365 the cloud offering
mirrored the features and capabilities of the on premise exchange server, by early 2012 Microsoft
released a hybrid mode of office 365 server. By early 2012 Microsoft released a hybrid mode of 365 that
provided very tight integration between exchange online in the cloud and exchange server 2010 services

pack 2 on premise. Organization were able to have users split between on premise exchange server and
office 365 whether the hybrid was during a migration process the hybrid was temporary during for
example an acquisition of an organization or the strategy of the organization to have core administration
users access exchange on premise and field works or temporary workers on office 365. The office 365
continues to evolve and with exchange server 2013 again provide an on premise exchange server 2013
environment as well as a cloud based version of exchange server

Microsoft Exchange server 2013

The Exchange server 2013 on 64 Bit Hardware was with exchange server 2010, the exchange server
2013 product only comes in an x64 Bit version. The exchange server 2013 requires either Windows
Server 2008 R2 or Windows Server 2012 and server 2012 R2 (both x64 bit only operating systems) to
run a the core OS, although exchange server 2013 requires windows x64 bit to run the exchange server
software an organization can still run 32 bit windows server 2003 domain controllers and global catalog
server throughout the environment. Just the exchange server 2013 servers need to run x64 bit one of the
biggest problems with earlier versions of exchange on a 32 Bit platform is the support for only 4 GB of
Memory on an exchange server just a few years ago no one though 4GB of memory was a limitation.
However with exchange and the amount of messaging for an exchange server to process for exceeded
the memory space available in just 4 GB of RAM. Because the processing of messages write transactions
to disk logging for rollback recoverability and the addition of spam ad virus protection takes away from
available memory in the system 4 GB would be used up quite quickly.
To compensate for the lack of available memory in 32 Bit exchange. Microsoft Exchange server 2003 and
prior depended heavily on caching transactions to disk. As an example for an organization with 5000
users on an exchange server 2003 in a large enterprise the exchange server 2003 server would have
4GB of RAM and need about 100GB of disk storage to have available spool memory. In very large
enterprises with tens of thousands of users the exchange server could easily take up 500 GB of disk
Space for spooling with 64 bit windows and its support for 8 TB of RAM and exchange server 2013 server
with 5000 users now need 32 GB of RAM but can do with just 5GB or less of spool disk space. Not only
does the additional RAM eliminate the need for hundreds of gigabytes of spool desk space the additional
memory allows an exchange server 2013 server to support three to six times as many users per server
and providers a 50% to 80 % increase in system efficiency of transactions. Likewise the 64 bit OS also
proven to provide better support for significantly larger exchange EDB database. Most organization would
not think of having than 80 GB to 100 GB in size however with a 64 bit OS exchange server 2013
supports database that easily run in the hundreds of GB and even multiple TB sizes. This means that
organizations need to make sure their server hardware is x64 Bit. Most organizations have been buying
x64 bit hardware for the past three to four years anyway becomes many hardware vendors stopped
shipping 32 bit hardware years ago. The benefit of 64 bit hardware is that you can still run 32 bit software
on the hardware until such time that you want to just install 64 bit software on the systems