You might want to read an article I wrote that gives you the 30,000 foot view of Exchange 2010 high availability here:
http://www.simple-talk.com/sysadmin/exchange/exchange-2010-high-availability / Be aware that the 2-server deployment will require a hardware load balancer for the CAS role as you cannot use Windows NLB on the same servers that are in a failover cluster. This link is excellent for understanding what features are present in the various versions (including Windows Standard vs. Enterprise) http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/2010/en/us/licensing.aspx From: Richard Stovall [mailto:rich...@gmail.com] Sent: 01 February 2010 18:49 To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: 2003 to 2010 planning Good afternoon one and all, and please forgive the long post. I'm thinking about proposing the upgrade from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2010 this year. We're currently running a single monolithic server that has (knock on wood) been extremely reliable for going on 5 years. We've got ~100 mailboxes now, and I don't see us ever growing past 200. The information store is currently 110GB, and the perfmon-reported Single Instance Ratio is pretty large at 22. We have ~10 remote users who use Outlook Anywhere, ~10 PDA users, ~10 Mac (Entourage) users, and OWA is available to most everyone. AD is a single domain forest, is at 2003 Domain and Forest Functional Levels, and all DCs are 2003 SP2. We have a single physical site, and only one site in AD. Before rolling out 2010, I intend to deploy an e-mail archiving solution of some sort. My hope is that, in addition to the obvious retention and search benefits this will provide, it will also take some of the pressure off of Exchange 2010's storage requirements by allowing me to finally enforce mailbox size restrictions without reducing the availability of older messages. I've been poking around the interweb, looking for information that will help me determine how to design and deploy Exchange 2010 in a manner appropriate for our environment. The most promising thing I've come up with is a simple statement on the Microsoft page that describes Exchange 2010 Mailbox Resiliency (http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/2010/en/us/Mailbox-Resiliency.aspx). It says, " For smaller sites, you can deploy a simple two-server configuration that provides full redundancy of mailbox data along with Client Access and Hub Transport roles. These changes put high availability within the reach of organizations that once considered it impractical." That sounds like exactly like what I'm after - a simple-to-maintain, two server solution where all the inside roles are redundant. Does this configuration sound appropriate for an organization of the size and characteristics described above? Does anyone have any pointers to more in-depth discussion of this two server configuration? (Is there a particular name for this configuration?) Lastly, from what I can gather, this can be accomplished with Exchange Server 2010 Standard and Standard CALs. For an organization the size of ours, I don't think I need the added benefits of the Enterprise CAL at this point. Message hygiene is handled by the Barracuda and Sunbelt's VPE product, and I believe mailbox resiliency is available in the standard server regardless of CAL type. Any thoughts or comments are most welcome. Thanks, RS
