Chapter 2. Architecture and Implementation Planning

Before you install Exchange Server 2010 and start connecting your mobile devices, it's critical to make sure the fundamentals are correct and you understand how Exchange Server 2010 fits together. Although you can certainly just buy a server and install Exchange Server with its defaults instead of configuring it by trial and error, spending some time learning the core roles and carefully understanding what your organization needs will help ensure that you've got a solid foundation to build upon, and give you some confidence that what you build will perform as you expect.

This chapter introduces the roles Exchange Server provides and explains what each role does when compared with other roles. The first thing you should understand though, is that a role does not equal an individual server. Roles in Exchange Server separate the functions from one another and can be combined or separated as you need. You could run all the core functions of Exchange on a single server if you wish, or you could split the functions of Exchange into different servers dedicated to servicing different functions. Not only can you combine roles, but as your needs grow you can add more servers as you need them, and split roles. And, with careful initial planning you can grow your Exchange infrastructure without even impacting your end users.

Later in this chapter, after we've gained an understanding of each role and its function, we will look at how to perform basic capacity planning for an example organization using Microsoft's best practices and tools they provide. This chapter isn't intended to cover every aspect of Exchange Server capacity planning but it will certainly help you understand the critical aspects you need to consider before you introduce Exchange Server 2010 to your environment. If you've already got your environment up and running, then you also might find the information useful to help validate that what underpins your environment is suitable to introduce mobile devices onto.

Finally we'll cover some of the basics around namespaces—the server names clients use to connect to Exchange and the networking required to allow external access to the environment.