Chapter 2 Exchange 2013 Design Considerations The main objective of designing Exchange 2013 solution should meet business and technical requirements. Understanding these requirements is very important for the success of the project. These requirements have to be understood and documented thoroughly. Given below are the business and technical requirements that need to be reviewed before designing a new solution. These requirements vary from customer to customer depending on their business, budget, management requirements, and country regulations. These requirements have to be agreed upon by the business owners and the technical team who will be working on the project.
Business Requirements Total Cost of Ownership Total cost of ownership includes both the direct and indirect costs and benefits associated with the implementation of the new solution. It includes the purchase of hardware, license, power, maintenance, engineers, hidden costs, etc. Reduction in Implementation Time There is an immense amount of work required to implement Exchange, and management would likely prefer an automated process to deploy the new solution. Projects are bound by tight time lines. Automated deployment, configuration, and versions assist in meeting these tight deadlines. Automated processes also reduce human effort and errors. Service Uptime Uptime of the
server and uptime of the
service are two different things. The server can be up but the services can be down or unavailable. It is of no use when the server is up but services are down. Service uptime is measured in percentage, and businesses expect to achieve 99.999 percent. However, huge costs are associated with these very high percentages. Higher the uptime requirements, complexes the environment and configuration. No or Minimum User Impact Migration of users to the new environment should have minimum or no impact. Users should be able to continue to send and receive e-mails, and should continue to access calendars, shared and delegated mailboxes, and other features like address books and public folders during the migration. Compliance and Legal Requirements The new setup should comply with compliance and legal requirements of the organization. It should support legal hold, eDiscovery, role-based access control etc. Supportable and Expandable There are quite a few dependent applications that integrate with Exchange. New versions of Exchange should be fully supported by the vendor with the release of service packs, rollups, and fixes. It should also be scalable to accommodate the expansion of the organization's growth. Tentative user growth of the organization should be determined and should be considered while sizing the hardware resources. Security Security should offer strong encryption and safety from any kind of security threats and breaches. Security threats or breaches can be like spoofing, phishing, or spamming, which can be very unhealthy to the organization and cause damage in terms of reputation and money. Mobile devices are easy sources of security threats; implementing encrypting through an active sync policy would secure it. Data Retention and Recovery Companies have different retention polices for different types of e-mails. Some need to retain the e-mails forever, some for seven years, and some maybe for just one year. Additionally, these retained e-mails should be available for recovery. These recoveries might be needed because of the accidental deletion of e-mails, or recovery of e-mails from several years back for legal purposes. Exchange Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Object (RPO) RTO is defined as a part of the disaster recovery and business continuity plan. Exchange Recovery time objective is the acceptable amount of time taken to restore after a disaster or service disruption occurs. Depending on the criticality of the service, RTO time varies, and Exchange being one of the most critical applications, would need to have the RTO time as low as possible. It can be specified in seconds, minutes, hours, or days. For example, if the RTO time is around four hours, then you need to invest a huge amount of money to provide redundant infrastructure. However, if the RTO time is about a day or two, then it would allow some time to restore the service at the reduced infrastructure investment. RPO is also defined as part of the business continuity and disaster recovery plan. It is the maximum acceptable level of data loss after any disaster or catastrophe. It represents the point-in-time data to be recovered in order to resume normal operations. It is calculated in seconds, minutes, hours, or days. If the RPO is five hours, then Exchange data must be backed up once every five hours. The lower the RPO, the higher the infrastructure investment cost, and vice versa.
Technical Requirements Ease of Administration and Implementation Technology should be easy to manage and implement, and the interface should be easy to use. It should also be accessible by different browsers and provide remote PowerShell management. It should provide the scope for automation to reduce management and administration efforts. High availability and disaster recovery should be very easy to implement and manage. Bigger Mailbox Size Users never want to delete anything from their mailboxes; they want to keep everything. To address this issue, the new Exchange solution should provide bigger mailboxes when compared with the current usage, and also provide various retention policies, depending on the requirement. Bigger Database Bigger database support reduces the number of databases in the organization. It also reduces the maintenance and management efforts. New storage allows larger storage space that can easily accommodate bigger databases. Client Support Client support should include rich clients like Outlook, Outlook Web Access, various mobile devices like Blackberry, Active Sync, and mobile device management solutions. High Availability and Disaster Recovery High Availability (HA) and Disaster Recovery (DR) are very important for a business. Loss or unavailability of e-mails can be a huge loss to the business; thus, HA and DR can help in reducing the complexity of delivering business continuity. Integration Integration should include integrating with other applications and systems in the organization; other applications like Lync, SharePoint, Office applications, as well as in-house and other third-party apps. The organization may have many in-house-built or third-party applications like SAP, HR, etc., and these need to be supported by the Exchange server. Virtual or Physical Exchange is a resource-intensive application, and depending on the organization policy, some may want to implement physical servers, and other may want to go for virtual. Over the years, virtualization has proved to provide better performance with CPU and memory. Microsoft also supports Exchange 2013 on virtualization technologies like HyperV and VMware. Microsoft has provided guidelines and best practices when Exchange is being implemented on a virtual platform. It's up to the organization whether they wanted to go with physical or virtual.
Understanding the Current Environment Understanding the current environment plays a major role in designing the solution. It is very important to understand every component of Exchange and its depending application, like Active directory, Lync, SharePoint, etc., that work in collaboration of Exchange. Without understanding the current environment, it would be impossible for anyone to design the new solution. To start with, we need to collect the following information: 1. Exchange architecture diagram. 2. Exchange designing document. 3. Exchange configuration information document. 4. Exchange Server CPU utilization and specifications. 5. Exchange Server memory utilization and specifications. 6. Exchange Mailbox database configuration and size. 7. Exchange Server storage utilization types and design. 8. Network diagram. 9. Current high availability and disaster recovery model. 10. Vendor support documents and support numbers. In additional to the above information, various reports could be generated using various native and Exchange built-in tools available to collect the necessary information. They play a vital role in the designing process. Below are the details of some the tools : Exchange Profile Analyzer
Link The Exchange Profile Analyzer is used to collect the details of users sending and receiving e-mail information from a single mailbox, or across an Exchange server organization. This tool can be used only in Exchange 2003 and Exchange 2007 environments. This is a time-consuming task, and if you are on Exchange 2007 or higher, then this report can be generated easily using the script
Exchange E-mail Stats Exchange Environment Report
Link Exchange...
