Summary

In this chapter, we talked about some of the most important things you do as an Exchange administrator - that is, doing everything you can to provide higher availability for your messaging services.

An important part of providing higher availability is to ensure that you have the ability to perform proper and required maintenance during a time window that does not count against your availability numbers. Scheduled maintenance is important for ensuring the reliability and security of your Exchange environment. Don't sacrifice reliability for availability.

When looking at ways to improve your availability, you should look at the causes of any unscheduled downtime. Study what you need to do to eliminate or prevent those from happening in the future. This may include providing additional fault-tolerance components in your Exchange environment, such as redundant disks, redundant power supplies, and uninterruptible power supplies.

You can improve availability of services such as Client Access, Unified Messaging, Hub Transport, and Edge Transport server roles by implementing Network Load Balancing to balance the load between multiple servers that host the same server role and direct clients to a working server in the event one of the servers fail.

Clustering technologies can help you work toward higher availability for your mailbox servers. Single copy clusters work in much the same way as previous versions of Exchange did when cluster technology was implemented. Clustered continuous replication clusters are a new breed of clustered mailbox servers that provide redundancy not only for the physical server, but also for the databases.

In the next chapter, we will cover one of the other most important tasks that you perform as an Exchange administrator. This is a task that you must do daily: performing and verifying backups of your data and any other information necessary to recover a server in the event of a disaster.