Case Scenario Exercise

TailspinToys is an innovative and fast-growing toy manufacturing company that has recently signed an exclusive contract to produce the action figures, spaceships, and other miscellaneous toys for an upcoming blockbuster movie. As a result of their involvement with the movie, the marketing department forecasts a 5000 percent increase in traffic to the company Web site and a 500 percent increase in the amount of Web-based orders, which are delivered through to their Exchange Server 2003 server. The mail server currently processes about 7500 e-mail messages a day, of which approximately 1500 are customer-driven messages. Management is extremely concerned about the ability of the network infrastructure to handle the increased load and fears that not being able to fill Internet orders properly will result in a loss of immediate business and a poor customer service reputation and that it will have a long-term effect by causing the movie studio to use a different manufacturer to produce the toys for the sequel.

Because the problem is deemed critical in nature, you, as the network manager, have been given a lot of latitude in designing an infrastructure for e-mail and Web services that will scale to meet the requirements of the network traffic and that will be very reliable.

In addition, management has decided that it will label toys destined for the fast food restaurant market with its WingtipToys brand. Therefore, the Web ordering system will need to process orders for both tailspintoys.com and wingtiptoys.com. Also, sales people in the field will need to access e-mail using OWA for both e-mail domains.

• Requirement 1 After researching the problem, you decide to maintain your existing Exchange Server 2003 server for internal employee e-mail and to set up a clustered Exchange Server 2003 server configuration for storing and processing customer e-mail. You need to configure the cluster so that it will provide the most reliability against failure.

• Requirement 2 You decide to use a front-end and back-end architecture for the configuration, but you need to ensure that it can handle e-mail for both domain names, which will go to mailboxes and public folders both on the Exchange Server 2003 server hosting employee mailboxes and on the new Exchange Server 2003 cluster. You also need to ensure that e-mail access through the front-end servers, which sit outside of the firewall, is always available.

Requirement 1

The first requirement involves adding an Exchange Server 2003 cluster to an existing Exchange Server 2003 organization.

1. You determine that you will need to use the Cluster Service rather than Network Load Balancing to ensure the availability of the Exchange Server services. You plan to start with a two-node cluster, given the amount of e-mail traffic you expect the cluster to handle. Should you use an active/active model or an active/passive model? Why?

2. Describe the process that you will use to set up this cluster using Windows Server 2003 and Exchange Server 2003, Enterprise Edition.

Requirement 2

The second requirement involves configuring the front-end and back-end architecture to support multiple domains and to provide constant availability to Internet-based OWA users.

1. For the back-end server, you used the Cluster Service. Should you also use it on the front-end server? Why or why not?

2. How will the server nodes in the cluster using Network Load Balancing handle one of the servers going offline?

3. After configuring the Exchange Server 2003 two-node active/passive cluster and setting a two-node network load balanced cluster as front-end servers in Exchange System Manager, what additional step must you take so that the tailspintoys.com domain can also receive e-mail on the cluster through the front-end servers for wingtiptoys.com?