Understanding How Improvements in Windows 2003 Enhance Exchange 2003

 <  Day Day Up  >  

With the introduction of Windows Server 2003, Microsoft added several new features and functions to the operating system. Some of the features are general system enhancements, and other features directly add benefits and improvements for organizations using Exchange 2003. Enhancements in Windows 2003 improve user administration, security, data replication, and system performance.

Drag-and-Drop Capabilities in Administrative Tools

Many of the new administrative tools with Windows Server 2003, including the Exchange Server 2003 System Manager, provide drag-and-drop capabilities that enable administrators to select objects with a mouse and drag and drop the object to a new location. In Windows 2000, an administrator would have to select the objects, right-click the mouse, select Move, and choose the destination from a menu or graphical tree. Although this might seem trivial, for any administrator reorganizing users between organizational units in the Active Directory Users and Computers utility, the ability to drag and drop objects can greatly simplify the time and effort it takes to organize and manage objects in the Active Directory.

Built-in Setup, Configuration, and Management Wizards

Other major additions to Windows 2003 that simplify tasks are a series of configuration and management wizards that come built in to the Windows 2003 and Exchange 2003 systems. Instead of having to walk through menus of commands to manually create or modify networking roles, the 2003 versions provide wizards that enable an administrator to add, modify, or remove system configurations. No doubt these wizards are a significant benefit to novices of the messaging system, because the questions in the wizards are typically simple to answer. However, even Windows experts find the wizards simplify the configuration process over manual installation tasks, because it is easier and faster to start with the base settings created by the wizard and then manually adjust changes.

Improvements in Security

Significantly more than just cosmetic updates are the security enhancements added to Windows Server 2003. During the middle of the development of the Windows Server 2003 product, Microsoft launched its Secured Computing Initiative (SCI), which stipulated that all products and solutions from Microsoft meet very stringent requirements for security. Although Exchange Server 2003 was already slated to have several new security enhancements, SCI created an environment where the Exchange Server 2003 product added and enhanced security significantly in the system environment.

Chapters 11, "Client-Level Security," 12, "Server-Level Security," and 13, "Transport-Level Security," of this book are focused on security in different core areas. Chapter 12 addresses some of the new defaults wherein most services are disabled on installation and must be enabled for access. Although this also might seem like a trivial change in a messaging system environment, it provides a relatively secured server immediately from initial installation. Previous versions of Exchange could easily take an hour going through all the unneeded features and manually locking down a server system. The server defaults and the functional or operational differences are noted in Chapter 12.

IPSec and Wireless Security Improvements

Transport-level security in the form of IPSec was included in Windows 2000; however, organizations have been slow to adopt IPSec security, typically because they don't understand how it works. Chapter 13 of this book addresses how IPSec is enabled in organizations, providing a high level of server-to-server, site-to-site, and remote user “to “LAN secured communications. Also covered in Chapter 13 is the new secured wireless LAN (802.1X) technology that is built in to Windows Server 2003. Windows Server 2003 includes dynamic key determination for improvements in wireless security over the more common Wired Equivalency Protocol (WEP) that is used with standard 802.11 wireless communications. By improving the encryption on wireless communications, an organization can increase its confidence that Exchange Server 2003 can provide a truly secured messaging environment.

Performance and Functionality Improvements

A network end-user would likely never notice many new features added to Exchange Server 2003, and in many cases a network administrator would not even be aware that the technologies were updated and improved. These are technologies that help the network operate more efficiently and effectively so that a user might experience faster message transmission. (Although even if the network were able to respond twice as fast, many times a process that used to take three seconds to complete and now takes less than two seconds to complete is not something a user would particularly notice.) The key benefit typically comes in the area of overall network bandwidth demand improvements. For very large organizations, the performance improvements prevent the organizations from having to add additional servers, processors, or site connections; they gain system efficiencies from improvements in the core operating system and Exchange application.

Global Catalog Caching on a Domain Controller

One of the significant back-end improvements to Windows Server 2003 is the server's capability of caching Global Catalog (GC) information on domain controllers. In a Windows 2000 environment, for users to access the Global Catalog to view mail accounts and distribution lists, an organization typically put out a Global Catalog server to every site in the organization. This distributed Global Catalog server function minimized the ongoing traffic of users querying the catalog over a WAN connection every time they wanted to send an email to someone else in the organization. Directory replication occurred to Global Catalog, however, to keep the directory synchronized. With Windows Server 2003, an organization has the ability to place a domain controller in a remote location, and the Global Catalog information is cached to the remote system. This provides the best of both worlds : The directory information is readily available to remote users, but because it is just a cache of the information and not a fully replicated copy, synchronization and distribution of catalog information is done only when initially requested , and not each time a change is made to the directory.

Remote Installation Service for Servers

New to Windows Server 2003 is a server tool called Remote Installation Service for Servers, or RIS for Servers. RIS for Servers enables an organization to create images of server configurations, which can then be pushed up to a RIS server that can later be used to re-image a new system. RIS was standard with Windows 2000; however, it only supported the re-imaging of desktop systems.

RIS for Servers can be used several ways. One way organizations have leveraged RIS for Servers has been to create a new, clean server image with all of a company's core utilities installed. Every time the organization needs to install a new server, rather than starting from scratch with an installation CD, it can use the template RIS server installation. The image could include service packs , patches, updates, or other standard setup utilities.

RIS for Servers can also be used as a functional disaster recovery tool. After a server has been configured as an Exchange 2003 server with the appropriate program files and parameters configured, the organization can then run the RIPrep to backup the Exchange server image to a RIS server. In the event of a system failure, the organization can recover the server image from the state of the system before system failure.

NOTE

Creating RIS images for production servers requires planning and testing before relying on the system function for successful disaster recovery. Certain applications require services to be stopped before RIPrep is run. Chapter 32, "Recovering from a Disaster," addresses steps to conduct system server recovery.


RIS for Servers is a versatile tool that helps organizations quickly build new servers or recover from application server failures. Besides being covered in Chapter 32, RIS for Servers is also covered in detail in Chapter 3, "Installing Exchange Server 2003."

Scaling Reliability with 8-Node Clustering

Another Windows 2003 enhancement that is supported in Exchange 2003 is the support for 8-node clustering. Previous versions of Exchange supported up to 2-node clustering, which enabled an organization to have two systems available to support a series of mailboxes. Windows 2003 supports 8-node clustering, so an organization can now have up to eight servers clustered for a combination of performance load balancing and real-time system failover.

With active clustering, the load of the users accessing mailboxes hosted on the cluster can be distributed across the active servers, thus providing improved performance to users accessing mail. With 2-node clustering, the load was distributed to just two systems, thus limiting realistic access to thousands of simultaneous mail access connections. By expanding to up to 8-nodes, an organization can now have several thousand users simultaneously connecting to the mail store, distributing the load to up to eight systems for much better scalability.

In addition to providing load balancing, clustering provides failover and fault-tolerance capabilities, enabling an organization to have several thousand mailboxes protected by real-time fault failover and recovery. Through the implementation of active and passive clustering, an IT organization can choose the level of system recovery.

Details on how to plan, test, and implement a clustered Exchange 2003 environment is covered in Chapter 30. That chapter also covers other tools, technologies, and techniques on methods of improving Exchange system reliability and mailbox recovery in the event of a system failure.

Improving Mailbox Recovery Through Volume Shadow Copy Services

A significant addition to Windows Server 2003 is the Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) technology. Volume Shadow Copy takes a snapshot of a network volume and places the copy onto a different volume on the network. After a mirrored snapshot has been taken, at any time, files from the read-only shadow can be accessed without complications typical of network volumes in use. Exchange 2003 is one of the first application server products that takes advantage of the Volume Shadow Copy Service. VSS is used to improve online backups of Exchange databases, and it provides the basis from which mailbox recovery capabilities are provided in an Exchange 2003 environment. There are two primary ways VSS provides better system management support in Exchange 2003:

  • Online Backup of Files VSS provides the ability to back up open files, such as Exchange EDB data. Backing up open files has always been a challenge for organizations. Old tape backup software skipped files in use because there was no easy way to back up the files being used by applications such as Exchange. Improvements in tape backup software now provide the ability for an organization to add an Exchange backup agent so that Exchange databases can be backed up. However, the process of backing up Exchange data during production usage time significantly slows down the normal access to messages in the Exchange database.

    Windows Server 2003 Volume Shadow Copy provides the ability to create a snapshot to another volume. With the read-only shadow volume available, tape backup software can now launch a backup on the shadowed version of the database without having to contend with database access on the primary disk volume of the network. Furthermore, because the database on the shadowed volume is not in use, the backup system does not have to stop, unlock a file, back up the file, and then relock the file for user access.

  • Simple Mailbox Recovery Volume Shadow Copy Service technology is also used in Exchange 2003 to provide administrators the ability to recover lost or damaged mailboxes. Rather than having to go back to the last tape backup on a system, a mail administrator can go to the Exchange System Manager and choose to recover a mailbox. More details on mailbox recovery is covered later in the section "Simplifying Mailbox Recovery Using Integrated Tools."

 <  Day Day Up  >  


Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 Unleashed
Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 Unleashed (2nd Edition)
ISBN: 0672328070
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 393
Authors: Rand Morimoto

flylib.com © 2008-2017.
If you may any questions please contact us: flylib@qtcs.net