F5 Solution for Microsoft Exchange 2010

James Hendergart
Business Development Manager
Helen Johnson
Solution Engineer

Whats new in Exchange Server 2010?

1. Elevation of Client Access Server (CAS) role
All client connections, regardless of protocol, are
with CAS servers
CAS servers rely on ADC for high-availability

Exchange 2010 Architecture

Enterprise Network
Edge Transport
Routing and
AV/AS

Hub Transport
Routing and
policy

External
SMTP
servers

Mobile phone

Web browser

Phone system
(PBX or VoIP)

Mailbox
Storage of
mailbox items

Unified Messaging
Voice mail and
voice access

Client Access
Client connectivity
Web services

Outlook
(remote
user)

Line of business
application
Outlook (local user)

Whats new in Exchange Server 2010?

Elevation of Client Access Server (CAS) role

All client connections, regardless of protocol, are

with CAS servers
CAS servers rely on ADC for high-availability

Microsoft recommends hardware load balancing

for every Exchange 2010 deployment
ADC recommended over NLB
Includes multi-role Exchange server installations
Includes installations with Microsoft clustering services

The F5 Solution for Exchange Server 2010

Prevent these pains
Dropped sessions re-authentication, reconnection
Failed network connections retries, delay
Slow response trapped users

These capabilities

Health monitoring and intelligent load-balancing

Client persistence
Server off-load
Availability of servers, arrays and sites

Whats new in Exchange Server 2010?

1. Elevation of Client Access Server (CAS) role

All client connections, regardless of protocol, are with
CAS servers
2. Microsoft recommends hardware load balancing over
NLB
Multi-role Exchange server installations
Installations with Microsoft clustering services

Technical white paper on the MS internal Exchange design: http

://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff829232.aspx
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The F5 Solution for Exchange Server 2010

High-availability and superior user response

Site resilience
Reduced time and cost to replicate mail store
SPAM filtering and web client security

F5 Solution for Exchange Server 2010

C
B

Configuration - we have a template for that

Availability
Health monitoring
Port/protocol requests
Real-time in memory connection tables

Intelligent load-balancing
BIG-IP always knows the most available server
Least connection method
See application template

Cross site availability

Site level health
Prioritized decision tree
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Persistence
Also known as affinity, or sticky sessions,
persistence can help enhance a users
application experience
Different types of persistence:
Source IP
Cookie
SSL ID

Each Exchange client connection type has a

recommended persistence method
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Configuring persistence profiles in BIG-IP

LocalTrafficProfilesPersistenceCreate

Cookie

Source IP and SSL ID

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Performance - SSL termination

Reduce cost and overhead of managing
certificates by moving them to BIG-IP
BIG-IP is designed with dedicated chipset for
encryption/decryption calculations
Increase Exchange server CPU utilization and
network connections per second

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Security

Bi-directional proxy
Secure remote access
Pre-authentication
Application layer security for web clients
SPAM filtering

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Multi-datacenter considerations
Multiple datacenters provides additional options for
redundancy and load-balancing

Load-balancing and Failover across locations

DNS management
Secure, accelerated application data synchronization
Seamless integration with systems management tools

Key enabling functionality

BIG-IP LTM GTM communication

iSessions
iControl
F5 PRO-Enabled Management Pack
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Summary

Highest availability through intelligent, hardware-based loadbalancing of client connections to CAS servers

Dramatically increased server processing power through off-loading

of SSL, caching, compression and client connection isolation.

F5 enables cross-site availability and resilience

Pre-authenticate users in the perimeter network

F5 devices can be controlled using PowerShell and Management

Packs
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Next steps
Reply to your Coffee Talk calendar invite or your follow-up
email to schedule an appointment with your F5 customer
team.
Please complete our 30-second survey and receive your $5
Starbucks coffee card!

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Exchange related resources

Sysmex case study

http://www.f5.com/pdf/case-studies/sysmex-america-cs.pdf

F5 video demo how to configure BIG-IP for Exchange 2010

http://www.vimeo.com/album/1537190

F5 Deployment Guide
http://www.f5.com/pdf/deployment-guides/f5-exchange-2010-dg.pdf

F5 Solution page for Exchange Server

http://www.f5.com/solutions/microsoft/exchange

F5 online user community for Microsoft solutions

http://devcentral.f5.com/microsoft

Technical white paper on Microsofts internal deployment

Load-balancing requirements from Microsoft TechNet

http://download.microsoft.com/download/8/5/D/85D61478-8719-4219-96BAE5C53DD4F436/0941_ExchangeServer2010ArchitectureTWP.docx

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff625247.aspx

Microsoft TechNet wiki

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/exchange-2010-client-access-array-amp-load-balancingresources.aspx

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