Exchange 2013

Question 1

Exchange 2013 has 3 Server roles. What are they?

Answer 1

1. Client Access Server (CAS)
2. Mailbox server
3. Edge Transport server (from SP1 or later)

Question 2

What is the Client Access Server (CAS) used for?

Answer 2

1. The Client Access server authenticates,
   and redirects or proxies those Client requests to the appropriate Mailbox server.
2. It’s what clients (like Outlook, Outlook Web App, ActiveSync) connect to for mailbox access.
3. Client Access servers can be made highly available through the use of a load balancer.

Question 3

The 2 main services of a CAS are…

Answer 3

1. Client Access service – this handles the client connections to mailboxes.
2. Front End Transport service – this performs various email traffic filtering and routing email between the Exchange servers and the outside world

Question 4

What is the Mailbox Server used for?

Answer 4

1. Mailbox server host the databases that contain mailbox and public folder data.
2. All workload processing for a given user occurs on the Mailbox server hosting the active copy of that user’s mailbox.
3. Can be made highly available by configuring a DAG (Database Availability Group.)

Question 5

What are the two transport services that a Mailbox Server provides?

Answer 5

1. Mailbox Transport service – passes email messages between the Hub Transport service and the mailbox database.
2. Hub Transport service – This service provides (a) email routing within the organization, and (b) connectivity between the Front End transport service and the Mailbox Transport service

Question 6

What is the Exchange Edge Transport Server and how is it used?

Answer 6

1. Edge Transport servers are designed to sit in a DMZ network to provide SMTP connectivity and mail flow in and out of the organization, whether to/from the internet or Office 365.
2. The Edge Transport Server can be used to satisfy the requirement not permit any direct communications from the internet to internal networks.

Question 7

What happened to the remaining server roles that existed in Exchange Server 2007 and 2010:

Answer 7

1. Hub Transport server – this functionality has been divided between the Client Access server (Front End Transport service) and Mailbox server (Hub Transport and Mailbox Transport services) and thus no longer a dedicated server role
2. Unified Messaging – this functionality has been divided between the Client Access and Mailbox server and is no longer a dedicated server role

Question 8

What is DAG? How does it work? Why is it used?

Answer 8

1. DAG stands for Database Availability Group. Add redundancy and resilience to their Exchange environments by keeping replicas of exchange on multiple hosts.
2. Database availability groups replaced Exchange Server 2007’s high-availability model, which was based on local continuous replication (LCR),
   Standby continuous replication (SCR)
   Cluster continuous replication (CCR)
   and single copy clustering (SCC) .
3. A DAG contains mailbox servers. Once a mailbox server is a member of a DAG, the Failover Clustering role is installed on the server and all required clustering resources such as the cluster heartbeat, cluster networks, and the quorum are created.
4. In Windows Failover Clustering, a quorum means a majority of cluster members must be online for the cluster to function. This is important because if the cluster loses quorum, all DAG operations cease and all databases hosted in the DAG dismount—i.e., email is down. In this case, human intervention is required to correct the quorum problem and restore Exchange availability.

Question 9

What does Reseeding refer to?

Answer 9

Is the process that creates a new copy of the database by replicating the data from another DAG member that hosts a healthy copy.

Ex. Hardware failure on the underlying storage system.

Question 10

What is Recipient Policy

Answer 10

First, Recipients (which include users, resources, contacts, and groups) are any mail-enabled object in Active Directory to which Exchange can deliver or route messages.

Example of Someone in the florida office.

Exchange Admin Screen/Mailflow/EmailPolicy/ Create policy that gives them an email address that reflects Florida.

Modify/Create default e-mail addresses for existing recipients and/or designate new primary e-mail addresses.

Question 11

What is a Name Space?

Answer 11

1. A namespace is a set of symbols that are used to organize objects, so that these objects may be referred to by name.
2. File systems are namespaces that assign names to files.
3. programming languages organize their variables and subroutines in namespaces
4. Exchange we may devey up our mail into difference name spaces. For example, our Florida offices verse CO.

Question 12

How should you store DB, Logs and Public Folder data?

Answer 12

DB on one set of disks, Logs on another. Public folder on another but it’s ok if cost is a problem to locate with DB.

Question 13

What is SMTP?

Answer 13

SMTP stands for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. SMTP is used when email is delivered from an email client, such as Outlook Express, to an email server or when email is delivered from one email server to another.