Microsoft Exchange Server is Microsoft’s mail, calendar, contact management and collaboration software. It’s usually deployed on the Windows Server for professional use. Microsoft developed the Exchange Server to offer users access to their favorite messaging platform from multiple computers, mobile devices and even web-based applications. Exchange Server, however, can be managed by third-party companies who provide IT support.
IT support usually involves the installation and configuration of Microsoft Exchange Server on the organization’s network.
This includes installation of Microsoft Outlook Express and Microsoft Outlook 2003 with Microsoft Exchange Server. IT support also involves setting up the infrastructure, which consists of various servers, database servers, network adapters and web servers. All these servers play a role in providing high availability to the organization’s e-mail, data storage and corporate messaging solutions. With the use of these services, you get to enjoy several benefits including:
High availability – Microsoft Exchange Server offers high availability options for all your e-mail databases.
These include EDB files, mailbox exchange and Microsoft Exchange Server online backup. You can also enjoy the ability to load balancing across all your mail servers. This ensures that no single server or network is overused so that an entire load is distributed evenly amongst the e-mail mailboxes.
Failover – You don’t need to have one single server for managing your e-mail servers. You can create a cluster. A cluster creates a number of servers that can be used to perform failover functions. With failover, the operating system of the machines becomes secondary so that they don’t become the target of any attacks. In addition to failover, you can also create a default or secondary server if none of them is running successfully. For the cluster to operate smoothly, the servers should be rebooted periodically to ensure good performance level.
Effective power management – IT administrators find it easier to manage the servers using Microsoft Exchange Server on windows clustered. This is because of its feature of active manager. Active manager in a particular machine enables IT administrators to disable or enable services or applications so that they do not consume the whole computer processing resources. You can also disable or enable particular servers, while keeping the others enabled so that the resources are utilized in a balanced manner. You can also control the resource utilization of the machines by setting the values of the cloned Exchange databases and the active manager itself.
Effective recovery – If any data loss occurs, it can affect the entire database and can also affect the operations of the business. To remedy such situation, you need to restore your Exchange Server in an effective manner. Microsoft Exchange Server help you to perform this task easily. It provides various features such as anti-virus, recovery, and recovery including fix-up, site recovery and rollback options.
In DAC mode – The two main options available in Microsoft Exchange Server help you to maintain the integrity of the servers as well as the workstations in the data centers. This mode is known by the name of auto-daemon. In this setup, the computers in the data centers are managed through centralized administration and supervision. There is no need to reboot the servers when they face a problem.
Continuous replication – It is one of the best features offered by Microsoft Exchange Server.
- In this option, a copy of the user mailbox is kept on a separate physical server so that in case of a crash, an identical version of the user mailbox is available on another node.
- This makes the configuration and deployment of the emails much easier.
- This setup also enables the configuration of the cluster nodes in an efficient manner. Microsoft Exchange Server helps you in maintaining an effective configuration of the clustered servers as well as the data centers.
