Greetings, I have a single forest / domain environment with just under 70 current users on a single Exchange 2010 server.
We have two locations: one in the Western US and one in the East. HQ is in the Eastern US and has about 60 users. The rest are in the West. The two sites are connected by VPN over very reliable fiber connections at each facility. We will probably be adding one or two more sites in different states in the coming year or two. I’m guessing these would add 10 to 15 Exchange users per site. I have 5 remote sales users in various parts of the country that never come into either office. Things are going well now[1], but the Exchange server hardware is quite old at this point (~5 years) and the single mailbox database is becoming quite large (~500GB). At a minimum I need to replace the existing server hardware. I also intend to purchase some type of long-term e-mail archiving solution to reduce mailbox size. (I will also begin to enforce reasonable limits for most users). My questions are: 1) Should I consider additional Exchange servers for high availability and / or placing the appropriate mailboxes locally in the secondary site? 2) Two users in the remote site have access in Outlook to a shared mailbox that should always be placed in the HQ site. If I add a second Exchange server in the remote site and place their personal mailboxes there, can Outlook 2010 deal with multiple mailboxes hosted on different servers in different sites? (I can't imagine the answer is no, but it seems better to know for sure.) 3) When considering changes and enhancements, simplicity of management is extremely important. Perhaps as much as availability, or even more. In the current scenario we approach or exceed three nines[2], which is sufficient and appropriate for our company. The reason for requiring as little complexity as possible is that there are only 1.5 of us managing this (along with everything else we have) and I don't see that changing appreciably any time soon. 4) What am I missing? Answers, questions and whacks with clue-by-fours are all welcome and appreciated. Thanks, RS [1] Knock wood. [2] Knock wood.
