Load balancing exchange 2010 and enterprise vault

[cybergirl1987]

Hello,

I have a customer who wants guidance on load balancing exchange 2010 and enterprise vault. I searched but could not find any technote related to this. Any articles/technotes will be appreciated.

Thanks !!

[JesusWept3]

OK so load balancing Enterprise Vault is not going to happen, its a server by server basis, the best you can do is clustering, but absolutely no load balancing. On the Exchange 2010, obviously it supports load balancing, typically most companies use a hardware load balancer for the CAS Servers, theres tons of appliances and software out there that do this already. Typically though you're not going to find any technotes or white papers from symantec around that because thats between Microsoft and other 3rd party vendors that provide load balancing solutions

[JesusWept3]

Point your customer to this article from the MS Wiki http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/896.exchange-2010-client-access-array-and-load-balancing-resources.aspx

[cybergirl1987]

Thanks a ton !!

[cybergirl1987]

As part of the Exchange 2010 environment, my customer is introducing a hardware load balancer to front end the CAS role. Does EV need reconfiguring in any way for this?

[JesusWept3 · Accepted solution]

Typically not, however you may run in to a couple of issues....

Some older load balancers had an issue where you needed to apply a hotfix, otherwise it would disconnect the session prematurely. i think that was regarding the F5 firewalls.

A couple of other things to note:
Exchange 2010 introduces a "Throttling" policy, basically giving Exchange a set of rules of how long a user can perform queries in AD, Exchange, LDAP etc, if this isn't configured properly, and EV is doing a long query such as user address lookups, Exchange will forcefully disconnect the user.

Although you cna set the throttling policies on Exchange, the load balancer itself may say that the user has been connected for too long and kill the connection itself

You can read more about it here:
http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH169970

If you have a lot of connectivity issues, would suggest using the ExchangeGCOverride in the ExchangeServerEntry table to point to a hard coded CAS server, don't use the HOSTS file as the tecnote suggests because thats a horrible solution

[cybergirl1987]

Great piece of information. Thank you again.

[lgarcia]

nice article