journaling remote exchange sites

[dante18]

I was wondering if someone out there could explain the dataflow between a central EV/Exchange 2010 site and remote exchange only sites, as it pertains to journaling?

Does the message travel to remote site, then get sent back over WAN for journaling and then get delivered to recipient?

Thanks in advance I hope I was clear enough for you guys?

Dante

[JesusWept3]

by remote, do you just mean in a remote office in the same network or something like the Cloud/off premise type journaling?

Typically in exchange all that happens is the messages are effectively copied by the transport layer to a seperate mailbox as the message hits that server and then is archived by EV afterwards if its set up to do so

So for instance you may have a user in Location A \ Exchange Server 1 that sends an email to Location B\Exchange Server 2, and then the transport layer sends it to to Location A\Exchange Server1 to be journaled, whilst another process just forwards it regularly to Location B\Exchange Server2

EV if configured will just archive whatevers in the journal, so if you have a journal in the remote site then i suppose you could be tripling your network traffic.

I.e User sends an email, one goes to the end user in theother location, the other goes to the journal, ev then connects to the journal, downloads it and then deletes it, where as it would be faster if it were to journal a mailbox that was in the same physical location etc

[dante18]

Remote office same AD domain. EV/EX10 in North America, two remote EX10 sites (no EV) in Asia...

All mail flow goes through North America, then is delivered to Asian sites. Therefore mail hits NA site gets journalled and sent on to recipient.

I was wondering how EV would handle local mail in the remote site?

Example:

Sender creates mail addressed to office mate one office over in Asia (local mail)

Hits send, does EV then split two copies of the message?

One for the journaling mailbox located in the US.

One for the local recipient located in Asia?

[JesusWept3]

Well it all depends if you are journaling as well as archiving mailboxes
Typically what will happen is if you journal users and also archive their mailboxes, if the journal archive and mail archives belong to vault stores that have sharing set up, you would have two copies of the message, one for the user and one for the journal, and any attachments such as word documents etc will be shared between the two

So if you have a 10MB attachment that is journaled and is also in a users mailboxand that gets archived, the only thing that will be archived just the once will be that attachment, but because the meta data of the journaled item and the item in the users inbox are fundamentally different, they will be seperate

[dante18]

Ahh... I see.

Now a final question!!

Would that journal traffic saturate a WAN link that is kind of weak? What we are ultimately worried about is a degradation of the remote Exchange performance due to the fact that local mail will have to be journalled accros a WAN link...

[JesusWept3 · Accepted solution]

it all really depends, it very much could do for instance,
lets say you have the following layout


Loation A:
Exchange Mbx Server
Exchange Journal Server
EV Server

Location B:
Exchange Mbx Server
 

If users in Location B send emails to people in Location A, then thats a normal amount of traffic
Item gets set to MbxServer and Journal Server in Location A, and EV Server archives off of the journal server

If users in Location B send emails to people in Location B, then the items get sent between those exchange servers, but also get pushed to the Exchange Journal Server as well.

So if you send a 10MB email, the email in the remote office goes to Location B for the regular users to pick up, and then the 10MB gets pushed across the transport to Location A to hit the journal server.

But where the EV Server is utilized, its archiving off of a local journal server.

Depending on the industry that you are in, you can either not journal anyone in the remote site, or just journal a very specific list of VIP's to help.

Or you can do it so you have the following

Location A:
Exchange Mbx Server
Exchange Journal Server
EV Server
SQL Server (Directory and local vault stores)

Location B:
Exchange Mbx Server
Exchange Journal Server
EV Server
SQL Server (local vault stores)

Then configure the transports in such a way so that any emails in Location A only go to the LocationA's Journal Server, and Location B goes to the Location B Journal Server

The cross site traffic will be limited to Directory lookups for EV and regular mail flow.
The downsides to this is, you have more than one journal repository to search against in DA or whatever solution you use for compliance and discovery

[dante18]

Your first scenario nails it and it will be very difficult to make my client change from that setup.

That being said 1500 users sending 100 emails per over a 10MB WAN link will be latency suicide! I am figuring they will eat all bandwidth on mailbox journaling alone.

I am an onsite Exchange consultant and I am trying to get the client to understand that as soon as they put an EX environment remotely that they will "HAVE TO" put an EV environment in as well.

Just trying to get some ammo for my recommendation that they need to spend more $$ and put an EV environment at the remote EX10 sites... Happy days!!

dante