Exchange server Implemenetation Analysis

Yeah ours in internal.. it wasn't a complete outage just about 7,000 mailboxes out, less than 10 min outage though.

sreekumarpg

Thanks all for giving the valid suggestions.

I too agree 365 hosted exchange solution is better than inhouse . But the management wants to host the exchange inhouse

Finally we planned to move the FSMO roles to the site where exchange is going to install.

coliver

Have you looked at other solutions outside of Exchange? Or would that not work in your environment?

sreekumarpg

@coliver We already have Domino hosted , we are planing to move to exchange,

Dashrender

@sreekumarpg said:

@coliver We already have Domino hosted , we are planing to move to exchange,

But why exchange? is there something there specifically you want?

sreekumarpg

@Dashrender said:

here something there specifically you wan

We are testing the exchange features and feasibility study.

other than exchange ,Domino. what you suggest ?

coliver

@sreekumarpg said:

@Dashrender said:

here something there specifically you wan

We are testing the exchange features and feasibility study.

other than exchange ,Domino. what you suggest ?

Have you taken a look at ZImbra? They have a fantastic web-client (probably the best in the market). It is also completely open source and very manageable.

coliver

@sreekumarpg said:

@coliver We already have Domino hosted , we are planing to move to exchange,

Ah... sounds like you got burned by one hosting vendor and that has turned your admins sour to anything hosted... sad.

sreekumarpg

@coliver @coliver Zimbra we already tested the community version , management is not satisfied with Zimbra

Also some clients are provided with corporate email access and we are planing to stop using SMTP,POP3 and IMAP

If exchange we can provide outlook and clients can access email server using outllook anyware

scottalanmiller

@sreekumarpg said:

If exchange we can provide outlook and clients can access email server using outllook anyware

Zimbra does that too. What about Zimbra did they not like? Were they confused about having Outlook?

coliver

@sreekumarpg said:

@coliver @coliver Zimbra we already tested the community version , management is not satisfied with Zimbra

Also some clients are provided with corporate email access and we are planing to stop using SMTP,POP3 and IMAP

If exchange we can provide outlook and clients can access email server using outllook anyware

That's fine was just wondering. Zimbra, while niche, is a great competitor to Exchange... especially if you can't host Exchange the value becomes that much better.

Zimbra's web client is that much better then Outlook (again in my opinion) that your users probably won't care if they have to log into a website rather then open Outlook... especially if they don't currently have Outlook. You can also get Activesync if you spend some money on it.

sreekumarpg

@scottalanmiller Management requirement is to have a test and feasible study on exchange inhouse with 50 users. Sure i will parallely build a Zimbra server and provide the same to management for a comparison

scottalanmiller

@sreekumarpg said:

@scottalanmiller Management requirement is to have a test and feasible study on exchange inhouse with 50 users. Sure i will parallely build a Zimbra server and provide the same to management for a comparison

I think that that is a good idea. We have used both and always preferred Zimbra. But we use Exchange now because it is hosted with Office 365. If it was not MS hosted, we wouldn't consider it.

scottalanmiller

@coliver said:

That's fine was just wondering. Zimbra, while niche, is a great competitor to Exchange... especially if you can't host Exchange the value becomes that much better.

I wouldn't call it niche, it's the "other" mail system. There is really just Exchange as the leader and Zimbra as the follower but the two, effectively, own the global email options.

sreekumarpg

Our Plan is to split the Mail Box role and Client Access Roles into two servers. These two servers are in two different VLAN

I would like to which all ports i required to open for

Client Access Server > AD Server
Client AccessServer > Mailbox Server

MailBox server and AD server in same vlan .

Outside to Inside access to Https and SMTP is required only for Client AccessServer?

coliver

@scottalanmiller said:

@sreekumarpg said:

@scottalanmiller Management requirement is to have a test and feasible study on exchange inhouse with 50 users. Sure i will parallely build a Zimbra server and provide the same to management for a comparison

I think that that is a good idea. We have used both and always preferred Zimbra. But we use Exchange now because it is hosted with Office 365. If it was not MS hosted, we wouldn't consider it.

Same here. If we had to have Email in house I would probably be running Zimbra.