CAS/HUB Server 安装在一起做NLB

上次微软面试官问的问题,很可惜,他的答案是错误的,虽然他一再坚持并叫我回来自己查证,其实CAS/HUB Server 安装在一起做NLB是可行的.

NLB can be used to provide high availability in the following scenarios:

1.    Load balancing of inbound SMTP connections for POP and IMAP client connections to the default Receive connector named "Client <Server Name>" that is created only on Hub Transport servers.

2.    Load balancing of inbound SMTP connections for applications that submit e-mail to the Exchange organization.

NLB should not be used to distribute connections for internal routing between Hub Transport servers.

Besides,NLB is only avaliable on Exchange 2007 with SP1 installed.

1.    For the first question: should NLB be setup before or after Ex2007 installation?

NLB should be configure after we have these roles have installed.

2.    IP address you want to use as the Windows NLB cluster IP address should be an IP address on the same subnet as the NLB member servers.

3.    When we begin to setup NLB the first thing is to do is to create an A-record for the NLB cluster name in DNS. So that we can use these two Hub transport/Client Access server as one. Then you have to point your MX record to Windows NLB cluster IP address, which you specified when you create the A record. So that Client will find the Hub transport/Client Access server.

4.    Yes, you are right. Internally, you can use https://mail.internal.domain.com/owa ,external URL should be the https://mail.domain.com/owa

More information share with you:

How you can load-balance Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1 (SP1) Hub Transport Servers using Windows Network Load Balancing technology.

http://www.msexchange.org/articles_tutorials/exchange-server-2007/planning-architecture/load-balancing-exchange-2007-sp1-hub-transport-servers-windows-network-load-balancing-technology-part1.html

Using Network Load Balancing

http://technet2.microsoft.com/windowsserver/en/library/57c24429-0268-4ed8-afdf-fd4b0b6539b71033.mspx?mfr=true  

Hope it helps.

Update

In order to keep the number of servers down in a high availability environment, administrators have been looking at using Network Load Balancing (NLB) for CAS and then co-locating the HT role on each node of the NLB cluster to also provide high availability for the HT role.

This configuration can work, and it really is not too difficult to configure. It is extremely important to note that using NLB to load balance the default SMTP receive connectors (using port 25) is not supported and is completely unnecessary since they are load balanced for all intra-Exchange communications like HT to HT communications. However, using NLB to provide redundancy and load balancing for connections to  HTs that are hosting Client SMTP receive connectors (using port 587) is fully supported and may be desireable if you have a large number of external SMTP/POP and SMTP/IMAP clients that need to connect to this receive connector.

The steps that you need are to:

  1. Setup two servers running Windows Server 2003 with two NICs in each server
  2. Install Exchange Server2007 Hub Transport and Client Access Service (CAS) on each server
  3. Configure one NIC for the Network Load Balance cluster and setup the other NIC in a separate network so it can be managed through that IP address
  4. Configure NLB with Unicast and even load balancing
  5. Setup the port rules:
    • Port 25 to 25 for both TCP and UDP and select the radio button to disable this port range (this will exclude port 25 from being listed to using the virtual IP address of the NLB cluster, but still allow the individual server IPs to still listen to port 25)
    • Port 465 to 465 for both TCP and UDP and selected the radio button to disable this port range
    • Port 80 to 80 for both TCP and UDP and set affinity to none (I recommend "none" so you can easily test and verify that it works)
    • Port 587 to 587 for both TCP and UDP, affinity none (this is for the client SMTP receive connector)
    • Port 443 to 443 for both TCP and UDP, affinity none
    • Port 110 to 110 for both TCP and UDP, affinity none
    • Port 993 to 993 for both TCP and UDP, affinity none
    • Port 143 to 143 for both TCP and UDP, affinity none
    • Port 995 to 995 for both TCP and UDP, affinity none
  6. With affinity set to none, you can more readily test the CAS (after updating the web pages to show which server is actually responding) and verify that the load is being shared. You can also test to make sure the NLB cluster does not respond to SMTP on port 25, which it shouldn't if you set it right, and verify that each server does respond to SMTP as an individual server name.
  7. You can configure protocol logging for the other protocols and telnet to the ports using the NLB IP address to see if they are loading balancing like they should. You can also use the NLB IP for the testing by sending and receiving messages and checking the message tracking logs to see that the traffic was being balanced. It all worked.

NOTE: You may want to change affinity to either single (especially if it is being used internally) or Class C (especially if it is accessible from the Internet) once your testing is done.


5 Comments

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