the server on which the Active copy reside, is logically not in a failed state). In this case a coworker made a Exchange Management Shell script which checks every x minutes whether the Default Public Folder Attribute of a Mailbox Database is referring to the same server (i.e. I have a customer who uses a DAG and has Outlook 2003, which cannot be upgraded quickly. You can script some form of HA into it, at least your users don’t have to wait for admin intervention. Those pesky legacy apps….īut what, if you are stuck with Outlook 2003? Or going to discontinue Public Folders, but just not at the moment? Or other reasons I didn’t think of? When your clients aren’t the bottleneck, move the Public Folder functionality to other products (SharePoint for instance). So, what options do I have? Upgrading Outlook off course, which has a lot of other benefits. You can have duplicate Public Folder Databases via PF Replication, but there is no automatic PF Server failover! This could be catastrophic for your SLA, as Outlook 2003 ( supported in combination with Exchange 2010) requires Public Folders to operate correctly or operate at all! Luckily, Outlook 2007 & 2010 do operate, but it is possible that they don’t have Public Folder access during a failover. Clients do not connect to the Public Folders Database via de CAS Array they directly connect to the server with a Public Folder Database defined in the Default Public Folder attribute of a Mailbox Database. If you still need Public Folders (PF), you are in a pickle. This solution gives us MAILBOX database redundancy. So, if a database or server fails, a failover occurs and the load balancer(s) redirects the traffic to a remaining Client Access Server.
#Exchange public folder database windows#
Essentially a DNS record pointing to a Load Balancer.Ī Hardware Load Balancer (HLB) is Microsoft's recommended way to enable redundancy and load balance this entry point (BTW: On TechEd 2010 Europe, the Microsoft Exchange team mentioned that it does not recommend it’s own Windows NLB solution anymore). When using a DAG the single point of entry for your clients and for all protocols (including MAPI RPC), is the Client Access Array (or CAS Array).
DAG supplies us with mailbox database redundancy.
It is a different approach with previous versions of Exchange, who leverage server redundancy. When realizing a High Available Exchange 2010 environment, you automatically going to use DAG ( Database Availabilty Groups).