Wednesday, March 05, 2014

Load Balancing in Exchange 2013 and Managed Availability

Load Balancing becomes critical when we have more workloads approaching the servers from various instances and for this Exchange Server is not an exception, we all know the importance of Load balancing with Exchange Server for all these years and with the Exchange Server 2013 release it moved from the traditional Layer 7 Load Balancer to Layer 4 Load Balancer which requires no session affinity at the Load Balancing layer.


Though this is a great architectural simplification we have a minor glitch with the Managed Availability feature comes along with Exchange Server 2013 which monitors the Exchange server and performs automatic recovery mechanism during failures and a EHLO blog post published today on this topic which clearly explains this impact with various scenarios and also shows how an administrator can configure settings to over come the issues caused by this proactively to have the service up and running without issues.

Ross Smith takes the following Namespace and Affinity scenarios and explains this in detail with clear visual appeal.

Single Namespace / No Session Affinity
Single Namespace / Session Affinity
Multiple Namespaces / No Session Affinity

Check out the blog post to know more: Load Balancing in Exchange 2013 

* In addition to the above post read the below new WindowsITPro article from MVP Michael Van Horenbeeck explaining the clear usage differences between a Layer 4 and Layer 7 load balancing  with Exchange Server 2013 and touches how the usage of a proper load balancer enhances the support experience.

Exchange Server 2013 Load Balancing and Health Checks

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