Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 High Availability

Introducing the new Exchange architecture

Before we delve into how to design and deploy a highly available Exchange 2013 infrastructure, we need to look at the architecture changes and improvements made over the previous editions of Exchange.

Note

This is not an extensive list of all the improvements introduced in Exchange 2013. Only the main changes are mentioned as well as those relevant for high availability.

Looking at the past

In the past, Exchange has often been architected and optimized with consideration to a few technological constraints. An example is the key constraint that led to the creation of different server roles in Exchange 2007: CPU performance. A downside of this approach is that server roles in Exchange 2007/2010 are tightly coupled ...