
Exchange Server
2007 Routing
Routing determines how a message gets from a source server to its destination server. Routing
decides on the best and least-expensive path a message takes when transferred between Exchange
servers within an organization and to servers in other organizations. In Exchange Server
2000/2003, several components were involved in routing, including Link State, Routing Groups,
Connectors, and Routing Group Masters. Routing Groups were logical groupings of Exchange
servers determined by the administrator. In Exchange Server 2007, because the transport core func-
tionality has changed as noted in Chapter 7 , message routing has also been changed. Rather than
using the Routing Engine found in Exchange 2000/2003, the Categorizer (see “ The Transport
Server Architecture ” in Chapter 7 ) now has a routing stage that determines the ultimate destina-
tion for a message, selects a route to that destination, and selects and resolves the next hop for that
destination to a server(s) and IP addresses.
Link state was one of the components of routing in Exchange 2000/2003 many Exchange
administrators were happy to see go away. Although link state had some benefits, managing it in
some cases required a significant overhead. In some large Exchange Server environments, the
orgInfo packet, which holds the routing information for the organization, ...