Coexisting with Previous Versions

Determining the Location of ADCs

The class of computer on which you run ADC depends on the size of your existing Exchange deployment, the number of Windows 2000 domains you have, and the hardware budget you have available.

The processing load of ADC depends on the replication schedule set for the Connection Agreements and the number of calls made to the Exchange 5.5 directory and Active Directory. You can install the ADC service directly onto a global catalog server; however, because the global catalog is a precious resource in the organization, you may decide to implement ADC on a member server, ensuring that a fast network link exists between the member and the global catalog. Ideally, the Exchange 5.5 bridgehead server should also be on the same fast network. This allows you to achieve the best performance from all of the components. If you deploy the ADC in this manner, it may involve additional hardware costs that must be taken into consideration.

Using Multiple ADCs

You can deploy multiple ADC servers in large organizations, but you must configure the Connection Agreements so that different sets of objects are replicated by each. If only mail-based connectivity exists or if you require additional replication performance, you can deploy multiple ADC servers to ensure that Internet Protocol (IP) connections between servers are relatively local. You should not deploy multiple ADC servers as a fault-tolerant solution, although you can mitigate the risk of downtime by having more than one ADC server in the enterprise.

Administration and management overhead can be kept to a minimum when you deploy multiple ADC servers because ADC obtains all configuration information from the configuration-naming context in Active Directory. Because each domain controller in the forest holds a read/write copy of this context, you can manage Connection Agreements remotely, even if direct IP connectivity does not exist between the management console and the ADC server. In this scenario, you make changes to a local domain controller that then replicates to all of the other servers.

For more information about deploying ADC, see Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server Planning and Installation.

Related Topics

Deploying Active Directory Connector Understanding Resource Usage of ADC Set Up a Connection Agreement Understanding Exchange's Mixed Mode Operation