Exchange Server

Desparate Dan · Guest

Hi Guru's

I'm looking into an Exchange 2003 solution that will be centralised with a
number of remote sites coming in over 2MB ADSL (2MB Download speed / 256K
Upload speed).

The remote sites contain approx 25 users each and the intention is to deploy
DC/GC's locally at each site.

There are ten remote sites and each one is one days travel away for the main
office IT team to get to and as there are no IT skills locally it is planned
not to locate Exchange servers locallly.

The cost of links from these remote sites is very expensive so to upgrade
the links is not being considered at present.

There is a requirement for the full Outlook 2003 client to support a plug in
app so OWA is not a consideration.

Could anyone advise or help on the following.........

- What tools would be available to simulate client traffic over ADSL to see
if this is a viable solution.

- What are the general experiences out there in the real world.

- Is there a formula that anyone knows off for calculating the number of
Outlook 2003 clients such a design.

Any help and advice would be greatly appreciated

Dan

Al Mulnick · Guest

There's a lot of variables there. For example, what is acceptable
performance? Client expectations in general? What is the expected
utilization of the links at any given time of day? How many concurrent users
at the remote site? What is the expected link latency? How many messages is
each user expecting to work with in a given day? Directory lookups? How
reliable are the links? What if the link is unavailable? Does your company
culture send mass emails with attachments? What about anti-virus settings
for client and server? Any plans there?

FWIW, I've deployed far worse clients in far slower and more latent sites
without many issues or complaints. Those that did complain were receiving
larger files than the rest (binary attachments that choked the link) and the
email aware client based anti-virus was choking the heck out of the links by
having to download each attachment as it hit the inbox and then the client
would download it again to see the attachment after the AV was done with it.
Painful.

Some other options that can make the user experience better is to use
RPC/HTTP (reliability) and cached mode which can mask a lot of network
latencies from the user.

Your local GC is most likely useless from an Exchange perspective unless you
manually configure the clients to use it.

Al

"Desparate Dan" <DesparateDan@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
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Brendon · Guest

Perhaps consider Terminal Services?

"Desparate Dan" <DesparateDan@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
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