Accessing mailboxes over WAN

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Hi All.

I have been asked to investigate the pros and cons of setting up a solution where approx 15-20 users will be accessing their mailboxes over a 512k WAN link. The boxes will be hosted on 2007, clients running Office 2003/7/10. The wan link is MPLS and in the first instance wont be used for anything other than mail. There will be a server 2003 on the users side for them to authenticate to, but this will be in a seperate (trusted) forest from the exchange 2007 server.

The 2007 box already hosts mailboxes for users in 2 seperate trusted forests (both 2003) on its local LAN which although not ideal, is working so I'm really just wondering about the bandwidth / latency issue affecting performance of users accesing mailboxes over the 512k link.

Does anyone have experience of a simmilar setup to this or any opinions as to how it might perform?

Any thoughts or pointers welcome!

K.

 

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If the users have Outlook set with cache mode, they will rarely even know the difference. There's some calculation sheets out there which show how many users can be hosted over 128, 256, 512, etc speed links, and I've personally managed an environment with centralised Exchange servers and roughly that many users in sites with even slower links.

It worked fine, but it also depends on your users. If they all send emails with megabyte sized attachments throughout the say, it may not be enough. This is what the calculators would try to assess.

 

All our exchange servers are centralized, and serve 40 odd offices.

Site i work at has 10mbps line, and we run about 170 connections on that, never had a problem, it barely scrapes the bandwidth usage past a few hundred k, even at it's peak. But as shin mentioned, that can change depending on size of emails, and if its sent to a global list etc

512k would probably manage the amount of users you've specified

I'm still trying to convince the boss that we need a 100mbps line at work, for the amount of people we have

 

even if you sent to a large internal distribution list it wouldnt expand it until it hit a hub transport server for DL expansion, which im pretty sure also requires a GC in the same site, so it would occur after the mail reaches the central site

this is a VERY common topology these days, I would not worry too much about it assuming you run in cache mode as Shi says, without cache mode it might be a bit painful

 

Sweet!

Thanks guys. I guess my parioia was coming from studying for the 284 exam (not having any real world exchange experience) where you get used to scenarios where "you are the admin for a large exchange org. You have offices in blah.......and exchange servers coming out your ears..."

I think that was the tech spec anyway... Well seen I failed it twice...

K.