This white paper provides details on the HP E5000 Messaging System’s network configuration and best practices for how a hardware load balancer can be used. HP recommends the use of a hardware load balancer with the E5000.
The HP E5000 Messaging System comes equipped with multiple network interfaces which include integrated and mezzanine network interface cards1 (NICs). These NICs have several purposes including client-based Messaging Application Programming Interface (MAPI) messaging traffic, Microsoft® Windows® domain traffic, management networking, and replication. These interfaces will be discussed in
detail within this paper.
Microsoft has made significant changes to the way clients interact with Exchange in the 2010 release. All clients connect via the Client Access Server role (CAS). This workload can be distributed across multiple CAS servers by assigning them to a CAS array. However, the CAS array does NOT provide any load balancing or high availability. This presents a significant performance and reliability issue for the Client Access Servers.