Hi Our sites (AD 2003) have large number of Exchange 2007 users in them. We're toying with the idea of giving Exchange dedicated DC's for DSAccess. I recall with Exchange 2003, you could only hardcode one DC, and this still doesn't stop other services from using that DC. Does anyone know if this has changed with Exchange 2007? Can we have a group of DC's specifically for Exchange? And how could we measure how many DC's we needed for this?

one DC/GC per site for exchange 2007 is required . If need analyze how they are being used check event 2080 on exchange server

This can be helpful http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dgoldman/archive/2006/05/06/the-ds-server-registry-key-and-rebuilding-an-offline-address-list.aspx

On Fri, 15 Oct 2010 18:55:45 +0000, Neil4933 wrote: >Our sites (AD 2003) have large number of Exchange 2007 users in them. We're toying with the idea of giving Exchange dedicated DC's for DSAccess. > >I recall with Exchange 2003, you could only hardcode one DC, No, you can use as many as you like. You can only use ONE DC as the "conguration domain controller", but you can have more than one for DCs and GCs. >and this still doesn't stop other services from using that DC. Well, no, it wouldn't. But putting the DCs and GCs into a separate AD Site would negate the need to use manual configuration for the DCs and GCs, and it would probably prevent other applicationsfrom using them under normal circumstances. >Does anyone know if this has changed with Exchange 2007? Can we have a group of DC's specifically for Exchange? It hasn't changed. >And how could we measure how many DC's we needed for this? The "rule of thumb" for 32-bit DCs is 4 Exchange CPU cores for each DC CPU core. For 64-bit DCs it's 8 Exchange CPU cores. So, the more economical solution is to switch the DCs to running Windows Server 2008 R2. Have you measured the perfromance of the GCs and DCs? Is there a problem? You don't say how many users there are in an AD site. But running the Outlook clients in cached-mode can help by offloading a good deal of the name resolution onto the clients. So you have two ways of lowering the load on the DCs. --- Rich Matheisen MCSE+I, Exchange MVP --- Rich Matheisen MCSE+I, Exchange MVP

Thanks Rich. To confirm - i. If we did want to have seperate DC/GC's just for Exchange, the ideal scenario would be to give Exchange servers their own AD sites, that way the DC/GC's are 'reserved' for them? ii. If we decided we wanted seperate DC/GC's post-deployment, what would be the best way to set this up out of interest? I mean in a situation where creating new AD sites and placing Exchange servers in them would be impractical? I'm just curious that's all,

On Sat, 16 Oct 2010 21:17:03 +0000, Neil4933 wrote: >i. If we did want to have seperate DC/GC's just for Exchange, the ideal scenario would be to give Exchange servers their own AD sites, that way the DC/GC's are 'reserved' for them? They're "reserved" to the extent that other applications are well behaved. Unless you firewall off the AD Site (or start using IPSec) you can't prevent their use. >ii. If we decided we wanted seperate DC/GC's post-deployment, what would be the best way to set this up out of interest? I mean in a situation where creating new AD sites and placing Exchange servers in them would be impractical? I'm just curious that's all, All you'd need to do is change the IP addresses of the servers and reboot them (assuming you don't have manually created A and PTR records in DNS. You'd already have created the AD Site before assigning the new IP addresses. --- Rich Matheisen MCSE+I, Exchange MVP --- Rich Matheisen MCSE+I, Exchange MVP