Dear all, We are planning to setup a new design of exchange 2010 for our company, the planning is to implement a new network running in 10 sites. design: company.local (internal Domain) company.com (external Domain) main site: AD, EXCHANGE 2010, APP, DATA(VIRTUAL SERVERS), site 1 till 9 : AD, EXCHANGE 2010, APP, DATA( VIRTUAL SERVERS), All sites will have their own virtual environment, and they will be linked trough VPN site to site over the inetrnet. Questions: Do i need to install all exchange server roles at each site? Do i need license for all the site when installing exchange 2010? Where can i find a best practice design for this type of implementation? thx

The first big question that comes to my mind is, will this be just a single AD domain or will you have AD subdomains for your sites? Exchange does not have to be installed at each site at all, but if each physical site is defined as a separate AD site, then I would at least place CAS server there. Also, you need an Exchange license for each server you install Exchange 2010 on, so yes. Even if you diversify the roles, you need a license for each server. here is the doc on multiple AD sites and Exchange 2010 http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa996299.aspx I know of no document that will outline exactly what you are attempting to do though. This sounds like it could get complicated quick, so maybe you should engage an outside consultant to work with you on the design of your system.

Dear russ, it will be a single AD domain name. about installing Exchange in all the sites, this is because of the connectivity between the sites, to minimize the traffic via VPN and that all user can have their mailbox at their own site. The smpt will be at the main site for receiving of emails and then send to the sites. thx

Then you will need to do site routing and have a multi-role server at each physical site where HUB/CAS/MBX are installed, then use site routing for mail. This is also dependant on the number of users in each site as well. When you are talking strictly local Outlook access, then this will be fine, but if you are going to allow OWA,POP3,ActiveSync, etc.. from the internet, then you will have that additional traffic flowing across your VPN tunnels to access the mailbox servers at each remote site from the main site, unless you are going to split-tunnel and make each site accessible from the net, but that further complicates things. What kind of internet connections and what VPN are you going to use for this?

we will have DSL internet connection 30MB/6MB at 5 sites in one Island that we can have from the ISP, and at one site(other island) we will have DSL 15 MB/1MB and at the other 4 sites(other island) we will have DSL 1MB/1MB. The VPN is not defind yet, but we will use Fortigate for our WAN topology. Routing will be done accordanly, because all site will have their own IP segment in the same Subnet 0.0.0.0/24. In most cases their will be only use of Outlook at some islands, but the OWA we use for sure.