Hi,

I'm trying to get my head around something I am sure is very basic indeed. All the guidance recommends keeping things simple and trying to minimise URLs and so on , but i can't square how it works in my head. Single AD domain with "acme-corp.com" for example.

Lets say I have two separate datacenters one in northamerica and one in emea. I want my 2000 users in NA to use a DAG in north america and my 1000 users in emea to use a DAG in emea DC. Unless of course there is an outage in which case I want the dag's to failover. lets say each DC has 2 CAS/MBX servers installed to keep it small.

So starting  is the "autodiscover.acme-corp.com" record. My understanding is that for each server, I can create a DNS record for autodiscover for each host (and set the URL's correctly) so that clients will pick one of these and connect to the particular server (create a certificate for it and so on).  If an EMEA client picks a north american server from DNS this will proxy the request to an EMEA mailbox server. When the docs say proxy does it mean that the traffic will constantly flow from outlook > NA server > EMEA server, or it is just the initial connection and once that is made traffic goes from outlook to the EMEA server directly? A brief connection to NA is probably ok, but not all traffic!

I've read about the autodiscover site affinity setting but I'm not sure that works with Exchange 2013 and I'm not really sure if that is what i want, as ideally i will just use a single URL/hostname for autodiscover over all the servers as this keeps things a lot simpler.

Does that make any sense?

Cheers

Hi David,

Your understanding is correct, the traffic will constantly flow from outlook > NA server > EMEA server.

Unless the connection drops and it picks up another server from EMEA.

No Session Affinity means, now the same session can continue from Outlook,OWA etc without any user visible impact irrespective of the CAS server in use.

So within a single instance user might switch between 2 sites, still have all inplace nothing breaks.

Unbound model (single URL) is recommended for Sites having good WAN bandwidth, which can allow unlimited live proxy connections.

If you don't like this idea use separate URLs for each

Hi David,

And for the "autodiscover site affinity setting"

Its also called AutodiscoverSiteScope or Client-only sites . Read the article for more.

Basically in the two AD site scenario, you should really have 2 different internal URL's at minimum (1 for each site) for autodiscover site affinity to work.

Configure the Autodiscover Service to Use Site Affinity

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-in/library/aa998575(v=exchg.141).aspx

Exchange Server 2010 to 2013 Migration Reviewing Autodiscover Configuration

http://exchangeserverpro.com/exchange-server-2010-2013-migration-reviewing-autodiscover-configuration/

Hi,

I'm trying to get my head around something I am sure is very basic indeed. All the guidance recommends keeping things simple and trying to minimise URLs and so on , but i can't square how it works in my head. Single AD domain with "acme-corp.com" for example.

Lets say I have two separate datacenters one in northamerica and one in emea. I want my 2000 users in NA to use a DAG in north america and my 1000 users in emea to use a DAG in emea DC. Unless of course there is an outage in which case I want the dag's to failover. lets say each DC has 2 CAS/MBX servers installed to keep it small.

So starting  is the "autodiscover.acme-corp.com" record. My understanding is that for each server, I can create a DNS record for autodiscover for each host (and set the URL's correctly) so that clients will pick one of these and connect to the particular server (create a certificate for it and so on).  If an EMEA client picks a north american server from DNS this will proxy the request to an EMEA mailbox server. When the docs say proxy does it mean that the traffic will constantly flow from outlook > NA server > EMEA server, or it is just the initial connection and once that is made traffic goes from outlook to the EMEA server directly? A brief connection to NA is probably ok, but not all traffic!

I've read about the autodiscover site affinity setting but I'm not sure that works with Exchange 2013 and I'm not really sure if that is what i want, as ideally i will just use a single URL/hostname for autodiscover over all the servers as this keeps things a lot simpler.

Does that make any sense?

Cheers