How to evaluate the availability of your Exchange Mailbox Server

When deploying a mailbox server in an enterprise, we are pursuing a primary goal: High Availability of the Exchange Mailbox server. In general, it is how to reduce the downtime of the mailbox server. It is our mailbox administrator's responsibility to ensure that enterprise email servers can run without faults. However, the moon is overcast and clear, and the sky is unpredictable, and the mailbox server will also be ill. Therefore, when deploying the mailbox server, we also need to evaluate the availability of the mailbox server to see what risks exist, which may reduce the availability of the mailbox server.

1. Environmental Risks.

Because it takes 365 days a year for an email server to run on a daily basis, it can be regarded as a delicate device with high requirements for the external environment. When evaluating the availability of the mailbox server, the author often starts from a relatively simple environment problem.

Check the power supply status if necessary. Continuous Power Supply and stable voltage are the basic requirements for mailbox server availability. Unfortunately, few companies can do this, especially in terms of voltage. It is difficult to ensure its voltage regulation. Therefore, when deploying an enterprise mailbox server, I suggest you deploy a UPS with a voltage regulation function in terms of power supply. This device can ensure a stable current for the mailbox server. When an unexpected power failure occurs, it can also be mentioned as a protection function.

If the data center has any disaster prevention measures. My company has many servers. For this reason, the company has a dedicated office to store servers. This storage server space is independent from our office. That is to say, no one can store all kinds of servers in the room. Because people walk in and out, there will be a lot of dust. What's more, it's inevitable. Therefore, the author suggests that enterprises, whether mailbox servers or other server applications, should be able to divide an independent space to store them. In addition, cameras or alarms can be configured to prevent servers from being stolen. Therefore, whether the data center's disaster prevention measures are appropriate is also an important factor affecting the availability of email servers.

There are also considerations for this environmental problem, such as dust, temperature, humidity, line layout, and so on. When enterprises have strict high availability requirements on mailbox servers, these issues cannot be ignored.

Second, hardware risks.

When deploying the mailbox server, hardware also affects the availability of the mailbox server.

Whether redundant power supply exists. Because the mailbox server requires 365 days of continuous operation every year, it is a great test of power supply. According to the author's understanding, even if the server's power supply has taken into account this problem and adopted good materials, the server often becomes a machine due to power failure. Therefore, to reduce the impact of server faults caused by server power supply problems, the recommended method is to use redundant power supply. For example, when I deploy an email server to a customer, I suggest that enterprises purchase servers with redundant power when purchasing them, that is, servers with two power supplies. In addition, when a power supply fails, it needs to be replaced immediately. In this case, when a power supply problem occurs, another redundant power supply can take over immediately to prevent power failure and improve the availability of the mailbox server.

If the disk space is not properly planned, the availability of the mailbox server will be reduced. The most common cause is that the application stops responding due to insufficient disk space. Therefore, in the disk space planning, on the one hand, you need to purchase a large enough hard disk, but now the hard disk price is not expensive. On the other hand, you can consider using the disk quota. In my actual work, I found that many employees do not have the habit of clearing their mailboxes on a regular basis. They have been working for ten years in the enterprise, and their emails may be retained for ten years on the mailbox server, this is a waste of disk space. In addition, some employees also use the mailbox server as a file backup server, and simply put some important files in the mailbox server. In this case, you can set a disk quota for each user during disk planning to reduce the pressure on disk space. Finally, when planning a disk, you need to set a disk space alarm. When the disk space is insufficient, if the usage has reached 80%, you need to send an alarm to the Administrator. So that the administrator can have enough time to deal with this issue, whether to add a hard disk or clear files in the hard disk. In this case, you can try again until the hard disk space is exhausted.

Therefore, the mailbox server's Hardware settings also affect its availability. In terms of hardware configuration, redundancy is an important measure to ensure high availability.

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