Hi, We're running Exchange 2003 in Native Mode at our company headquarters. We have 40 disparate satellite offices, who are currently maintaining their own Exchange organizations with their own email domains. Management has asked me to look into the feasibility of bringing all 40 Exchange servers into the headquarters' Organization and running all 40 servers under it. The remote offices would continue to store their mailboxes locally. We would just change their email domains to match headquarters, then relay their mail to their respective Exchange servers. My question is this - is there a limit, either technically or support-wise, on the number of Exchange 2000/2003 servers allowed in an Exchange 2003 organization? Thanks in advance for any assistance. Charles

If there is a limit, it's well above 40.

Hi mjolinor, thanks for your response! Can someone from Microsoft please confirm this (mjolinor, not sure if you're from Microsoft, so no offense if you are). I'd like to hear it from the horse's mouth before I tell management that this is something I can deliver. My Google-Fu hasn't turned up anything from Microsoft that answers this question. Thanks, Charles

i'm not from MS, but I've seen management whitepapers, etc. from organizations that had dozens of them. I had 13 of them once upon a time....

On Mon, 8 Mar 2010 17:32:21 +0000, charles-k wrote:>Hi, We're running Exchange 2003 in Native Mode at our company headquarters. We have 40 disparate satellite offices, who are currently maintaining their own Exchange organizations with their own email domains. Management has asked me to look into the feasibility of bringing all 40 Exchange servers into the headquarters' Organization and running all 40 servers under it. The remote offices would continue to store their mailboxes locally. We would just change their email domains to match headquarters, then relay their mail to their respective Exchange servers. My question is this - is there a limit, either technically or support-wise, on the number of Exchange 2000/2003 servers allowed in an Exchange 2003 organization? Thanks in advance for any assistance. Charles The number of Exchange servers in an organization is much larger than40. I used to admin an organization with 120, spread over the world(Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, Europe, South Africa, SouthAmerica, and North America). So you can put the "technical" part tobed.The "administrative" part van be a real problem if there's too muchautonomy. If you had 40 different sets of standards and you're lookingto roll all that up into one big ball you've got one heckuva job aheadof you. Naming conventions, mailbox sizes, message sizes, DLmanagement, public folders, permissions, who creates users, whomanages mailboxes, who assigns permissions, etc. are where your realworrk will take place. Compared to that the running of the servers isa piece of cake.Is it safe to assume that these machines are probably stuck in someclosets with no proper air conditioning or UPS and that backups arehit-or-miss, and that nobody's paying close attention to the contentsof the event logs? Or are the machines in data centers? If they are,prepare yourself for the inevitable battle of what operationalstandards you'll follow.You're about to be subjected to the "may you live in interestingtimes" curse. :-)---Rich MatheisenMCSE+I, Exchange MVP--- Rich Matheisen MCSE+I, Exchange MVP

Not to mention the chaos they can make of a public folder heirarchy if left to their own devices....

Hi Rich, I appreciate your response. In order to avoid the headaches you mention, like different standards, mailbox management, condition of the servers, etc, we're trying *not* to get in the business of administering the 40 remote Exchange servers. We want to let each office continue to administer their Exchange servers (and mailboxes). All we want to do is change their email domains so all offices will share a common email address format, then have the Exchange server here in headquarters forward emails to the remote Exchange servers, with the mailboxes residing locally at the offices. Is there a way to achieve this without bringing the remote servers into our Organization? Since everyone will be in the same address space (user@company.com), how can I configure different message routes for users depending on their location, so that messages for RemoteOfficeA_user@company.com will be routed to his Exchange server, messages for RemoteOfficeB_user@company.com will be routed to her Exchange server, and so on? Configuring routing based on email domain is straightforward, but I don't know how to break up the routing within the same domain. Thanks in advance for any insight.... Charles

I don't think that's going to be practical at all. It might be possible, but trying to maintain the routes will drive you insane - there will have to be a send connector for each of the 40 sites and the addresses for that site listed and maintained in the namespace for each connector. If they're not in the same org, then I don't think there's any way for them to share route information, so you'll have to do it for them.

If you really need to make this work, I'd recommend you look into a 3rd party MTA that will let you maintain smtp route tables with imported .txt files, and make it the routing hub for the entire org. You should probabaly have a least 2 for fault tolerance.

On Wed, 10 Mar 2010 16:12:59 +0000, charles-k wrote:>Hi Rich, I appreciate your response. In order to avoid the headaches you mention, like different standards, mailbox management, condition of the servers, etc, we're trying *not* to get in the business of administering the 40 remote Exchange servers. We want to let each office continue to administer their Exchange servers (and mailboxes). Right now it sounds like you have 40 different AD forests. If you planto move all 40 of thise forests into one multiple domain forest you'regoing to have to have some standardization. You may not want to managethe servers, or the users, but there needs to be a uniform namingconvention for objects in your directory (and the address books you'llhave to deal with).>All we want to do is change their email domains so all offices will share a common email address format, See. There. You said the same thing! :-)>then have the Exchange server here in headquarters forward emails to the remote Exchange servers, with the mailboxes residing locally at the offices. Is there a way to achieve this without bringing the remote servers into our Organization? Yes, but that would involve directory synchronization with all theother AD forests and probably the creation of multiple SMTPConnectors. It's not impossible but it'd be a PITA to manage.>Since everyone will be in the same address space (user@company.com), how can I configure different message routes for users depending on their location, so that messages for RemoteOfficeA_user@company.com will be routed to his Exchange server, messages for RemoteOfficeB_user@company.com will be routed to her>Exchange server, and so on?If everyone is in the same Exchange organization you don't have to doanything except make sure that there are Routing Group Connectors toconnect the different Routing Groups. I wouldn't advise you to try amesh-style network, though. Go with one, or more, hub site with'spokes' to the other Routing Groups.If you plan on doing this with 40 different Exchange organizations,one way would be to assign a secondary SMTP address with a sub-domainin each forest. Everyone could have the same domain in their primarySMTP proxy address so inbound mail would use the same MX record. TheContact for the person in the sub-domain would have a targetAddress inthe sub-domain and a secondary SMTP proxy address in the root domain.---Rich MatheisenMCSE+I, Exchange MVP--- Rich Matheisen MCSE+I, Exchange MVP

Thanks guys, I really appreciate your feedback! Rich, can you please explain what you mean by assigning a secondary SMTP address with a sub-domain in each forest? Are you talking about using AD contacts to set up something like a forwarding service, where the main Exchange org accepts the remote users' mail and forwards them on to their domain/Exchange org? Thanks again for your help. Charles

On Thu, 11 Mar 2010 16:53:09 +0000, charles-k wrote:>Thanks guys, I really appreciate your feedback! Rich, can you please explain what you mean by assigning a secondary SMTP address with a sub-domain in each forest? If you have multiple forests then each of them will have to have aunique identification so you can route e-mail to them.Hong Kong == hk.parent.comBelgium == be.parent.comSpain == es.parent.comSouth Africa == za.parent.cometc.If you need to go to the city level then add another sub-domain anduse something like airport codes to identify the city.Providence, Rhode Island == pvd.us.parent.comSan Francisco, California == sfo.us.parent.com>Are you talking about using AD contacts to set up something like a forwarding service, where the main Exchange org accepts the remote users' mail and forwards them on to their domain/Exchange org? That's correct. If you're going to run multiple Exchange organizations(which is what you'll be doing if you maintain each remote system inits own forest) you can't all use one domain.Actually, if you're not wedded to using Exchange to manage this task,you could use a smart appliance that uses the AD to retreive routinginformation. You'd store the fqdn of the smart host for each system ina property of a Contact. The appliance gets the smart host address byquerying the AD for the email address and retreiving the smart hostaddress and the target address in the other system. It then sends themail to the smart host. If you used ADAM (or whatever the new acronnymfor it is) and a directory synchronization tool to populate thatdirectory you wouldn't have to move everything under one unbrella.Of course, if you're looking to truely unify the company and be ableto use calendaring without all the messiness of forest-level trusts,replicating F/B folders, etc., then the one-forest organization has alot going for it.---Rich MatheisenMCSE+I, Exchange MVP--- Rich Matheisen MCSE+I, Exchange MVP

>That's correct. If you're going to run multiple Exchange organizations(which is what you'll be doing if you maintain each remote system inits own forest) you can't all use one domain.You can't use one domain on the contact objects, but I think they could all keep one domain as their primary smtp addess, and use that address withing their own Exchange org. They'd all have to have an assigned secondary address on their contact entry in all the other orgs All the Exchange servers would need to be set to route mail that doesn't have a mailbox in the local org to the appliance / smarthost for inter-org routing. >Actually, if you're not wedded to using Exchange to manage this task,you could use a smart appliance that uses the AD to retreive routinginformation. You'd store the fqdn of the smart host for each system ina property of a Contact. The appliance gets the smart host address byquerying the AD for the email address and retreiving the smart hostaddress and the target address in the other system. It then sends themail to the smart host. If you used ADAM (or whatever the new acronnymfor it is) and a directory synchronization tool to populate thatdirectory you wouldn't have to move everything under one unbrella.ADAD (LDS now) would work for this, but it seems like overkill to get what's essentially going to be just a big routing hash table. Seems like you should be able to do that with a Powershell script and a scheduled task.-just my .02