The Exchange Server 2007/2010 Edge Transport server role is pretty useful for what it does, but I don’t come across many customers who are using it. Usually they run a third party mail security appliance, or use a hosted service, or if they are small enough they just run an integrated email security product on the Exchange server.
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Well, my team manages about 50 different client environments and we have Edge servers set up in two of them so it’s not something I deal with on a very frequent basis. The vast majority of our clients either use commercial smarthosts like Message Labs or Postini or devices like Ironport, barracuda etc.
Can’t beat the higher level of security on the edge border… When combined with forefront for exchange 2010 I have hyper-v edge servers that take a LOT of load off of appliances and at the same time no spam, decent backscatter filtering, federation capabilities and more… Add on a backup dns with dnssec and dynect security on the domains and it works very well without adding the complexities of additional hardware and MSA’s.
Plus you get a lot better message tracking…
In the past when I used sendmail I spent way too much time dealing with backscatter and such… Plus edge transport under hyper-v can be totally decentralized across the net…
Having to deal with the additional load of on appliances is not terrible, but if something goes wrong it is a lot harder to locate the source of the problem…
In my experience the cost of a hyper-v guest with forefront is far better due to the simplicity, reliability, and especially the amount of hours that is saved having to deal with appliances…
Of course, for anything before Exchange 2010 SP1 that is another story…
We use one purely for redundancy alongside our Cisco IronPort C370 mail appliance. Mail flow is fully redundant right to the mailbox.
I’ve also found that ET’s LDAP lookup functionality is a lot more reliable than IronPort’s, so at the moment this is our mail flow(this is very much “At the moment”. All will change on the tail end of this migration):
MX1 is the C370
MX2 is the ET Box
The C370 forwards to ET (if it can) otherwise delivers straight to the HT server inside. The ET delivers onwards to the HT should it receive mail.
This works at the moment, but I’m going to spend some time configuring the C370 properly and will hopefully retire the ET server at some point. It’s really not serving a useful purpose other than redundancy, and I’m looking into cloud-hosted mail caching solutions that will survive even if our internet goes down.
Chris
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What are you looking at for cloud options? (if you can say)
Haven’t started looking yet, Once I get this Ex03+Postfix=>2010 migration completed I’ll be looking into them. Any suggestions you want to fire my way?