Exchange Hosting Questions

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From: Jim De Vico (Vico_at_discussions.microsoft.com)
Date: 10/21/04 

Date: Thu, 21 Oct 2004 12:39:14 -0700

My company, in Los Angeles, has about 100 mailboxes which we have hosted with
a services company, which is based in Chicago. We currently have a dedicated
server at the host and set up a VPN between our office and the host over our
T1. The T1 is shared for web browsing, FTPing and other things and its
bandwidth is pretty much fully utilized from 9AM - 6 PM. We do have another
on order and will pool the bandwidth but make it so that the Exchange server
never gets less than 1.5Mbits/sec allocated to it.

We are finding this current solution to be very problematic. We often
experience disconnects at the client end during the day and emails with
attachments can take minutes to retrieve depending on the attachment size, of
course. Moving between calendar, inbox, contacts and public folders can
sometimes be painfully slow and having come from a company where the Exchange
server was in the same office as the users, this kind of slowness is very
difficult to endure. It has even come to the point that about 50% of the
users in Los Angeles use the OWA client provided by our host to access their
email in order to speed up their interaction with "Outlook".

I hope that is enough background information. My questions are as follows
    1) Is there any way to speed this up without investing in a T3 or even
more T1s?
    2) Will this new T1 make things reasonable?
    3) Is it possible to set up a "mirror" server here in our office so that
all communications between our internal users and Exchange happen locally and
the two Exchange servers handle external messaging?

I would really like to implement option #3 but something in the back of my
head is telling me that this is not possible.

We like our hosted solution as it gives us piece of mind knowing that there
is 24x7 support, backup, Spam filtering, AV scanning and easy remote access
for our road warriors. The 24x7 uptime is crucial as these warriors are all
over the globe on any given day and phone calls at 3 AM locally are really
not desired. However, we absolutely hate the hosted solution for its
slowness.

Any insights would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Jim

Relevant Pages

  • RE: Connection Unavailable???
    ... doing an nslookup computername.domain and see which DNS server is trying to ... > From a remote site, I can ping my exchange server all day long, either by IP ... I also note that the clients at ... > about how the remote DNS/WINS server is resolving the host name. ...
    (microsoft.public.exchange.connectivity)
  • RE: Connection Unavailable???
    ... doing an nslookup computername.domain and see which DNS server is trying to ... > From a remote site, I can ping my exchange server all day long, either by IP ... I also note that the clients at ... > about how the remote DNS/WINS server is resolving the host name. ...
    (microsoft.public.outlook.general)
  • Re: This is not a relay host - mail must be to or from host domain
    ... exchange server returns the error "This is not a relay host - mail must ... rest of the external contacts contained in the distribution group. ...
    (microsoft.public.exchange.admin)
  • Re: Unable to sentd email to certain domains...
    ... The server name of true3.tnlhdom.local is our exchange server. ... > then you need to talk to your DNS provider now. ... When you ping a host by name ... they often don't have a reverse DNS set up. ...
    (microsoft.public.exchange.admin)