Introduction to Exchange 2007's Edge Transport Server (Part 1)

Henrik Walther

Back in February 2004, when Exchange Server 2003 was still a major Exchange messaging platform used by business organizations around the world, Microsoft stated that they would provide a lifting addition. High is known as Microsoft Exchange Edge Services. This plan is intended to enhance Exchange Edge Services to be able to implement Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) forwarding in Exchange Server 2003. With Exchange Edge Services, Microsoft will provide a range of new capabilities to equip to enabling customers to better protect their email systems against viruses and spam as well as improve the efficiency of managing and routing email traffic.

Enhancing the Exchange Server 2003 product, the product already has some anti-spam features at the time and additional features added through service packs 1 and 2, seem to be signs good for mail advisers as well as administrators working with it, or in corporate organizations that are using Exchange as a basic messaging platform. However, just before Christmas that year, Microsoft's Exchange product group had a number of changes according to user feedback. They launched Exchange Edge Services as part of the next version of Exchange Server, Exchange Server 2007. This is the role that the Exchange 2007 Edge Transport Server was created.

In this series, I will show you the Edge Transport Server role and some of its features. In Part 1, you'll know what the Edge Transport Server is and why it is thought to be a good platform for fighting spam and antivirus.

What is the Edge Transport Server?

The Exchange product group introduced the Edge Transport Server to allow enterprise organizations to have strong support for anti-spam issues without investing in solutions of third party software groups when installing this product. The mailing 'sort' features in the Edge Transport server role are agent-based and include multiple filters that are frequently upgraded. Although the main role of the Edge Transport server is to route email and perform some mail sorting tasks, it does have some features, which can allow you to do some. Other things like recording SMTP addresses, configuring transport rules, allowing logging .

You need to understand that the default Edge Transport server only filters spam and other unwanted messages using the attached agents. This means that this Exchange 2007 Server role does not perform any filtering when it comes to viruses in the mail. To filter the virus inside infected messages with the Edge Transport server, you must install Forefront Security for Exchange or a third party software product for the server.

Consider implementation issues

The Edge Transport Server role in Exchange Server 2007 is designed to be installed in an organization's perimeter network. The Edge Transport Server is just an Exchange 2007 server role, not part of your company Active Directory in the internal network; It needs to be installed on a 'stand-alone' server in a workgroup or as a domain member in an Active Directory used exclusively for servers located in the perimeter network as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Typical Edge Transport Server deployment scenario

Although the Edge Transport Server role is isolated from Active Directory on the internal production network, it still has the ability to communicate with Active Directory using EdgeSync to operate on the Hub Transport Server, and is part of Active Directory, so Have access to necessary Active Directory data. The Edge Transport server uses Active Directory Application Mode (ADAM) to store the required Active Directory data, which are data types such as Accepted Domains, Recipients, Safe Senders, Send Connectors and Hub Transport server lists (used to create The connectors are dynamic so you don't need to create them manually).

You also need to understand that EdgeSync replicas are encrypted by default, and this copy is a one-way process from Active Directory to Active Directory Application Mode (ADAM), which means that there will be no data available. from ADAM to AD.

Initially EdgeSync replication appears, the ADAM repository will be placed, then data from Active Directory will be copied at fixed intervals. You can specify this time period or use the default settings.

Although the Edge Transport server role has been designed to provide anti-spam and virus protection for Exchange 2007, you can still deploy this server role in an existing Exchange 2003 organization. When installing the Edge Transport server role on a 'stand-alone' machine in the perimeter network, this is a completely simple task.

However, although you can use the Edge Transport server role as an intelligent server or an Exchange 2003 SMTP server, it is still not possible to replicate the configuration and replication data from Active Directory to ADAM using Use EdgeSync as in the Exchange 2007 Hub Transport server in the internal network. However, this issue does not interfere with your use of filtering agents without relying on EdgeSync service. If you only use the Message Filter (IMF) in Exchange 2003, then deploying the Edge Transport server in the perimeter network will be more visible, as it can provide an additional layer of anti-spam protection. And as mentioned earlier, you can also install Forefront Security for Exchange Server on the Edge Transport server to filter messages that are infected with the virus.

As is the case with the Exchange 2007 Hub Transport server, the Edge Transport server has its own Jet Database to handle the delivery of incoming and outgoing email messages. When incoming email messages are saved in the Jet database and ready for delivery, the Edge Transport server will look up the corresponding recipient in the ADAM archive as mentioned, along with the includes recipient data that has been recreated from Active Directory using the EdgeSync service.

In another scenario, where you have deployed multiple Edge Transport server servers in your organization, Edge Transport servers will use DNS round robin (which is supported by most DNS servers today). for network connection and load balancing between servers.

Conclude

Part 1 introduced the Edge Transport server role in Exchange server 2007 by referring to Microsoft's overview of this server role and how to use it in the organization. In the next section, I will show you how to deploy the Edge Transport server.