Exchange 2010 and Licensing

I am seeing a lot of posts that have some interesting comments about licensing. However many are not referencing Microsoft’s own how to buy documentation.

http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/2010/en/us/licensing.aspx

This provides pretty solid information about what is needed for Database Availability or as some people might call it. High availability. I have seen some posts around Exchange 2010 standard addition HA. Which really there never was such a thing. There was LCR which is now gone. However now you can use Standard edition of exchange loaded on a windows 2008 Enterprise server and start a Database Availability group better known as a DAG.

I have seen many discussions around 2 server HA in small environments. and yes this is possible. however in order to do it. You must have the following.

2 windows server 2008 Enterprise Edition Server licenses
2 Exchange 2010 Standard Edition Server licenses
Enough CALS for all your users.

the hardware is not as big a deal as it used to be. the hardware can be dissimilar however it is at least recommended that both machines have 2 nics. The servers do have to be 64 bit.

Now you will find some documentation that states a load balanced CAS server can not be on a Mailbox role with a DAG. The specific on that is that you cannot use MICROSOFT NETWORK LOAD BALANCING with the CAS roles installed on a Server that has DAG implemented. so in this case you have to implement either hardware load balancing or use ISA load balancing.

Hope that helps

About Mitch Roberson

Having worked as a consultant at multiple VAR’s as well as Microsoft. Mitch has had the experience of Seeing a multitude of environments. As well as working with both Network, Systems and Security teams. This has allowed him to broaden his knowledge in many areas of IT. Because of this broad experience it has driven him to an almost fanatical desire to have visibility in his environments so he can understand what is happening with in an environment. He still is responsible for day to day operations of Active Directory, Exchange, and much more. But his passion is to learn how applications communicate so he can decrease mean time to resolution.

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