Consolidated HMC 4.5 Server List

Consolidated HMC 4.5 Server List

Microsoft's Hosted Messaging and Collaboration 4.5 platform can be run in a consolidated fashion. Although there's no "official" document that outlines or details the steps involved to detract from the normal deployment. There is an unofficial guide to the HMC 4.0 deployment and that can be used as a basic deployment guide. Although there are differences between the two versions of the deployment and the references in the unofficial deployment document to the Microsoft TechNet doc are all broken, it can give you an outline of deployment.

I have to say that after using this method and indeed after taking making shortcuts to achieve a functioning hosted messaging system, it worked. The collaboration deployment I did not complete. It was required. I deployed only the exchange environment and this is working fine, including outlook anywhere and outlook web access . I'm using the sample provisioning tool and did encounter one awful message when deploying mailboxes for one of the organizations. I was able to create new accounts for the organization but cannot add mailboxes to new accounts. If a mailbox is removed for one of the existing users it cannot be re-added either. Other organization in the hosted environment are not having this problem.

Here's my consolidated server list for HMC 4.5 (10 servers,messaging only).

AD01
AD02
ExCAS01
ExCASOAB01
ExCASHUBEXT01
ExMBX01
ExMBXOAB01
ExUM01
FE01
MPSSQL01

There's no clustering of Exchange servers nor the SQL servers. Microsoft's Plan is much better than this. This is a watered down version as it is a consolidated incarnation of a well planned, thorough and developed solution from Microsoft. In addition, I am relying on the redundancy and failover achieved from the fact I am running all servers on a virtual platform.

Image below is from Microsoft's Deployement Walkthrough > Architecture