Improving Exchange UM Resilience/Availability

I was asked the other week how to load balance the UM role, I am going to use this post to provide some simple advice to get you started.

In short, add multiple UM role servers to each Dial Plan you wish to make more resilient to application or operating system failure.

Depending on your IP Gateway you should be able to round robin or balance the load between UM servers. To remove a server temporarily you could use:

set-umserver -identity e14um01 -status nonewcalls

Simple and to the point I hope.

Technorati Tags: Exchange,UM

Assigned additional IP Addresses to Exchange Server?

It’s been a while since my last post, so I’m easing in gently with an old favourite of mine I have recently used in deploying a hosting solution…

I can think of a number of reasons you can end up with multiple IP address; on-premise it may be to support additional receive connectors using the same port; and in the hosting world for Autodiscover or OWA customisation.

If the IP addresses are on the same subnet you can just apply them to the primary NIC, this may result in routing issue however as they will all be registered in DNS. Over the years my approach has been to simply add a secondary NIC (made easy even easier with virtualisation) with the “Register this connections addresses in DNS” option not checked and to assign the additional IP addresses to this NIC.



I have been using this with Exchange Server 2007 and 2010 for a many years without any problems.

Hope you find this useful.
Daniel