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BKITStaff-2336 asked JeffYang-MSFT commented

"Branch" office access to HQ files, Exchange, etc - best practise and recommendations

Hi, we are a small cosmetic company, 250 employers with about 150 users distributed equally across two sites. Sites are connected with ipsec vpn. Wan links are FTTH (optical fiber) 100/30 Mbps (just activated, until yesterday we had vDSL links). Currently my datacenter is only in site A (HQ site). Site B (grown over time) users connect to services through RDP with remote desktop services. Due to our ERP old architecture I cannot do withouth rds services but I'd like, for a better user experience with services like file, print and Outlook, to make users directly use their PCs. So, I was thinking at a solution like this:

  • Create an AD site "B"

  • Put in the site B rack an host with esxi on which power up a DC (not read only dc), a file and print server, a dhcp server.

  • create a dfs name space with my currently mapped shares (now shares are directly mapped with \\server-name\share).

  • setup dfsr across sites for these shares, with primary replication on site A and secondary site B.

  • let Outlook clients connect directly to my Exchange server located in site A: cached mode or online mode (I'm worried about link saturation...)? Now with RDS they are used to work in online mode.

  • RDS will remain in place to keep ERP software being used by my remote users.

Is this a suitable solution? I like simple but functional approaches. Any suggestions or recommendations?

Thank you,
Francesco.



windows-serveroffice-outlook-itprooffice-exchange-server-deployment
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1 Answer

JeffYang-MSFT avatar image
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JeffYang-MSFT answered JeffYang-MSFT commented

Hi @BKITStaff-2336,

Welcome to Microsoft Q&A forum.

According to your description, seems that your solution involves multiple products at the same time. Please kindly understand that engineers here may mainly research their own field and know few about others, for example, I mainly focus on general issues about Outlook desktop client here. So, I tried to discuss about your problem from the perspective of Outlook client.

I tried to contact the colleagues of Exchange Team, we discussed about your issue and found that the solution you mentioned let Outlook clients connect directly to my Exchange server located in site A: cached mode or online mode (I'm worried about link saturation...)? Now with RDS they are used to work in online mode. is indeed available. As for cached mode or online mode, Cached Exchange Mode gives users a seamless online and offline Outlook experience by caching the user's mailbox and the Offline Address Book (OAB) locally. While Online Mode works by using information directly from the server, the mailbox data is only cached in memory and never written to disk. Usually, we recommend using Cached Exchange Mode for better experience. You could learn more information about Outlook Cached Exchange Mode and Online Mode from here.

Hope this can be helpful.


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Hello Jeff, thanks for your kind answer. Two questions:
1) where, on MS Q&A platform, may I post other questions in my original post? Or maybe is technet a better place?
2) About Outlook connection over wan links: my concern is always about link saturation issues. How can I prevent similar issues? Is there a way to throttle Outlook <-> Exchange available bandwidth? I'm not asking for step by step procedures, just speaking at high level. Is there some white paper/technical doc on this specific topic?

Thank you,
Francesco B.

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Hi @BKITStaff-2336,
Thanks for your update.
1) You could try to add more issue-related tags in your original post so that more users who read the forums regularly can either share their knowledge or learn from your interaction.
2) I am still trying to research about the link saturation issue you mentioned, if I got any updates, I will post back as soon as possible. Thanks for your patience and understanding.

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Hi @BKITStaff-2336,
Did try a lot of search, could only found documents about message rate limits and throttling within Exchange server but have not found any white paper/technical doc explain about bandwidth. From the perspective of the difference between the cache mode and the online mode, Outlook caches mailbox items to local datafile and only regularly downloads updates to keep information latest in Exchange cache mode, instead, it would continuously occupy bandwidth to get the information you need when working with Online mode. So, even compared from the side of bandwidth limit, I think Outlook Exchange cache mode should have a better performance that Online mode.

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Just checking in to see if above information was helpful.

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