What is Hub Transport Server in Exchange Server 2010?
Hub Transport is the mail routing server that routes mail within the Exchange organization. Without having the Hub Transport Server the mail routing functionality won’t work in exchange server 2010. It handles all mail flow inside the organization, applies transport rules, applies journaling policies, and delivers messages to a recipient's mailbox. Messages that are sent to the Internet are relayed by the Hub Transport server to the Edge Transport server role that's deployed in the perimeter network.
What are the changes or new features in Hub Transport Server when compared with exchange server 2007?
Below are the new features available in exchange server 2010 related to Hub Transport server role
MailTips - MailTips provide extra information that's displayed to senders while they're composing e-mail messages.
Shadow redundancy - Messages that are submitted to an Exchange 2010 Hub Transport server are stored in the transport database until the next hop reports successful delivery of the message. If the next hop doesn't report successful delivery and it fails, the message is resubmitted for delivery.
Moderated transport - Exchange 2010 provides an approval workflow for sending messages to recipients. When you configure a recipient for moderation, all messages sent to that recipient must go through an approval process
End-to-end message tracking Exchange 2010 transport provides users with the ability to track messages from submission to the final destination
Incremental EdgeSync - In Exchange 2010, the EdgeSync process has been changed to keep track of synchronized information and only synchronize the changes since the last replication cycle. This significantly reduces network traffic and greatly improves synchronization efficiency.
And other features like Transport Rule command improvements New and Set Transport Rule, The handling of distribution group expansion has improved in Exchange 2010. First, the amount of memory that's used for caching distribution group membership has been capped by a configurable limit and Message throttling improvements.
How the mail flow occurs in Hub Transport Server 2010?
Messages are submitted to the Hub Transport server in three ways: through SMTP submission, from the Pickup directory, or when a user inside the organization sends a message, which is picked up from the user's Outbox by the store driver. The store driver is a software component of the Hub Transport server that delivers inbound messages to Exchange stores, the databases that contain public folder and mailbox stores
When messages are submitted to the Hub Transport server, they're processed by the categorizer. The categorizer is a component of Exchange transport that processes all inbound messages and determines what to do with the messages based on information about the intended recipients. In Exchange 2010, the Hub Transport server uses the categorizer to expand distribution lists and to identify alternative recipients and forwarding addresses. After the categorizer retrieves full information about the recipients, it uses that information to apply policies, route the messages, and perform content conversion. Messages are then delivered locally by the store driver to a recipient's mailbox, or they're delivered remotely by using SMTP to send messages to another transport server. Messages that are sent by users in your organization are picked up from the sender's Outbox by the store driver and are put in the Submission queue on a server that runs the Hub Transport server role.
What are the queues available in Hub Transport Server 2010?
There are 5 mail queues available in Hub Transport Server; they are Submission queue, Mailbox delivery queue, remote delivery queue, Poison message queue, unreachable queue.
Explain Send Connector in Exchange Server 2010?
Send Connector represents a logical gateway through which outbound messages are sent. Exchange 2010 transport servers require Send connectors to deliver messages to the next hop on the way to their destination. A Send connector controls outbound connections from the sending server to the receiving server or destination e-mail system.
Send connectors that are created on Hub Transport servers are stored in Active Directory and are available to all Hub Transport servers in the organization. If a Send connector is configured to send messages to an external domain, any Hub Transport server in the organization will route a message for that domain to a source server for that connector to be relayed to the destination domain
Explain Receive Connector in Exchange Server 2010?
Receive connectors represent a logical gateway through which all inbound messages are received. It is require Receive connectors to receive messages from the Internet, from e-mail clients, and from other e-mail servers. By default, the Receive connectors that are required for internal mail flow are automatically created when the Hub Transport server role is installed.
By default two receive connectors will be created automatically with the name shown below, they are
Client Servername - This Receive connector accepts SMTP connections from all non-MAPI clients, such as POP and IMAP.
Default Servername - This Receive connector accepts connections from other Hub Transport servers and any Edge Transport servers you have.
Explain the dumpster changes in exchange server 2010?
Exchange Server 2007 introduced the transport dumpster feature for the Hub Transport server role. An Exchange 2007 Hub Transport server maintains a queue of messages delivered recently to recipients whose mailboxes are on a clustered mailbox server. When a failover is experienced, the clustered mailbox server automatically requests every Hub Transport server in the Active Directory site to resubmit mail from the transport dumpster queue. This prevents mail from being lost during the time taken for the cluster to fail over
Exchange Server 2010 introduces the shadow redundancy feature to provide redundancy for messages for the entire time they're in transit. The solution involves a technique similar to the transport dumpster. With shadow redundancy, the deletion of a message from the transport databases is delayed until the transport server verifies that all of the next hops for that message have completed delivery. If any of the next hops fail before reporting back successful delivery, the message is resubmitted for delivery to that next hop
Unable to send email to external domain, what are things you will check?
By default, when exchange server 2010 is installed with the default server roles, internal mail flow occurs and the external won’t. There is no send connector created to sending emails to external domain. Need to check the following
- Send connector to send emails to external domain needs to be created
- Exchange Server queues to be viewed to check whether the emails are stored in queue
- Check the smart host which is configured to relay the emails to external domain
- Any change on the ISP or the MX record configuration to b e checked
Unable to send email to one particular domain, what will be the issue? And how you will troubleshoot this issue?
If you are unable to send emails to particular domain, need to the following
Is the send connecter configured with * as the address space to send emails to external domain, if it is there then there is no need to create a separate connector for particular domain
Need to check the check the SMTP codes on the NDR received, based on the NDR we can troubleshoot further
What happened to routing group connector in Exchange Server 2010? Do we need Routing Group connector in Co existence environment with legacy version of exchange server?
Routing group and Routing group connector concepts are replaced with Active Directory site based email routing in exchange server 2010. If we are having a coexistence with legacy version of exchange server, automatically an routing group connector will be created to establish a mail flow between exchange 2010 and legacy version of exchange server
How to achieve High Availability of Hub Transport Server?
Deploying more than one Hub Transport server per site provides redundancy. When you install more than one Hub Transport server in an Active Directory site, the connections are distributed.
What needs to be back up in Hub Transport Server? How to recover a Hub Server failure?
- Send connector configuration and the details are to be recorded\noted
- Receive connector configuration and the details are to be recorded\noted
- Need to have a detail record on the accepted domain and relay domain configured
If the server gets crashed,
- We can rebuild a server with the same computer name and IP address configuration,
- Apply the same service pack and patches as like before
- Recover the server using recover switch, this needs to performed at the command line installation
Explain a back pressure? When it will occur and what will happen? How to solve this?
Back pressure is a system resource monitoring feature of Microsoft Exchange Transport service that exists on Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Hub Transport and Edge Transport servers. Exchange transport can detect when vital resources, such as available hard disk space and memory, are under pressure, and take action in an attempt to prevent service unavailability.
When back pressure occurred and the level is
Normal - Server accepts new connections and messages
Medium - Mail from senders in the authoritative domain can flow and the other message will be queued
High - Full back pressure is applied. All message flow stops, and the server rejects all new incoming MAIL FROM commands.
To solve this issue, we need to make sure the disk space on the queues and queue database disk are having enough disk space and the hub transport server is having enough memory.
What is an Accepted Domain? What is the use of it?
An accepted domain is any SMTP namespace for which a Microsoft Exchange organization sends or receives e-mail. Accepted domains include those domains for which the Exchange organization is authoritative and responsible to receive emails for those accepted domains.
If we look at the use of accepted domain, if company have additional domain names and they cannot setup exchange server for each and every domain names, they can create accepted domain and point the MX record to their exchange domain. Also by creating a new email address policy they can easily change the email address for all users in exchange organization.
What is the use of remote domain?
Remote Domains can be configured to change the settings for message transfer between the Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 organization and domains outside your Active Directory forest. When you create a remote domain entry, you control the types of messages that are sent to that domain. You can also apply message format policies and acceptable character sets for messages that are sent from users in your organization to the remote domain.
Explain Relay Domain?
Relay domain will allow the exchange server to receive a email for other exchange domain and it will be forwarded to the relay domain
Two types of relay domain are available internal relay domain and external relay domain.
What is the use of Pick up and Replay directory? How to secure messages in those directories?
How shadow redundancy helps in mail flow?
Shadow redundancy provides the following benefits:
- It eliminates the reliance on the state of any specific Hub Transport or Edge Transport server. As long as redundant message paths exist in your routing topology, any transport server becomes disposable.
- If a transport server fails, you can remove it from production without emptying its queues or losing messages.
- If you want to upgrade a Hub Transport or Edge Transport server, you can bring that server offline at any time without the risk of losing messages.
- It eliminates the need for storage hardware redundancy for transport servers.
- It consumes less bandwidth than creating duplicate copies of messages on multiple servers. The only additional network traffic generated with shadow redundancy is the exchange of discard status between transport servers. Discard status is the information each transport server maintains. It indicates when a message is ready to be discarded from the transport database.
- It provides resilience and simplifies recovery from a transport server failure
What will happen if the queue database gets corrupt? How you will recover that?
Why the queue database extension mention as .que file?
What is priority queuing in exchange server 2010?
How you will configure the mail flow between edge and hub transport server?
Requirement is to configure the external mail flow happen only through a particular site, how you will achieve this?
Queues are filling on Submission queue, what are the things you will check? All the stores are mounted and the exchange server related services are running normal here.
How to force the mail from queue, we don’t have option like exchange server 2003 queue viewer?
How the mails the secured in exchange server? What kind of secure communication will occur between server to server mail flow and server to client mail flow?
Single Mailbox is creating bulk number of email which leads to bulk number of log file creation, how you will find the mailbox and how you will fix the issue?
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