Practical MS Exchange 2010/2013 email server lab

JeanM

Hi folks,

I've been watching various videos that I can find on exchange and various topologies, and was able to implement a local exchange instance in esxi that works at home between various clients.

Now, next step would be to make it working to send and/or receive email from/to outside it's local lan. So, I've registered a domain and can set the MX record accordingly to point to the IP that is public facing. I am finding that some hosting providers allow for specifying the IP address and some allow for FQDN address and not ip address.

The question I have specifically is this- let's say you register mycompany.com with your choice of domain name provider. Do you need to then create a record for the host (vm) that runs the exchange or edge transport in DMZ or do you ONLY need to specify the MX record pointing to the host or edge transport?

The next question I have is this, since the hosting provider is also handling the DNS portion of that name space (mycompany.com) and you then set up exchange as part of your active directory domain is it recommended that you set up the exact same forest/name space matching the FQDN that you've registered with the hosting provider? Basically in this case the hosting provider has the mycompany.com and your active directory domain on your esxi is also mycompany.com, with let's say dc1.mycompany.com as the first domain controller and maybe mail.mycompany.com as the exchange server. Then, on the hosting provider control panel you set the MX record to point to the mail.mycompany.com?

OR, do you instead create a sub-domain like mylab.mycompany.com where your Server 2008/2012 is the DC/DNS and then join the Exchange server to this mylab.mycompany.com domain? That would basically mean, the email server can end up as mail.mylab.mycompany.com and the MX record on the hosting site would point to that?

This is assuming I configure my edge firewall/router accordingly to NAT/PAT between the local server name and the public IP that is giving to me by my ISP.

This is where I am either over thinking it, or confusing it.

How would you go about this specific scenario, and more importantly if you could elaborate on why

thanks!

pjd007

The external DNS record needs to point to the edge server or client access server in your DMZ and if they only allow FQDN set it to mail.mycompany.com then create a CNAME record that points to your Exchange server.

You should create a sub domain for your internal namespace, I've read this in an article during my studies so if you google you'll find it explained.

JeanM

pjd007 - thanks for the reply. So, CNAME and MX record both are needed to point to the CAS or Edge Transport correct?

richard612

Yes, the external DNS records need to point to your CAS (or the edge if you have one). Did you get this working?