Multple exchange servers in a domain

I was confronted with a question from one the the partners in my place of employment and since I mainly do desktop support I have no idea.

Is it possible to have multiple MS Exchange Servers in a domain and have each of those servers handle specific users email accounts. I know that is is possible to have multiple exchange servers in an environment in case one fails but is it doable to have lets say one server in charge of the 1st floor users and another supporting the users on the 2nd floor.

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Comments

sprkymrk

Short answer: Yes.

EJizzel

sprkymrk wrote:

Short answer: Yes.

That short answer sounds like its followed by a LONG explanation.

Thanks I at least know its doable I'll continue checking google for the answer.

paintb4707

Yes. It will even redirect you to the correct exchange server no matter which name you use. For example, if you set up an email profile for a user with a mailbox on exchange3 and you enter exchange1, it will search the directory and correct the name for you.

blargoe

It's possible, but why do they want to do this? One decent server can support thousands of mailboxes.

HeroPsycho

You can have about 2500 users per Exchange 2003 backend server.

If you want better redundancy, you should look into setting up an MSCS cluster or leverage HA options in VMWare, something like that. All you're doing is cutting in half how many people would lose service if a single Exchange server goes down.

Honestly, you'd be better off having a hot spare server and doing routine image backups with something like Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery than splitting the load between two servers.

sprkymrk

HeroPsycho wrote:

You can have about 2500 users per Exchange 2003 backend server.

If you want better redundancy, you should look into setting up an MSCS cluster or leverage HA options in VMWare, something like that. All you're doing is cutting in half how many people would lose service if a single Exchange server goes down.

Honestly, you'd be better off having a hot spare server and doing routine image backups with something like Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery than splitting the load between two servers.

In this particular case I agree.

However, in a distributed environment it would be a different case. If you have several sites with a few hundred users each, you won't want them having their mailboxes hosted on a server across the continent. In this case a single server per site to host those mailboxes is the way to go.

I only added this comment in case someone misunderstands your post. I realize you were addressing this specific scenario (and others like it).