Front-End/Back-End Overview
After you have installed your second Exchange 2000 server in the organization, you can elect to turn it into a front-end server. There are no settings involved for a back-end server, which basically operates as a normal Exchange 2000 server. In fact, there are no real front-end settings either. You are either an Exchange 2000 front-end server or a regular Exchange 2000 server, period.
We are going to track exactly what an FE server does and what it does not do. We’ll also look at the actual performance of a BE server with and without its FE counterpart. To help us do this, I put together another small lab.
First, let’s turn Server1 into the FE server. Making this change is the easiest thing you will ever do! Open the Exchange System Manager console and expand the Servers node under your org.
Right-click on the server you want to convert to the FE and place a check-mark in the This is a front-end server checkbox. Click OK and reboot the server to complete the transition. In our case, we selected Server1 and chose This is a front-end server.
So what have we done? By checking this box, we have instructed the server to no longer refer us to the server that holds the requested information. Now the server must perform the same look-ups as before, but now it will handle the authentication and all communication to the “BE” server. Let me demonstrate; first I try to open our OWA session from the FE server:
I enter the same information as before. Only this time I am prompted for a password.
Note: FE servers ALWAYS prompt for a password even if you already have a token in memory. FE servers only understand basic authentication. So if you have an in-house application and do not want to prompt the user for authentication, don’t use FE servers.
Next, instead of redirecting me to the appropriate Exchange Server, the FE server acts like the server it found in the back. Notice the Address bar shows an Exchange directory on Server1.
Guess what? Server 1 has no local store. I stopped all the services. There are a couple of ways to do this, the easiest is to simply stop ALL Exchange services and turn their start-up settings to manual. If you want to totally dismount the local stores, use the Exchange System Manager to dismount the public store(s). It is recommended that you leave the private store in place in order to generate NDRs, etc. In my example, I do both just to make sure no store is loaded.
In essence, Exchange Server is no longer running or even functioning on the FE server, Server1. What is functioning is a WebDAV redirector that still understands how to look at the Global Catalog for Exchange objects.
Remember our OWATEST folder? It is also addressable using the OWA interface and, as you can see, Server1 claims the folder is in its own local store (even though there is no local store.)
|
