The Exchange Services
The Exchange Server Mailbox role installs a number of unique services. It is important to understand what the Mailbox role does and which services are responsible for specific functionality so that if problems arise they can be pinpointed and corrected quickly.
Table-3 lists the services that are installed specifically to support the Mailbox functions.
Table-3 Exchange Mailbox Role Services| Service Name | Description | Best Practice Information |
|---|---|---|
| Microsoft Exchange Information Store | This required service mounts and manages mailbox and public folder databases. | This service must be started, otherwise none of the mailboxes or public folders will be available. |
| Microsoft Exchange Mail Submission Service | This required service submits messages that are placed in the hosted mailbox's Outbox to the Hub Transport servers. This service is needed because the Mailbox server does not have an SMTP-based delivery service. | In order to send e-mail from a mailbox this service must be running. |
| Microsoft Exchange Mailbox Assistants | This required service manages the background processing of mailboxes in the Exchange store, including the processing of out-of-office (OOF) messages and the managing of calendars for resource mailboxes. | To provide full functionality for mailboxes, this service should always be started. |
| Microsoft Exchange Replication Service | This service provides the continuous replication functionality for Mailbox servers in a database availability group. | This service should be running on all members in a DAG. |
| Microsoft ExchangeSearch Indexer | This service is responsible for indexing mailbox content. | This service should be enabled to maintain search indexes. |
| Microsoft Exchange Server Extension for Windows Server Backup | This service enables Windows Server Backup to work with Exchange Server 2010. | This service can be disabled if other backup methods are used. |
| Microsoft Exchange System Attendant | This is a required service that is responsible for generating e-mail addresses and offline address books, updating free/busy information for legacy clients, and maintaining permissions and group memberships for the server. | This service should never be disabled or stopped. |
| Microsoft Exchange Throttling | This required service limits the rate of user operations to ensure that a user cannot create a denial-of-service situation by consuming more than the allowed transactions. | This service should be started to reduce the possibility of a single user consuming an unfair amount of resources. |
Large Mailboxes
More and more data is being stored in mailboxes for a variety of reasons. First, users now send and receive a larger quantity of e-mail messages and the messages are larger in size and contain different types of attachments than they did in years past. Second, many organizations must retain more messages in case of litigation or to meet regulatory requirements. With previous versions of Exchange it was often necessary for users to move data out of their mailboxes and into Personal Storage Folders (PSTs) because it was too costly for some organizations to provide large enough mailboxes to meet user's storage requirements. This could lead to a number of potential issues, which are described in this section.
With more room in their mailboxes, end users spend less time juggling data to decide which data should be kept to maintain a threshold under the mailbox limit. Another issue is that PST files can be lost, stolen, or to a lesser extent become corrupted, potentially losing or misplacing important or sensitive information. And having data stored in PST files reduces the likelihood and increases the complexity of a legal discovery being successful in finding the pertinent and required information and often violates regulatory compliance. Storing messages within the user's mailbox rather than in a PST also allows the end user to be able to access all of her e-mail from all available supported clients such as OWA, Outlook client, and Outlook Mobile. By architecting and optimizing Exchange Server 2010 to support larger mailboxes all the issues described above have been addressed.
In this tutorial:
- Mailbox Services in Exchange Server
- Exchange Server Mailbox Services
- Exchange Mailbox Services Architecture
- The Exchange Services
- Deleted Item Recovery and Dumpster 2.0
- Discontinuation of Storage Groups
- Increased Database Page Size
- I/O Operations
- Online Archive
- Exchange Mailbox Services Configuration
- Database Maintenance
- Mailbox Limits
- Poison Mailbox Detection and Correction
- Client Configuration
- Configuring Public Folders
- Configuring Public Folders for Site Redundancy