Benefits of Using ISA Server 2006 with Exchange 2007
New features for ISA Server 2006 are designed specifically to enhance functionality for Exchange 2007. Table 1 describes these features.
Table 1 New features for ISA Server 2006 and Exchange 2007
|
Feature
|
Description
|
How To
|
| Web Publishing Load Balancing | ISA Server 2006 balances the request from the client to an array of published servers. This eliminates the need to deploy Network Load Balancing (NLB) on the published array. | Web load balancing features are automatically implemented when you publish Outlook Web Access and Outlook Anywhere. Outlook Web Access automatically selects a rule by using cookie-based load balancing. With cookie-based load balancing, all requests related to the same session (the same unique cookie provided by the server in each response) are forwarded to the same server. Outlook Anywhere uses source-IP based load balancing. With source-IP based load balancing, all requests from the same client (source) IP address are forwarded to the same server. Other Exchange services and features such as Exchange ActiveSync must use cookie-based load balancing. This also includes the Exchange services such as the offline address book and the Availability service. |
| Link Translation | Some published Web sites may include references to internal names of computers. Because only the ISA Server 2006 firewall and external namespaces are available to external clients, these references appear as broken links. ISA Server 2006 includes a link translation feature that you can use to create a dictionary of definitions for internal computer names that map to publicly known names. | ISA Server 2006 implements link translation automatically when you configure Web publishing for Outlook Web Access. |
| Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) Bridging Support | For authenticated and encrypted client access, ISA Server 2006 provides end-to-end security and application layer filtering by using SSL-to-SSL bridging. This means that encrypted data is inspected before it reaches the Exchange server. The ISA Server 2006 firewall decrypts the SSL stream, performs stateful inspection, and then re-encrypts the data and forwards it to the published Web server. Stateful inspection is a firewall architecture that works at the network layer. Unlike static packet filtering, which examines a packet based on the information in its header, stateful inspection tracks each connection traversing all interfaces of the firewall and makes sure they are valid. | ISA Server 2006 implements SSL Bridging Support automatically when you configure Web publishing for Outlook Web Access. |
In addition to the features listed in Table 1, ISA Server 2006 is designed to work specifically with the client access methods that you can use with Exchange 2007.