Information technology professionals who are responsible for planning and designing Exchange messaging systems for their companies should read these topics. Such professionals may be in the following roles:

• System architects   Responsible for designing the overall server infrastructure, developing server deployment strategies and policies, and contributing to networking connectivity design.
  
• Information technology managers   Responsible for technical decisions and for managing the IT staff responsible for infrastructure, desktop and server deployment, and server administration and operations across sites.
  
• Systems administrators   Responsible for planning and deploying technology across Microsoft Windows servers and evaluating and recommending new technology solutions.
  
• Messaging administrators   Responsible for implementing and managing organizational messaging.
  

When you plan your Exchange 2010 deployment, you must consider the performance and scalability requirements that may affect your ability to reach your organizational goals when you deploy each Exchange 2010 server role.

There are many areas that you must consider or evaluate to fully understand which design decisions are the most appropriate for your messaging environment. You must understand the different requirements of each Exchange 2010 server role in order to ensure that your design and testing will yield an architecture that will deliver the performance and reliability that you expect.

The following are some of the areas that you should understand when planning the performance and scalability requirements for Exchange 2010 in your organization:

• Understanding Exchange Performance
  
• Understanding Exchange Scalability
  
• Recommendations for Maximizing Client Performance
  
• Recommendations for Performance Tuning
  
• Pre-Deployment Performance Validation Testing
  
• Understanding the Impact of Virtualization on Performance and Scalability
  
• Tools for Performance and Scalability Evaluation