Improvements in Windows Server 2003 that Benefit Exchange 2003

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Windows Server 2003 includes several new features and changes that may affect the way you design Active Directory and Exchange. The features and changes include:

  • Increased number of sites per forest   Because of Windows Server 2003 improvements to the Knowledge Consistency Checker (KCC) and Intersite Topology Generator (ISTG), forests can contain a greater number of sites than in Microsoft Windows 2000 Server. In Windows 2000 Server the limit was 300 sites per domain; a Windows Server 2003 domain can contain 3,000 sites or more. These scalability improvements may affect your forest structure.

  • Volume Shadow Copy service   Windows Server 2003 contains Volume Shadow Copy service capabilities that allow you to quickly perform online backups of application data volumes, with minimal impact to your e-mail clients. Volume Shadow Copy service works with applications, operating systems, backup programs, and storage hardware to create a consistent shadow copy of data. This feature allows creates high-fidelity backup recovery and data mining without significant impact to performance.

  • **Storage Area Network support **  Windows Server 2003 contains several improvements to support for Storage Area Networks, including improvements in connecting to volumes, handling fiber channel Storage Area Networks, and the ability to start from a Storage Area Network.

  • **Log on without a local global catalog server   **In Windows Server 2003 users can log on without a local global catalog server. This feature caches user credentials and significantly reduces requests to the global catalog server. However, the ability to log on without a local global catalog server is intended for use in Windows sites that do not contain Exchange users.

    Important

    In Windows sites that contain Exchange users, it is always recommended that you install a local global catalog server.

Windows 2000 Server

If you continue to use Windows 2000 Server as the operating system or if you upgrade some servers to Windows Server 2003, some of the Windows Server 2003 features are not available until you upgrade to a pure Windows Server 2003 forest.

In particular, the RPC over HTTP feature in Outlook requires that the Exchange server and a global catalog server run Windows Server 2003 and that your Active Directory schema be upgraded to Windows Server 2003.

Other features of Exchange 2003, such as Volume Shadow Copy service, are available when you run Exchange 2003 on Windows Server 2003, but it is not required that you upgrade the Active Directory schema to Windows Server 2003.