MS Exchange – 8/25/2008

Today we conquered chapters seven – nine.  Chapter 7 covered the concept of virtual servers.  When I first started studying Exchange a couple years back, the concept of virtual servers confused me a little.  Up until that point, whenever I referred to virtual servers, I was talking about server virtualization, where an entire server installation was virtualized and ran inside another server OS.  These virtual servers are different in that they are simply instances of services that run on the server.  Traditionally, for example, we used to have a separate physical computer for each HTTP server, each mail server, etc. that we needed.  Exchange will allow us to set up multiple virtual servers so that each of these services can be run from one physical server.  It’s really nice too since we can set up one physical server to run multiple instances of the same type of service, so we can have, for example, two IMAP servers running, each with different authentication requirements.

In additon, we talked about SMTP, which is the protocol that allows us to send mail.  (IMAP and POP3 are e-mail receiving protocols).  Chapter nine dealt with security and how it interfaces with Exchange.

Homework:

• Chapter Seven: Review Questions
• Chapter Eight: Review Questions
• Chapter Nine: Review Questions