Exchange Preferred Architecture

I hope you are familiar with Exchange Preferred Architecture (PA). In short it , which is Microsoft’s recommendation on how clients should deploy Exchange. There is a PA for Exchange 2016 and another for 2019. PA is quite controversial, because it assumes physical commodity servers with built-in disks (DAS and without SAN), while many companies have invested heavily in SAN and virtualized environments and now believe that the days of physical servers are over. The second surprise is that PA does not require backup Exchange databases; instead, it , relies on massive redundancy and delayed copies of the data.

As Microsoft consultants, we usually mention PA, but in reality—with few exceptions—we would implement virtualized Exchange farms protected by enterprise- Backup systems such as Veeam or NetBackup.

Here are the references to Exchange 2016 PA: https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/exchange/2015/10/12/the-exchange-2016-preferred-architecture/

And Exchange 2019 PA: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/plan-and-deploy/deployment-ref/preferred-architecture-2019?view=exchserver-2019

The change between two version can be shortly described as adding planning support for SSD and bigger RAM, CPU.

While we're on the subject of Exchange 2019, we’d like to mention that the UM "Role" (voicemail for Skype) feature was removed in this version. If you need voicemail and do not have Cloud Voicemail, you should keep Exchange 2016.