I am looking into the best setup for allowing approx 40 users in one office to receive/send emails from another office via 256K Frame Relay WAN. There is only one public mail exchanger (where DNS MX record for domain points to) in Office A. So all email traffic has to go via office A to Office B. I have seen that there are two methods for doing this:
1. Have two Exchange 2000 servers, the one in office A acts as a Bridgehead server for Office B and all email to and from Office B goes via Office A. The Exchange 2000 server forwards all email for office B to an Exchange 2000 server in office B. The Outlook clients in office A then read their email from the Exchange server in office B.
2. Have one Exchange 2000 server in Office A and the Outlook clients in Office B connect via the 256K Frame Relay WAN.
From initial testing it seems that Option 1 is better performance wise and option 2 is slower but acceptable with text only messages, however when opening any attachments the performance seems to degrade to an unacceptably slow level. It seems to me that the only way to improve performance on option 2 is to increase the size of the WAN, but then this needs to be compared with the cost of having two Exchange 2000 servers as opposed to one.
Does anyone have any experience or opinions of having Outlook clients connect across a WAN of this size?
As a note the ping times accross the WAN from office A to office B are approximately 100ms, which increases to 200ms+ when trying to open attachments in Outlook across the WAN at the same time.
Thanks
1. Have two Exchange 2000 servers, the one in office A acts as a Bridgehead server for Office B and all email to and from Office B goes via Office A. The Exchange 2000 server forwards all email for office B to an Exchange 2000 server in office B. The Outlook clients in office A then read their email from the Exchange server in office B.
2. Have one Exchange 2000 server in Office A and the Outlook clients in Office B connect via the 256K Frame Relay WAN.
From initial testing it seems that Option 1 is better performance wise and option 2 is slower but acceptable with text only messages, however when opening any attachments the performance seems to degrade to an unacceptably slow level. It seems to me that the only way to improve performance on option 2 is to increase the size of the WAN, but then this needs to be compared with the cost of having two Exchange 2000 servers as opposed to one.
Does anyone have any experience or opinions of having Outlook clients connect across a WAN of this size?
As a note the ping times accross the WAN from office A to office B are approximately 100ms, which increases to 200ms+ when trying to open attachments in Outlook across the WAN at the same time.
Thanks
