Exchange 2016 namespace design and planning

Exchange 2016 namespace design and planning is one of the most important tasks. If you configure it right, you will spare yourself a lot of headaches. It’s important to understand Exchange 2016 namespace design and plan it accordingly. In this article, you will learn Exchange 2016 namespace best practices configuration.

Information 2016 Exchange namespace design

When installing Exchange Server 2016, the internal URLs match the fully qualified domain name (FQDN) of the Exchange Server. This design is by default. How does an internal hostname look like? Examples are .local, .priv, or .internal.

You are asking for trouble if you proceed like this, for example:

• You can’t buy a third-party certificate based on the internal FQDN URLs.
• Autodiscover certificate warnings and issues when connecting with clients.
• You can’t load balance between multiple Exchange Servers with an internal FDQN.
• Adding another Exchange Server in the environment will give problems.
• Configuring Exchange hybrid deployment will give problems.

It’s recommended to make use of a generic namespace, for example mail.yourdomain.com.

We have an internal domain named exoip.local and external domain exoip.com. In my example, we are going to configure the namespace mail.exoip.com.

Exchange 2016 namespace planning

An architecture view of the Exchange 2016 namespace is shown below in the topology.

• The public DNS / External DNS will have a mail.exoip.com record that resolves to the public IP address of the firewall or router. It will then NAT any external connections to the Exchange Server’s internal IP.
• The Internal DNS zone will have a mail.exoip.com record that resolves to the internal IP address of the Exchange Server.

Configure internal DNS Exchange 2016

Configure the DNS zones internally with Pinpoint DNS. Both the records that we are going to add will look like the following.

Record Type   DNS Name                 Internal IP Address
-----------   --------                 -------------------
A             mail.exoip.com           192.168.1.52    
A             autodiscover.exoip.com   192.168.1.52

Read the article Configure internal DNS Exchange 2016.

Configure internal and external URL in Exchange 2016

We will configure the internal and external URLs with the same name. Almost all the URLs will have the mail.exoip.com in the configuration. That’s because the AutoDiscover URL will be different.

Service                  Internal and External URL
-------                  -------------------------
AutoDiscover             https://autodiscover.exoip.com/Autodiscover/Autodiscover.xml
Exchange Control Panel   https://mail.exoip.com/ecp
Exchange Web Services    https://mail.exoip.com/EWS/Exchange.asmx
Exchange ActiveSync      https://mail.exoip.com/Microsoft-Server-ActiveSync
Offline Address Book     https://mail.exoip.com/OAB
Outlook Web App          https://mail.exoip.com/owa
MAPI over HTTP           https://mail.exoip.com/mapi
Outlook Anywhere         mail.exoip.com

Read the article Configure Internal and External URL in Exchange 2016.

Configure external DNS Exchange 2016

There are three records that we are going to add to the public DNS. These are the A record, CNAME record, and MX record.

Record Type    TTL    DNS Name                 Priority   Value
-----------    ---    --------                 --------   -----
A              300    mail.exoip.com                      73.122.35.127 
CNAME          300    autodiscover.exoip.com              mail.exoip.com.
MX             300    @                        0          mail.exoip.com.

Read the article Configure external DNS Exchange 2016.

Conclusion

You learned Exchange 2016 namespace best practices. Now that we explained Exchange 2016 namespace design and planning, let’s configure them one by one:

• Configure internal DNS Exchange 2016
• Configure Internal and External URL in Exchange 2016
• Configure external DNS Exchange 2016