Exchange namespace design and planning

Exchange Server namespace design and planning are some of the most critical tasks. If you configure it right, you will spare yourself a lot of headaches. Therefore, it’s essential to understand the Exchange namespace design and plan it accordingly. In this article, you will learn Exchange namespace best practices configuration.

Information Exchange namespace design

When installing Exchange Server, the internal URLs match the fully qualified domain name (FQDN) of the Exchange Server. This design is by default.

Let’s have examples of how internal hostnames look like:

• .local
• .priv
• .internal
• .lan

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 cause problems
• Configuring Exchange Hybrid deployment will cause problems

Note: We recommend making use of a generic namespace. For example, mail.yourdomain.com.

In our example, we have an internal domain with the name exoip.local and external domain exoip.com. Therefore, we will configure the namespace as mail.exoip.com.

Exchange namespace planning

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

• The public DNS/External DNS zone 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 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 for Exchange

Configure the DNS zones internally with Pinpoint DNS. Both these records are A records.

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 for Exchange.

Configure internal and external URL in Exchange

Configure the internal and external URLs with the same name. Almost all the URLs will have 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.

Configure external DNS for Exchange

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

Note: Always use a spam filter to protect your Exchange Server organization from incoming and outgoing spam. The one we recommend is the SpamBull cloud spam filter.

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	@	10	mx1.spambull.com.
MX	300	@	20	mx2.spambull.com.
MX	300	@	30	mx3.spambull.com.
MX	300	@	40	mx4.spambull.com.

Read the article Configure external DNS for Exchange.

Conclusion

You learned the Exchange namespace best practices. It’s essential to have an architecture view of the namespace design before you start to configure. Save yourself trouble in the future, and don’t use internal hostnames for the internal URLs.

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