Can Hub Transport Co-Exist on a Domain Controller?
We are co-locating our Exchange Servers and need to have high availability. The current configuration is two clustered Exchange 2007 servers with a separate hub transport/CAS server. The contemplated configuration is two Exchange 2010 servers and two domain controllers configured to DAG. To achieve load balancing can I put the Hub Transport role on the domain controllers? I know best practice is to not to mix the two but this is a small operation, only 100 users. Just trying to avoid buying yet more hardware (a load balancer).
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The official word from Microsoft is this "is not a recommended configuration". When you run the Exchange Analyzer Tool, it is going to tell you that.
As already mentioned, Small Business Server (SBS) is an all-in-one configuration with the Domain Controller, Exchange, SQL, and other services wrapped into one server. But this SBS server is specially configured to integrate those services; an integration that does not occur when the services are installed separately on a regular Windows server.
Long story short, sure you can put a HUB role on a Domain Controller. I do not suggest putting Client Access or Mailbox roles on the Domain Controller though.
As already mentioned, Small Business Server (SBS) is an all-in-one configuration with the Domain Controller, Exchange, SQL, and other services wrapped into one server. But this SBS server is specially configured to integrate those services; an integration that does not occur when the services are installed separately on a regular Windows server.
Long story short, sure you can put a HUB role on a Domain Controller. I do not suggest putting Client Access or Mailbox roles on the Domain Controller though.
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While the other offered solutions are no doubt based on good experience I am going with this posting. For a couple of years now I have been running a clustered Exchange 2007 arrangement along with a Hub Transport / CAS box that was an Optiplex 755 workstation. We've had no load balancing issues so I'm hopeful that our small shop can accommodate to this hybrid arrangement.
I think a better config would be the two Exchange 2010 servers running all 3 roles with either a hardware load balancer or CAS Array (basically DNS Round robin)
Exchange and AD will run on the same sever, but there are a lot of performance problems.