Microsoft Exchange 2016: The vNext

By Chetan Kumar

The upcoming version of Exchange Server is built on the architecture of Exchange Server 2013. The version next is further refined to cater and suite the deployments of all scales. New version of the product is evolved from Office365 and enables both On-Premise and hybrid deployments. The official release of the product will be in 3rd Quarter of 2015.

Architecture

Exchange Server 2016 eliminates Server roles completely and hence is a ‘Single Role’ product. Microsoft pushed the product to a new version to simplify the product architecture and improve its capabilities. Refer Figure 1 the architecture changes in the new product.

Figure 1- Architecture Design

The mailbox server role hosts all the components to process/render/store data and contains the logic to route requests to the correct target endpoint. With the elimination of CAS role, communication between the servers still occurs at the protocol level.

Improvements

• Search Improvements: Search is improved for Outlook online mode clients. Network bandwidth requirements between Active and Passive database copies is reduced. 
• Document Collaboration: Integration with Office Web App Server added the functionality of editing documents in Outlook web access. 
• Extensibility: REST APIs are now available in Exchange Server 2016 that allow the developers to connect from any platform and simplifies programming for Exchange.
• Outlook Connectivity: MAPI/HTTP is the default protocol enabled for users in Exchange Server 2016. 
• Coexistence with Exchange Server 2013: It is comparatively easier to move or coexist with your existing Exchange Server 2013 deployment. 

Key Benefits to Customers

• Simpler Deployments: With the Exchange Server 2016 architecture, identical Exchange Servers with respect to hardware, configuration, and so on, make deployment simpler. 
• Reduced Infrastructure/Software cost: New architecture of Exchange Server 2016 reduced the number of physical Exchange Servers as compared to previous versions, which lower the investment in infrastructure, operations and software licensing. 
• Faster Recovery: The new version provides faster failover/recovery of databases (around 33%), disk IOPS are further reduced, automated database repair detect and fix divergent database copies. 

Conclusion

Exchange Server 2016 is laid on proven architecture and flexible future-ready foundation, which continues the vision of reducing the complexity of architecture. Customers running the previous version of the product can easily adapt new versions of the product to their existing deployments. The new product version helps to simplify the messaging environment and increase the availability/resiliency of the deployment.