Sun Java Communications Suite 5 Deployment Planning Guide

Chapter 12 Designing a Messaging Server Topology

This chapter describes how to design your messaging topology. A messaging topology describes the physical and logical layout of a networked messaging system. Specifically, a topology depicts the way the devices are arranged on a network and how they communicate with one another. In addition, a topology describes the way that data passes through a network. Topologies are bound to network protocols that direct the data flow.

This chapter contains the following sections:

Identifying Your Geographic Needs

The first step in designing your messaging topology is to identify your geographic needs. In particular, determine the messaging services you need to provide at each location within your organization:

  1. Once you identify your deployment goals, determine the functions and features needed for each location within your deployment.

  2. Understand your organization’s physical constraints, specifically:

    • Available bandwidth

    • Distance between physical locations within your organization

    • Mail transaction rate and volume of mail storage at each physical location

Designing a Messaging Topology

Before you develop your topology, you need a strategy to determine where you are going to put your messaging servers in your organization. Depending on your goals, there are four common topologies that you can apply to your organization:

Central Topology

In a central topology, most or all major system components and messaging processes are located at one site. Clients at remote sites communicate over a Wide Area Network (WAN) to the centralized messaging servers. Figure 12–1 shows a central topology.

Figure 12–1 Central Topology

This diagram shows a central topology. The Tokyo, London,
and New York sites use the Messaging Serer and Directory Server hosts in the
Central site.

You should consider a central topology for your organization when:

There are advantages to implementing a central topology. In general, a central topology has lower hardware and support costs. Central topologies tend to be easier to manage because you have a simplified messaging architecture and a directory replication structure with fewer replication agreements. With a simplified architecture and no need to coordinate installation among geographically distant sites, a central topology is faster to deploy.

That said, there are an equal number of disadvantages to implementing a central topology. A centralized approach heavily relies on a WAN. If the network does not function properly, users at the same site as well as users in remote locations could not send email to one another. Depending on network bandwidth and traffic, services might be slower during peak usage times. For users who send messages within the same domain, a central topology is inefficient. For example, looking at Figure 12–1, a message sent from one user in the Tokyo site would first travel to the Central site before being sent to another user in the Tokyo site.

Distributed Topology

In a distributed topology, most or all system components and messaging processes are distributed across multiple sites, usually at each remote site. Figure 12–2 shows a distributed topology.

Figure 12–2 Distributed Topology

This diagram shows a distributed topology with Messaging
Server hosts at the Tokyo, London, and New York sites.

You should consider a distributed topology for your site when:

There are advantages to implementing a distributed topology. Users at regional sites have faster access to their messages because they do not have to retrieve messages over the WAN. Furthermore, messages sent within a regional location will incur less messaging traffic than in a central topology. However, satellite offices still rely on the WAN. Therefore, if lots of message traffic is generated in a satellite office, the WAN might need to be upgraded.

The disadvantages of implementing a distributed topology are that typically you will have higher hardware costs and higher support costs as you maintain more hardware at more locations. Support costs are also higher because of the complexity of the distributed topology. For example, failover in a distributed topology is more difficult to implement than in a central topology. In addition, it is much slower to initially deploy Messaging Server because there are multiple servers spread across multiple sites.

Because Messaging Server accesses the LDAP directory, the LDAP server is a critical link in the mail delivery process. If you don’t use remote LDAP replicas, and the central LDAP is down, the messaging service will not be usable.

Hybrid Topology

In a hybrid topology, central and distributed topologies are combined to meet the needs of an organization. Figure 12–3 shows a hybrid topology.

Figure 12–3 Hybrid Topology

This diagram depicts a hybrid topology utilizing both
central and distributed topologies.

Organizations that benefit from a hybrid topology include those with many sites that have the ability to support a large user base. These sites that support them can house their own messaging servers. Some of these larger sites might have smaller satellite offices located in the general vicinity. But these satellite offices would not require their own messaging servers. Instead, the nearest major office would act as the central location for their services.

Service Provider Topology

In essence, a service provider topology is a large-scale central topology. Typically, a service provider hosts multiple domains and has a larger customer base than an enterprise. Systems are centralized and are able to support multiple users during peak hours. Figure 12–4 shows a service provider topology.

Figure 12–4 Service Provider Topology

This diagram shows a service provider topology, spread
out between two separate domains.

Understanding Messaging Topology Elements

This section describes the most common elements in a messaging topology. Having some familiarity with the basic elements will make it easier for you to design your own topology.

The following topics are covered:

Messaging Topology Components

In Designing a Messaging Topology, you were introduced to three components of a messaging topology: Messaging Server, Directory Server, and clients. This section will describe other components in a basic messaging topology.

Messaging Server. Houses and maintains user mailboxes; it can also be a server that contains just the MTA portion of Messaging Server as described in Internet-facing MTA and MTA Relay.

Client. Accesses messaging services from Messaging Server (often through the Messaging Multiplexor).

Directory Server. Used by Messaging Server for name and alias lookup. Direct LDAP lookup determines where messages should be routed.

Messaging Multiplexor. Connects clients to the appropriate Messaging Server for retrieving messages.

Internet-facing MTA. Routes messages from the Internet and relays them across the firewall. Typically, a Messaging Server host is set up to perform this function.

MTA Relay. The inbound MTA routes incoming messages to valid addresses in the appropriate Messaging Server. The outgoing MTA accepts outgoing messages from clients, queries LDAP to find out where to send the message, then sends it off to the appropriate server or out across the firewall to the Internet. Typically, a Messaging Server host is set up to perform this function.

DNS Server. Resolves server names into IP addresses to allow messages to be routed to their proper address in the network.

Firewall. Restricts Internet access of your internal site. You might even have a firewall between departments in your organization.

Using MTAs to Protect Your Messaging System

You can use MTAs to protect your Messaging Server deployment, as well as to control the flow of message traffic to and from your site.

An Internet-facing MTA is a single point of contact that receives messages from sites external to your organization. An Internet-facing MTA sends the incoming messages across the firewall to the inbound MTA, typically another Messaging Server.

The inbound MTA then queries the directory to determine where to send the message within the organization. The Internet-facing MTA is located in the demilitarized zone (DMZ) of the firewall (between the external and internal walls of the firewall), and does not have access to any information about servers other than the inbound MTA.

The outbound MTA accepts outgoing messages from clients. It queries LDAP to find out where to send the message, then sends it off to the appropriate server or out across the firewall to the Internet. This offloads the MTA work from messaging servers that are used by users to retrieve messages. Figure 12–5 illustrates the idea.

Figure 12–5 MTAs in Messaging Topology

This diagram shows the mail relays in a Messaging Server
topology.

Using MMPs

The MMP enables you to mask the layout of your Messaging Server hosts from your end users. Consequently, you assign users to a generic MMP or a load balancer without having them point to the specific server where their mail boxes reside. Message access clients point to the MMP for retrieving incoming messages.

When such a client connects and authenticates, the MMP looks up the user information in the directory to determine where the user’s messages are held. The MMP then connects the client to that specific server. The following figure shows how the MMP acts as a proxy for IMAP4 and POP3 connections to Messaging servers. Figure 12–6 shows how multiplexors function in a Messaging Server environment.

Figure 12–6 MMP Overview

This diagram illustrates how the Multiplexor (MMP) acts
as the common point between clients and servers.

Use a load balancer in front of the multiple MMPs. It is unlikely that you would have a single MMP.

Using the MMP SMTP Proxy

The MMP contains an SMTP proxy that is designed to accept messages but not transfer messages. Because of this design, never use the MMP SMTP Proxy as the target of a DNS MX record or to otherwise receive mail incoming from arbitrary sources on the Internet. Messaging Server does not support the use of the MMP SMTP Proxy in a message transfer capacity.

Messaging Server does support the use of the MMP SMTP proxy for message submission from end-user clients. However, the multiplexing functionality of the MMP, which is necessary to distribute POP and IMAP connections to the correct back-end store, is not necessary for SMTP submission. You can balance SMTP submission by MX records for mail clients that follow the standard, or by a simple load balancer for mail clients that do not follow the standard.

Only use the MMP SMTP Proxy in the following situations:

  1. If the MTA is becoming impeded with SSL/TLS processing, the MMP SMTP proxy can offload that processing for message submission while still supporting standard SMTP STARTTLS.

  2. If the MMP has SSL hardware acceleration for POP/IMAP, it might make sense to also leverage that for SMTP submission.

  3. If you need to use the "POP before SMTP" mechanism, then the MMP SMTP Proxy is required.

  4. The MMP SMTP proxy has a desired feature not present in the back-end MTA.

  5. If your deployment requires a proxy, then use the MMP SMTP proxy, which is specifically designed to preserve the security features and SMTP extensions present in the MTA and uses a custom SMTP extension (XPEHLO) to do so safely.


Note –

The MMP SMTP Proxy only works with Messaging Server's SMTP server as a back-end.


Using Gateways

Your organization might contain legacy messaging systems that use proprietary methods for messaging handling. Until you migrate your users, both messaging strategies must co-exist. To access these legacy systems, you can use an SMTP gateway, which enables SMTP connections between the new system and the other legacy systems. Usually legacy systems support SMTP connections so that the inbound MTA can route messages to it.

Creating a Messaging Topology Example

Once you have a basic understanding of your topological needs, your strategy, and the topology elements, you can create your messaging topology. To illustrate how to create a messaging topology, this section uses the example of the Siroe Corporation.

The Siroe Corporation is a multimedia organization headquartered in New York, with two smaller offices in Los Angeles and Chicago, and two satellite offices in San Diego and in Minneapolis.

Step 1: Identifying Messaging Goals

The first step in creating a topology is to understand the goals of your organization. Similar to Chapter 2, Analyzing Your Communications Suite Requirements, Siroe’s messaging goals can be categorized into business objectives, technical, and financial constraints.

Siroe’s Business Objectives

The finance, marketing, legal, IT, and engineering groups are located in New York. The creative groups are located in Los Angeles and in San Diego. The technical support groups are located in Chicago and Minneapolis. Most messages are sent between Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York.

Employees at the Siroe Corporation rely on email as their primary method of communication. On average, employees send approximately 15 messages per day with attachments in the form of spreadsheets, presentations, or animation.

The deployment planners determined that Message Server hosts would be set up in Chicago, Los Angeles, and in New York. Since the volume of email traffic in San Diego and in Minneapolis is relatively light, these satellite offices will only have mail clients connecting to servers that are located in Chicago and in Los Angeles.

Siroe’s Financial and Technical Constraints

Because of budgetary restrictions, Siroe will be using the existing infrastructure and hardware that is already in place, moving servers to locations where there is critical need. 24x7 support will be available only in the New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles offices. All offices will be connected by T3 lines to the Internet.

Step 2: Choosing a Topology Strategy

The second step in creating your messaging topology is to choose your topology strategy, described in Designing a Messaging Topology. The Siroe Corporation evaluated their business objectives as well as their financial and technical constraints. They determined that:

The Siroe Corporation then mapped their objectives and constraints to a common design strategy. Figure 12–7 shows that the Siroe Corporation has chosen a hybrid topology.

Figure 12–7 Hybrid Topology for the Siroe Corporation

In this diagram, the Siroe Corporation chooses a hybrid
topology strategy.

Because New York has the highest message transaction rate of messages entering and leaving the system, it has the most number of messaging servers. The smaller offices, Los Angeles and Chicago, also support San Diego and Minneapolis. However, these satellite offices do not require their own messaging servers. Instead, Chicago and Los Angeles act as the central location for their services.

Step 3: Planning the Topology Elements

The final step in creating your messaging topology is to plan your topology elements in your actual deployment, as described in Understanding Messaging Topology Elements. The following figure illustrates the topology elements in the Chicago and Minneapolis offices.

Figure 12–8 Topological Elements in the Siroe Messaging Deployment for Chicago and Minneapolis

This diagram shows the Chicago and Minneapolis layout
of the Siroe topology.

Because 30 percent of the workforce is made up of third-party vendors and contractors, internal firewalls are used in addition to the external firewalls in the topology to restrict access to locations within the company. Internet MTAs are placed in the topology to route messages from the Internet and relay them across the firewall. MTAs are added to route incoming and outgoing messages. Separating incoming and outgoing messages helps to manage the high volume of message traffic. The MMP connects employees’ POP and IMAP mail clients to their mailboxes in the Messaging Servers. By using an MMP, employees don’t have to know their specific mail host when they log in, and administrators can seamlessly move employees’ mailboxes to different mail server locations.

Creating a messaging topology enables you to account for the physical and logical placement of all the elements in your deployment. Doing so ensures minimal rework of your installation.