Load balancing Exchange 2013

Exchange has always been difficult to load balance because of the way it works, but with the release of Exchange 2013, it has become a lot easier to load balance, as the architecture in Exchange 2013 has been dramatically simplified with only two roles, the Client Access server (CAS) and the Mailbox server. The CAS now only serves as a stateless proxy to the Mailbox server. This means that we can load balance on layer 4, as it does not matter which CAS a user is sent to. Also, RPC has been removed as a protocol, and now HTTPS is used by default with Outlook Anywhere, which makes it a lot easier to load balance. When configuring Exchange, we need to set up CAS using an external URL, which is available only via NetScaler.

With Exchange 2013 Service Pack 1, we also have the support do perform SSL offloading, but this is not configured by default and is not directly exposed in the Exchange management console. The advantage with performing SSL offloading is that we...