Enterprise Vault™ Configuring Internal and External WebApp URLs for OWA
- Configuring Internal and External WebApp URLs for OWA
- Overview
- How to define the external URL for Enterprise Vault
- Determining when to use the external URL for Enterprise Vault
- Load balancing
- Fault tolerance
- Customized shortcut links
- OWA configuration examples
Load balancing
The flexibility of Enterprise Vault architecture means that any user in the site can access the Enterprise Vault Web Access application using any Enterprise Vault server. For this reason, publishing only one Enterprise Vault server on a firewall or Exchange CAS proxy is feasible. However, the feature described in this document allows for load balancing. Load balancing can be implemented in the following ways:
Use an external load-balancer or round-robin DNS on the given host name.
Assign a different virtual directory name in different policies. This will allow the URL to be used by different firewall or Exchange CAS proxy rules, which would forward requests to different Enterprise Vault servers.
For example, user A could be assigned a policy with "External Web Application URL" set to "/EV1", and user B could be assigned a policy with "External Web Application URL" set to "/EV2".
Both users use the same OWA server, accessed using the URL:
https://mail.company.com/owa
For User A the external URL to access Enterprise Vault would be:
https://mail.company.com/EV1
For User B, the URL would be:
https://mail.company.com/EV2
These URLs would both be processed by the same firewall server. However, the firewall server would have different rules for the virtual directories, EV1 and EV2:
EV1 would map to http://evserver1/enterprisevault.
EV2 would map to http://evserver2/enterprisevault.
Assign a different virtual directory name on different Exchange Servers using the "ExternalWebAppUrl" configuration setting.
Assign a different, fully qualified URL in different Exchange Mailbox policies, and assign the policies appropriately. These could use different host names to access different firewall or proxy servers, or different virtual directory names to access different firewall rules.
Assign a different fully qualified URL on different Exchange Servers using the "ExternalWebAppUrl" configuration setting.
Similar techniques can also be used to allow for mailboxes in different Enterprise Vault sites; each site's policies would need to specify a different external URL to allow the firewall rules to be set to access an Enterprise Vault server in the correct site.