What makes Microsoft Exchange 2019 faster and more secure?

Microsoft Exchange is a pro­fes­sion­al email and groupware solution for busi­nesses, offering cent­ral­ised email, calendar, contact, and task man­age­ment. The Exchange Server enables secure and efficient com­mu­nic­a­tion and col­lab­or­a­tion.

Key Exchange 2019 features

Many changes in Exchange Server 2019 take place behind the scenes and are therefore not im­me­di­ately visible to users. Other updates, however, directly affect the workflow of employees whose companies rely on Microsoft Exchange Server 2019. Some features are par­tic­u­larly in­ter­est­ing for ad­min­is­trat­ors.

Meta Cache Database (MCDB)

If you operate your own physical server and equip it with SSD drives, Exchange 2019 gives you the option to use the Meta Cache Database (MCDB). This tech­no­logy is already used in Microsoft 365. With this approach, meta in­form­a­tion related to the mailbox (e.g., the folder structure) is stored. This speeds up access and searches while allowing ad­min­is­trat­ors to host more users on a single server instance. In turn, this can help reduce costs.

Dynamic Database Cache (DDC)

The Dynamic Database Cache (DDC) also improves Exchange Server per­form­ance. In earlier versions, ad­min­is­trat­ors assigned a fixed amount of memory to each database. When the number of active databases changed, memory was often left un­der­u­til­ised. In Exchange 2019, the DDC allows memory al­loc­a­tion to adjust dy­nam­ic­ally depending on the situation.

Search Index

Microsoft com­pletely re­designed the search index in Exchange 2019. Pre­vi­ously, the index was stored sep­ar­ately from the mailbox database. In the new version, the search index is now in­teg­rated directly into the mailbox database, sim­pli­fy­ing man­age­ment and boosting search speed.

Windows Server Core

Microsoft now offers ad­min­is­trat­ors a min­im­al­ist version of the server operating system with Windows Server Core. In the past, however, this could not be used in com­bin­a­tion with an Exchange Server. Exchange 2019 now provides this option. Because Server Core is much simpler than the standard version, it reduces con­fig­ur­a­tion work and elim­in­ates un­ne­ces­sary services that only consume resources. In addition to saving time, Windows Server Core also promises greater security because its stream­lined structure gives criminals fewer attack points, and ad­min­is­trat­ors are less likely to introduce security-related errors.

Calendar en­hance­ments

Exchange 2019 also provides end users with new features, all related to the calendar. With the Do Not Forward function, users who create a meeting can specify that attendees are not allowed to forward the in­vit­a­tion. This way, the event organiser maintains control over who can par­ti­cip­ate in the meeting. In addition, Exchange Server 2019 gives users more options when creating an Out of Office message. If you are out of the office for a certain period, you can block your calendar for that time. Meeting requests for that period will then be auto­mat­ic­ally declined.

Another calendar-related feature focuses on ad­min­is­trat­ors: they now have access to a brand-new and enhanced Cmdlet (‘command-let’). This newly added command lets ad­min­is­trat­ors remove events (such as meetings) from calendars. Pre­vi­ously, events created by employees who had left the company stayed in other users’ calendars in­def­in­itely. With Remove-CalendarEvents, admins can finally delete these entries. In addition, the Add-FolderPermissions Cmdlet has been upgraded, allowing ad­min­is­trat­ors to assign delegate per­mis­sions directly through Power­Shell.

Email Address In­ter­na­tion­al­iz­a­tion (EAI)

Also in­ter­est­ing for end users is Email Address In­ter­na­tion­al­iz­a­tion (EAI), which helps reduce issues when sending emails in a global context. In­ter­na­tion­al email users are no longer limited to the ASCII code, which is re­stric­ted to the English alphabet. Instead, the extended UTF-8 standard can be used. In previous versions of Exchange, email addresses had to be converted to support this, but that is no longer necessary. EAI in Exchange 2019 allows email addresses with in­ter­na­tion­al char­ac­ters to be used directly.

Unified messaging removed in Exchange 2019

For some companies, this could be a moderate issue: Starting with Exchange Server 2019, Microsoft has dis­con­tin­ued the Unified Messaging (UM) service. In previous versions, the service offered extensive voicemail features. Companies that want to keep these cap­ab­il­it­ies in the future will need to switch to another service. Microsoft itself is retiring UM in favor of Cloud Voicemail. The latter is provided through Microsoft Teams and is therefore part of Microsoft 365, Microsoft’s SaaS solution.

Ad­di­tion­al im­prove­ments in Exchange 2019

Alongside the more visible updates, Microsoft has also built a range of behind-the-scenes en­hance­ments into Exchange Server 2019. These focus primarily on security and per­form­ance. To better protect against attacks, Microsoft now supports running Exchange in com­bin­a­tion with Windows Server Core. At the same time, the new version in­tro­duces stricter security re­quire­ments: beginning with Exchange 2019, only the TLS protocol version 1.2 or higher is supported. Older, less secure versions are no longer com­pat­ible, ef­fect­ively requiring ad­min­is­trat­ors to meet stronger security standards.

Ad­di­tion­ally, the new Exchange version gives ad­min­is­trat­ors more options with Client Access Rules to restrict access to the con­fig­ur­a­tion area (Admin Center & Power­Shell) of the servers. This also increases security: ad­min­is­trat­ors can now allow only specific IP addresses and block external access directly on the server without relying on an ad­di­tion­al firewall.

More has also been done to improve the per­form­ance of Exchange Server. Major in­nov­a­tions such as MCDB, DDC, and the re­designed search index have already been high­lighted above. But Exchange Server 2019 includes even more en­hance­ments: switching from Work­sta­tion Garbage Col­lec­tion (GC) to Server GC allows available pro­cessing power to be dis­trib­uted more ef­fi­ciently. Server GC handles more requests per second than the Work­sta­tion version. However, this ef­fi­ciency boost only applies when multiple processor cores are used. That’s why Exchange 2019 supports up to 48 processor cores running in parallel.

Since memory im­prove­ments were also a key focus of the Exchange 2019 changes, Microsoft has ensured better support for modern hardware in this context as well. In addition to tra­di­tion­al HDDs, SSD storage can now be used in your Exchange Server—together with standard hard drives. A total of 256 GB of memory is now supported.

Exchange 2019 re­quire­ments

The release of the new version also brings updated Exchange 2019 re­quire­ments for server en­vir­on­ments, es­pe­cially when it comes to hardware:

• Processor: 64-bit Intel or AMD pro­cessors
• Memory: 128 GB for the Mailbox role and 64 GB for the Edge Transport role
• Storage: 20 GB for in­stall­a­tion, plus 200 MB free on the system drive and 500 MB free on the drive hosting the Message Queue Database

Microsoft’s published figures for the minimum memory re­quire­ments have caused some un­cer­tainty among ad­min­is­trat­ors because they are re­l­at­ively high. However, what the vendor actually means is that for optimal per­form­ance, you should have at least 128 GB of memory available. That said, it is still possible to implement Exchange 2019 with less memory if needed.

Also important: the required software. To use Exchange 2019, Windows Server 2019 or a newer version is required. For many or­gan­isa­tions, this means upgrading the operating system as well. The man­age­ment tools are also designed for Windows 10. Exchange 2019 requires .NET Framework version 4.7.2. Users can access Exchange Server starting with Outlook 2013 or newer.