Exchange 2000 Hosting Kit Architecture

The Exchange 2000 Hosting Kit provides transactional provisioning and management for hosted Exchange installations. As shown in the schematic, the  Exchange 2000 Hosting Kit consists of a “Request Manager,” three or more “Service Configuration Objects” (SCOs), an audit trail database, and multiple transaction logging databases. An administrator uses a Web-based application to submit a provisioning or management request to the Request Manager. It contains a queue to handle and authorize the incoming XML requests, and process controllers that parse, log, and then route them to one or more SCOs. Each SCO communicates with a single system component, like with AD, Exchange, or a billing system. The Resource Manager SCO handles provisioning of other non-AD Windows 2000 resources like creating a file or setting file security. Everything is logged in one of the Hosting Kit’s transaction logs and into the audit database. Because many of the services such as AD do not natively support true transactional capabilities, the framework can use its own transaction logs to roll back a change request if all change processes do not complete successfully. If one or more component services, such as a billing system, support full transactional capabilities, they can use COM+/MTS (Microsoft Transaction Server) to manage the transaction elements.