Why would you bring up an Exchange Server offline?

The Exchange Team Blog recently posted an article on how to help speed up the time certain Exchange Server services take to start when the server isn’t connected to the Internet.  You can read the article via this link. The question I’ve been hearing after this article showed up was “Why would I bring up an Exchange Server that isn’t net connected?  Isn’t the point of Exchange to send/receive mail?”  Valid question, but I can think of a few instances where this article can really help folks.

1 – You aren’t sure what’s broken

This is a pretty common one, believe it or not.  When troubleshooting Exchange, sometimes servers can appear to be connected to the Internet, but are not.  They may also require several reboots to properly correct whatever went wrong with the network connection once you figure out what broke.  In both cases, having a way to speed up the Exchange service startup can make troubleshooting faster and more efficient.

2 – You’re testing something out

Many times, administrators will want to see how certain changes impact Exchange Servers without allowing them to receive new mail (just in case they have to revert to a previous version of the database).  This is typically done by disconnecting the server from the network, as that will ensure no mail is transferred in any direction.  If a reboot is required for the testing, shortening service start times makes life easier.

3 – Secured environments

The article specifically mentions this one.  If Exchange Server is used for internal mail routing ONLY, and never expected to send/receive anything on the public Internet, then it may not be connected to the public Internet at all.  Under these specific circumstances, there’s no reason for things like public certificate updates to happen, since the Exchange Server will never use them.  Be very careful with this one, though. You’d be amazed how many times I have found so-called “isolated” Exchange Servers that are chattering away with the outside world.

As you can see, there are reasons why you would bring an Exchange Server up without a connection to the Internet.  In those circumstances, the guidance in the article can help speed up the process of getting your Exchange services started.  Just be careful to follow all the warnings in the articles, as a wrong move could either break Exchange or create a whopping security hole in your email architecture.