Help with Exchange 2010 and Load Balancer

Working on a POC for Load Balanced/Redundant Exchange Environment. Things are "working" but I am not convinced its the way it should be. Here's the quick lowdown. I'm hoping you all can help me validate.

 

 

2 Active Directory Sites (DC/GC in each Site)

 

4 Exchange Servers (All 2010 SP1 Rollup 2 running on Server 2008 R2) - (2 Exchange Servers per site)

 

2 F5 Load Balancers

 

 

One thing to note is that our environment is entirely internal. Meaning all users connect via VPN. All clients will be configured using Outlook Anywhere however there is no "outside" access to OWA or anything outside of the VPN.

 

 

I have:

 

 

- Created 1 DAG group containing all 4 servers

 

- Each server is hosting a copy of the 2 databases

 

- Created 2 CAS Arrays (1 per site)

 

- Assigned the DB's to their respective CAS array's

 

- Created DNS entries for each CAS array which point back to the F5's

 

- Configured the Exchange servers for SSL offloading

 

- Installed SSL Wildcard cert on F5's

 

 

Everything is more or less working. I do notice some strange anomalies but the thing that has really perplexed me is with regards to the configuration of the Exchange Virtual Directories. Currently I have configured only the Internal URL for all of them and set it to the respective server name. Only autodiscover is set to use a common name "outlook" which in DNS has multiple entries configured to "round robin" between the f5's. I have left all External URL's blank.

 

 

So my (primary) question (of the hour) is...should I be setting the External Urls's for Exchange Virtual Directories? Are my internal url's set properly or should they also be set to go to the F5's? In setting the internal url's to the names of the servers am I totally missing the point of having the load balancers? I have also configured the InternalNLBBypassURL to the names of the servers. If I have not provided enough information please let me know.

 

 

TIA for any insight and assisstance.