The Edge Server is one of the Exchange 2010 server roles.
An organization can choose to not have an EDGE server and still have a fully functional messaging environment. As we demonstrate in our Screencast Exchange Server 2010 Initial Configuration, you can configure an Exchange 2010 Hub Transport server to receive directly messages from the Internet.
However, a standard Exchange server is an attractive target. In case of a security breach it might allow an attacker access to mailboxes and Active Directory data. Here comes into play the Edge server as a lean, locked-down standalone version of Exchange server. The data, synchronized one way – from the internal AD into the local instance of AD LDS (Active Directory Lightweight Directory Service) is hashed, which makes it of little use to an attacker. In addition, the EDGE server is running a truncated version of Exchange Management tools. As you will see, the EMC (Exchange Management Console) is showing data just for the local Edge server and has quite a limited functionality. The same way EMS (Exchange Management Shell) supports a limited set of cmdlets.
In the following Step-by-Step video tutorial, we demonstrate the installation and initial synchronization of Exchange 2010 SP1 Edge Transport server on Windows 2008 R2 OS.
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Dean