Exchange DR suggestions?

[Bleek]

Running an Exchange 2003 environment, two servers, two blades.

What would be the best method to replicate this to DR, we currently have offline replica servers which I detest, is there any option in 2003 for 'hot spares' that can sit there ready to take the fall?

I'd rather not use clustering (it's a flakey system on Blades) and/or third part apps (unless they are free/cheap).

Suggestions would be appreciated.

 

[Bleek]

We're a financial institution, the problem is we can't wait. We need a proper working DR solution for this yesterday.

They want to test DR of Exchange in a few weeks but I believe booting up servers that have been off for so long is just asking for trouble.

 

[Bleek]

To be honest our DR centre is 20+ racks of idle kit, it's hardly penny pinching or cost cutting. It's probably miles better than most companies live datacentres!

However with the current 'credit crunch' the heads are looking to cut costs wherever possible.

We have a large VMware setup AND we use DoubleTake for SQL servers.

Not sure how Virtualizing Exchange will work because we still can't just 'roll over' to those servers because the names, addresses etc will be different.

Why didn't MSoft build in a failover platform or process for Exchange, it's a business critical area?

Is there anyway to add 'blank' or front end Exchange servers to the current domain, have them located at DR and 'simply' transfer mailstores to them in a DR situation or will this cause problems because the servers have different names?

 

[Bleek]

Can anyone forsee any problems bringing the cold spare servers online, patching them, taking the live servers offline and then restored MBX stores to the cold now live server?

The cold spares are named exactly the same, we'd just have to updated DNS and WINS by hand.

Oh and there are firewall rules already in place for these boxes.