Help with Exchange 07 would be appreciated

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J.B

J.B

J.B

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OK, Im getting a bit of a head ache reading TechNet so would appreciate someone explaining things in plain English.

Basically the situation as it stands is we have one server that does all the Exchange roles. Now we have a bit more money in the company its been decided that we should have a second exchange server to provide a failover incase the original goes offline.

Now I've used NLB to cluster web servers and file servers before and just assumed it would be a similiar process for Exchange.

From what I've read it seems that you can only cluster certain roles, i.e. have the Client Access roles load balanced but using the same mailbox server.

Can anyone give some helpful hints or tips or suggest things I should be reading to make this a bit clearer.

Ideally I'd like to say the second server is running all the Exchange roles and is a replica of the original server.

Thanks guys.
 
Cheers mate, I skimmed over that article. CAS is seldom used in our company as most people access using MAPI so load balancing that isnt high on my list, but would be nice as sometimes we use OWA but by no means as important as keeping outlook access.
 
Do you use outlook anywhere or mobile devices? Those use CAS.

Basically... you need to cluster the mailbox role (CMS Clustered Mailbox Server). You cannot turn your current server into a CMS, you need to create one from scratch and move mailboxes to it. Also you cannot have any other roles on this server.

Main options for CMS are SCC (data is stored on some sort of shared storage eg SAN) or CCR (each cluster node holds a copy of the data and changes are replicated using a log shipping)

We have a CCR geocluster, with the 2 nodes at different locations (with a 100meg LL connection)

2 Physical machines for the CMS nodes, and a VM running CA/HT
 
We were going to go with a load balanced mailbox store, and then use microsoft cluster on the front end for the CAS roles.

But as we are not going to virtulise the exchange environment we are not going to worry about load balancing or HA, as VMWare will take care of that for us

Kimbie
 
Thanks guys.
To answer oddjob questions, we dont use outlook anywhere. We do use Blackberrys with a BPS server though but I thought that connected through MAPI as well.

So just to clarify this, we would need clustered mailboxes, which would be 2 servers running the mailbox role and nothing else. We'd probably use CCR but thats not too important right now. Then would we need an additional (third) server for HT role?

Correct me if I'm wrong but does that not create a single point of failure on the HT server, if that went down we would not be able to send/recieve emails?

Sorry for my ignorance on this.
 
IMO you need a minimum of four servers.

Two for CCR, one for CAS/HT (can be combined to one server quite easily, without any headaches or fuss), and one edge server.
 
Another question, is it possible to make the HT HA as its more important we can keep recieving emails and have them qued up rather than keep constant access to the mailbox server.

EDIT-
Thats already been answered. Sorry peeps. It is Monday after all!
 
Just an idea but have you thought about virtualising to achieve the HA?

Our Exchange 07 box is virtualised using Citrix Xenserver and switches flawlessly if there's a physical problem with a box.
 
Yeah we have, its mainly the cost of having to buy an OS, then an Exchange license as well. Bit of a kicker.
 
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