Help with Exchange 07 would be appreciated

J.B · 7 Dec 2009 at 09:08

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.

J.B · 7 Dec 2009 at 09:59

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.

J.B · 7 Dec 2009 at 10:25

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.

J.B · 7 Dec 2009 at 11:18

s0ck said:
Save yourself the headwork and look at Mimecast failover?

Thanks for the suggestion but due to security reasons we have to host our servers in house.

J.B · 7 Dec 2009 at 12:44

Yeah, its looking that way, just licensing them is going to be an expensive PITA.

J.B · 7 Dec 2009 at 13:11

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!

J.B · 8 Dec 2009 at 19:30

Yeah we have, its mainly the cost of having to buy an OS, then an Exchange license as well. Bit of a kicker.