Exchange Server

Darren · Guest

I have 2 geographically seperate main sites, and several regional offices.
Site 1 plans to run Exchange 2003 in an MSCS active/active/passive
environment for all the users in the company.

Site 2 already has AD controllers and GCs in it, so that in the event of a
total site disaster at site 1, network functionality to regional offices is
maintained. the main sites are connected by a 34MB link

The question is, can this limp-along functionality be extended to include
Exchange?

The 2 sites can't be part of the same cluster - they're too far apart for a
software solution and an EMC one is going to be far too expensive. Assuming
that the cluster has been destroyed at site 1, but that a list of mailboxes
and volume shadow copys are available, would there be a reasonably quick way
of getting them up and running at site 2 or am i going to need to wipe the
Exchange/cluster info from AD and build from scratch at site 2?

The primary requirement would be to provide an email service the next day, a
desireable state of affairs would be to reinstate maildata within 3 days or
so.

The only way i can see to achieve this realistically is to have the email
cluster in site 1 and an emergency exchange server in site 2, it would be a
member of the exchange organisation but wouldn't hold any information. Site 1
would do a daily exmerge of PST files which could then be replicated to site
2.

In the event of site 1 being destroyed, a script could be run on site 2 to
bulk-create the mailboxes using the site2 server as the mailstore. Exmerge
could then be run over time to re-import the mail.

Does this sound feasible? are there any other obvious (or not so obvious..)
solutions?

Thanks for your help

Al Mulnick · Guest

You were doing fine up to this point:

"The primary requirement would be to provide an email service the next day,
a
desirable state of affairs would be to reinstate maildata within 3 days or
so.

The only way i can see to achieve this realistically is to have the email
cluster in site 1 and an emergency exchange server in site 2, it would be a
member of the exchange organization but wouldn't hold any information."

After that you said the PST word and lost me :)

Why in the world would you do anything with PST's in this fashion? Are you
only dealing with 5 mailboxes? If not, then why would you not ship your
backups to the remote site for replay in the case of a disaster that took
out that datacenter? That *should* be part of your disaster plan as is
figuring out which users would be able to even access that other datacenter
and what they will use to access that datacenter.

What you describe is often referred to as 'dial-tone' availability. Why? I
dunno, but it just basically describes a way to provide service almost
immediately, often via scripts etc to alleviate nervous admins, and data at
a later point in time. Exactly as you describe. At question is how you plan
to get the data over to the remote site and how up to date it needs to be.
Another *IMPORTANT* question is how you plan to restore the cluster to a
stand-alone server? That's something you should practice if you know what I
mean...

Bottom line: I think you're on the right track. Assuming many things, this
should do what you want and meet the goals you stated. You need to ensure
that you're thinking this through to the point of the user (which you may
already have, but it never hurts to point out) and make sure that you
understand who's email needs to be back in what priority order. That often
comes across as important as well.

I highly suggest practice to ensure you have what you desire and that
expectations are met the way people think they should be. It sux to find
that out when it's really not convenient.

My 0.04 anyway.
Al

"Darren" <Darren@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:944EB0CC-DD52-4CF9-8DA4-6AEB12D8E0F8@microsoft.com...

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