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Redundancy on Windows 2K Exchange server ?

  • 08-02-2004 10:49pm
    #1
    Capt'n Midnight
    Moderators, Recreation & Hobbies Moderators, Science, Health & Environment Moderators, Technology & Internet Moderators Posts: 92,385 Mod ✭✭✭✭


    Ok I want to get redundancy on an Exchange 2000 server.
    Downtime to be minimum and recovery time to be fairly fast - restoring the OS from tape / repairing the OS are things I'd like to avoid. Backup would be to offsite tape using an agent for the app. RAID is a given.

    One way is to buy two servers and windows enterprise etc. the software costs are prohibitive.

    There are also third party soultions that as far as I can tell act as a device driver and can mirror drives to another machine on the fly (gigabit cards are very cheap) again we would need two copies of windows but at least not the enterprise edition.

    Another way would be to get two servers and one external RAID drive unit. Only one set of licenses would be needed and the other server could be used in a secondary role (intranet server / until needed or powered off so no licences needed.

    I seem to remember that if you have two SCSI cards on the same cable then the first one to power up gets read/wite access and the second one is read only - would it be possible to backup or replicate the HDD to another machine this way - (in addition to the tape backup) assume indentical drives and can have linux or whatever on other machine. (of course this would mean Mirroring rather than Striping)

    I'll have to look up cloning on 2K to see if it is possible to restore the System partition without having syspreped it first.

    Are there other ways of getting redundancy on the server ?
    Unfortunately am stuck with exchange.


Comments

  • #2
    ColmOT [MSFT]
    Closed Accounts Posts: 545 ✭✭✭ColmOT [MSFT]


    The most dependable solution you should use is the clustering solution - 2x Windows & 2x Exchange. It's expensive I know - but it's the best and most guaranteed solution. It will provide you with 0% downtime.

    I'm not sure about the other solutions that you suggest...


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