Re: Branch Office / Central Office Exchange -- Any thoughts?

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I appreciate your follow up, I guess after reading your reply it would
seem that we do not quite understand each other. The reason why I
suggested this solution (to our client) is for the very reason you are
telling me it will not work! I would assume that moving the mailboxes
off of the BO servers and onto a redundant exchange cluster (possibily
with an inexpensive SAN disk-set) would be optimal. In this senario, in
the event that everything is online, the local FE server would offer
the speed and outgoing SMTP relay (with proper routing group
configuration mind you) that we would want and in the event of failure,
we could use some DNS magic to tell the clients to look at some other
front end. I guess I simply do not fully understand what a FE server
does or does not. Possibily you could clarify?

Thank you again,

Kevin DiVincenzo
North East Dynamic Data, Inc.
Consulting Engineer / Systems Integration Specialist
kwdivincenzo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Nuevo wrote:
The FE scenario would not work for you. FE servers only act as a proxy and
so the BE servers still handle all the mailboxes. You need some type of
Geoclustering solution and there are many about but including XOSoft, Topio,
Steeleye although depending on your client's budget this may be overkill. A
less expensive solution might just to implement a traditional 2 node Active
Passive cluster which would allow one server to fail and Exchange to keep
running. Of course you need shared storage for this to work.

Nue
<kevin.divincenzo@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1150238679.621546.25600@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
We need a strategy to improve our existing infrastructure by adding the
ability of one of our branch office exchange server to fail, and the
users there to still be able to access their email via one of the
redundant T1's to our CO. I realize that the best strategy, especially
considering the number of users at each BO is small, would be to
consolidate all of the Exchange servers into one place. However, our
client does not want to loose the high-availabiliy and speed of having
an exchange server in each branch office, moreover they refuse to use
cache mode due to the delay between receiving emails on their
blackberry's versus outlook. Basically we have several managing
partners at these locations that use their email more like instant
messaging, send very large files (5 to 10mb) frequently, and are
unwilling to tolerate any sort of delay in sending or receiving emails.
This makes moving their exchange servers out difficult (I would
think?), so we've been looking at other options. My experience with
Exchange is limited (3 years experience limited to 2000 and 2003 and in
smaller scenarios) so I'm not entirely sure what the best way to do
this would be? We have thought about converting all of their BO
exchange servers over to Front-end servers with a clustered back-end at
the CO which holds all of their mailboxes, in fact this seemed like the
best solution, but the more I am reading about how FE/BE topology
works, it would seem that it is more for HTTP/POP3/IMAP than for MAPI,
so I'm not sure this is the right solution, or if this would even
accomplish what we need. To recap, we need a (semi)transparent
failover/failback system for their email so in the event any of the
branch office exchange servers go down, they will not loose the ability
to send or receive emails -- Any thoughts would be most appreciated.


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