I have EBS 2008 installed at my company. Eache of the three servers installed and up and running. Now my boss asked me what kind of failover we have. What happens if there is an hardware problem with the exchange server. Will no one be able to read its mail. And of course this will be the case.
So my question is. How can I make this system more failover.
Can I install one more messaging server to have as failover?
Is it possible to set it up on a remote location to get even better disaster recovery?
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Thanks for your reply.
Answering your questions:
a. Maximum half a day up to a day
b. As much as a. takes
c. loss of machine and I guess lost of building
Its okay for manual work and as long as we can get it up again in say half a day its okay. We have a remote location so if it would be possible to put a server there. What would you suggest for this?
If you want to replicate to another location, then you would need to have a domain controller and Exchange server (so that is two additional Windows licences and then an additional Exchange 2007 licence). You could then use SCR to replicate the data to the remote site.
DFS which is part of Windows can replicate the file data.
The above is basically what I do with my home network. I replicate everything to a machine that lives in my mother's study 20 miles away. I make a change at home, it is there a few minutes later.
When it comes to cash, you can spend as much as you like. But business continuity can get expensive really quickly. I know of a site near me, owned by a bank. Large office, 300 machines, all Dell Precision workstations, multiple monitors etc. It is their DR site. Hopefully will never be used, but must cost them a fortune to run.
It isn't IT's place to set the DR strategy though.
The company needs to decide what they can afford, what they can tolerate. The IT department then works to that. IT rarely knows the full business continuity plan.
Simon.
As Mestha indicates, failover can be an expensive solution. It is possible to setup Exchange on a remote server and have it function as long as the remote server is a domain controller that has the GC role. There's an interesting post on how Microsoft made Exchange work in EBS in the first place. It may give you some clues.
http://blogs.technet.com/e
I'm still developing a series of DRP strategies for my EBS site and I rely on DPM 2007 for the offsite solution. I have two DPM servers. The primary runs at the main office, the secondary backs up the primary from a remote branch office. This way there are no tapes involved. There are certainly some caveats to making it all work but it is the solution recommended by Microsoft. Of course it means purchasing another server and associated software costs. With disk deduplication, this is possible without having large amounts of data going across the WAN. I beleive this is the type of solution Iron Mountain offers customers who use DPM 2007.
The problem with DRP is that you have to cover off a number of possibilites, anything from a simple hardware failure to a site permanently gone (fire, for example). Each scenario typically requires a different solution, as well. I've worked on DRP solutions for customers when I worked at IBM and what I found is you have to think about every possible failure you can encounter and design a solution based on that type of failure. Often, the solutions will overlap. It becomes a challenging and expensive process if high availability is desired, though.
I think that if availability is highly important to management, it's imperative that you run the servers on hardware that's fully redundant. For this reason, I chose an Intel Modular Server with a spare blade. This way a system board failure is the only thing that will take me down, and at that only for 10 or 15 minutes, or as long as it takes for me to disconnect the drives from the failing server and allocate them to the spare server through the management console and reboot. And best of all, I can do it from home if the board also has spare memory and processor(s) installed.
I think ultimately, you will have to use a number of backup options including using the Backup software that comes with Windows 2008. It works very well, actually. And no matter what solution or solutions are chosen, management must be involved because as Methsa says, they have to buy into the downtime expected and the costs involved to find the right solution(s).
Thanks for all your replies. I have gotten some good ideas here.
What I will do is this:
1. Buy a backup server that is of the same model as our exchange (and sharepoint server). In this way if there are any hardware error I can just swap the harddrives to the other computer and have it running with in minutes.
2. I will perform full server backups with our local DPM 2007
3. I will buy a new server that is putted on a remote server and that backup local DPM over VPN. (Thanks DNadon57 for telling me about the secondayr DPM backup. Did not know about this)
With this I then have backup for most of the scenarios that I can think of. Am I thinking right on this?
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by: MesthaPosted on 2009-10-13 at 03:33:41ID: 25558458
There is no failover.
If you want failover the EBS wasn't the solution for you.
With Exchange 2007 you have three options.
1. CCR - that requires Enterprise Edition of both Windows and Exchange.
2. DoubleTake/NeverFail et al - that will require another server
3. If you are using virtual machiens then you could look at their technology for failover.
Another option would be something like SCR to replicate the data to another server, but that isn't live failover and requires manual intervention.
You need to decide
a. How long you can be without email.
b. How much you are prepared to spend.
c. What are you planning for (loss of machine, loss of building, loss of region etc).
The longer you can be down, the cheaper it will be. You do NOT get live failover for free or very cheap.
Simon.