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Exchange 2010 SP1 Disaster Recovery between sites with vRanger Replication or DAG
Hi there,
Recently our organisation implemented Exchange 2010 SP1 and we are now looking at ways to provide mail availability to our customers if there is a disaster at our primary site.
A bit of backgroud and information on our infrastructure.
We have two sites, a primary side (head office) and a data centre both on different subnets. There are no users at the datacentre... it's our DMZ and we just rent rack space there. The internet comes into our cata centre and the Primary Site (head office) is connected by a 10Mbit WAN link.
The environment is virtual with both sites running vSphere 4.0 and we also have a SAN at each site. We want to leverage our datacentre for disaster recovery so have created a second Windows Server 2003 domain controller out there with global catalog on a trusted VLAN outside of the DMZ network. We've also implemented vRanger 5.0 Backup and Replication and are now successfully replicating most of our critical VMs using change block tracking and active block mapping.
When it comes to our new 1 server Exchange setup (MB,HT,CAS), I'd been looking at the idea of replicating the whole server to the data centre using VSS with guest quiescing to ensure database consitency. Changes to the exchange VM would then be replicated each night to the datatcentre so in the event of a disaster, we just disconnect the link between the two sites, make neccessary changes to firewall / DNS and power up the replica then set new IP. For failback we would be replicating from the replica VM in the data centre to a second replica at head office (after failback the second replica would be powered on and not the original production exchange server) I haven't found an example of someone who has done this before so would be happy to know if it's possible since this is the option where we don't need to purchase an exchange licence.
The second option is to look at setting up a 2 member DAG betwen the sites with DAC enabled My understanding is that it involves purchasing an exchange licence.
Which option sounds like the best solution?
My manager is reluctant to buy the Exchange licence for DAG especially if vRanger does the job for Exchange DR.
Sorry about the long question.. i wanted to make sure I covered off everything and hopefully you have a clear picture of what we are trying to do.
Looking forward to your responses...
Recently our organisation implemented Exchange 2010 SP1 and we are now looking at ways to provide mail availability to our customers if there is a disaster at our primary site.
A bit of backgroud and information on our infrastructure.
We have two sites, a primary side (head office) and a data centre both on different subnets. There are no users at the datacentre... it's our DMZ and we just rent rack space there. The internet comes into our cata centre and the Primary Site (head office) is connected by a 10Mbit WAN link.
The environment is virtual with both sites running vSphere 4.0 and we also have a SAN at each site. We want to leverage our datacentre for disaster recovery so have created a second Windows Server 2003 domain controller out there with global catalog on a trusted VLAN outside of the DMZ network. We've also implemented vRanger 5.0 Backup and Replication and are now successfully replicating most of our critical VMs using change block tracking and active block mapping.
When it comes to our new 1 server Exchange setup (MB,HT,CAS), I'd been looking at the idea of replicating the whole server to the data centre using VSS with guest quiescing to ensure database consitency. Changes to the exchange VM would then be replicated each night to the datatcentre so in the event of a disaster, we just disconnect the link between the two sites, make neccessary changes to firewall / DNS and power up the replica then set new IP. For failback we would be replicating from the replica VM in the data centre to a second replica at head office (after failback the second replica would be powered on and not the original production exchange server) I haven't found an example of someone who has done this before so would be happy to know if it's possible since this is the option where we don't need to purchase an exchange licence.
The second option is to look at setting up a 2 member DAG betwen the sites with DAC enabled My understanding is that it involves purchasing an exchange licence.
Which option sounds like the best solution?
My manager is reluctant to buy the Exchange licence for DAG especially if vRanger does the job for Exchange DR.
Sorry about the long question.. i wanted to make sure I covered off everything and hopefully you have a clear picture of what we are trying to do.
Looking forward to your responses...
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just put outlook on a system if you don't have it or create a VM at the other site with windows 7 on it. If testing exchange you'll need a domain controller to come up as well and pont exchange to it if it's not the first one on the list already.
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