Kissel-B
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Exchange backup or Secondary MX server
I am looking to put a Secondary MX server offsite. We have frequent power outages and we are a small company so we have no backup generator. The UPS’ only last so long. I have been looking into putting a Secondary MX record that would point to a off-site exchange to cache the mail if the primary was offline we have a DAG currently setup but all the info I have seen say a backup server with a higher MX value is very easy to spam and spammers will regularly send SPAM to it. My question is can I do spam filtering on the backup server just like the CAS server does or can I set it up for when the primary site comes back up the mail will be delivered to the CAS server so it can be filtered? Any ideas would be great. I am currently on Exchange 2010
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Marco,
Are they at the same location or are each at a different site. I could do that I was just not sure how well the fail-over would work
Are they at the same location or are each at a different site. I could do that I was just not sure how well the fail-over would work
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Good suggestions offered.
I routinely run a pair of Exchange servers on a customer's site in a DAG with each server having an MX record, often with the same priority. They both have a decided public IP and port 25 opened to them from the outside world. The SPAM thing on secondary servers is mostly bogus. There is absolutely no reason to have a less adequate anti-spam on a second server. You wouldn't run it without an anti-virus system so why would you run it without the same anti-spam protection as the primary.
To be honest, the comment about not having a secondary server any more I feel is misleading. If it were true, why doesn't Google only have one MX record instead of five? The BBC has two, Microsoft.com only has one but it is a round-robin DNS entry.
If spam is an issue, you can use an external gateway that filters "in the cloud", and then uses transport rules to deliver the mail. Some are clever enough that you can even specify different transport rules for different email recipients, so you can use their system to send email to the right server instead of it being done at the Exchange end.