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  • #2089607

    Exchange Failover Capabilities

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    by bryan ·

    My company currently has two Exchange 5.5 SP4 servers running, both are in the same org and site and running on WinNT 4.0 SP6a machines. My problem is that I want to be able to replicate mailboxes, distribution lists, and mail to the second Exchange server so that I can easily failover to the second Exchange machine by simply swapping IP’s between the two machines. I thought this was the main advantage to having a backup in the same site as your production machine but I can’t get the replication to work and if I try to do an export/import it doesn’t create any mailboxes or distribution lists on the backup machine. Am I doing something wrong? Do I need to configure something that isn’t configured? Is it possible to get full failover capabilities between two Exchange servers? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

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    • #3813937

      Exchange Failover Capabilities

      by rcc ·

      In reply to Exchange Failover Capabilities

      Hi
      You need clustering support and Exchange Enterprise edition to do that. Exchange DOESN’T HAVE built-in fail-over for this. You better have a look at the software features…
      Changing the IP address will not help much, you will need to changethe NETBIOS name or change all your clients to point to the new server.
      Regards,
      Radu
      Regards,
      Radu

    • #3813805

      Exchange Failover Capabilities

      by mckaytech ·

      In reply to Exchange Failover Capabilities

      I agree with the answer already given – there is no elegant way to fail-over an Exchange server unless you are running an Exchange cluster.

      The main advantage to having a second server in a site is simply that of balancing out the workload. Mailboxes are easily moved between servers in a site so workload and storage capacity can be easily shifted to respond to trends in utilization. It is also possible to replicate public folders for added performance and redundancy, but it doesn’t work that way for individual mailboxes because of the addressing and routing scheme.

      Even if you were able to accomplish and maintain full duplication (unlikely), in the event of a failure, ALL of the clients would have to be re-directed to the new server and even then, if it was the first server in the site that failed, some connectors and other components would be missing (there are some pieces that only install on the first server in the site).

      Your best bet for disaster recovery would be to have a spare server already built so you could just transfer the databases and bring it up under the old IP address and server name.

      I would love to be able to tell you otherwise, but what you’re trying to do is just not a feasible plan with the product as it now exists.

      paul

    • #3812442

      Exchange Failover Capabilities

      by bryan ·

      In reply to Exchange Failover Capabilities

      This question was closed by the author

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