high availability for Exchnage Servers

As far as I know, the only "high availability" support for Exchange is a cluster.

Of course, it depends on what you mean by "high availability" - a properly configured Exchange server running v5.5 SP3 or above on appropriate hardware can deliver excellent uptime. A total downtime of a couple hours per year is achievable.

paul

What size is your company?

Clustering is good for Enterprise environments. The standard configuration I recommend to clients (small to medium sized companies) looking for good hardware reliability, is a server with a drive mirror for NT and Exchange system files, and 2 raid 5 drive sets for Exchange logs, and databases. An online spare drive is also a good idea. The server should have an array controller, and redundant power supplies connected to a large UPS. Dual network cards configured with fail-over.

Hope this gives you some idea.
Regards.
Duwane

Please do yourself a favour and do not cluster Exchange 5.5. Whereas it might give you a slight increase in reliability, it generally isn't worth the pain. Recovery and troubleshooting on a clustered Exchange server is horribly difficult.

Depends on your definition of "high availability".
Our SLA's say that we can't have a server down for more than 6 minutes in a year.
Here is how we do it...
We do not cluster. We have a hot spare just sitting there and we physically move the hard drives over to the hot spare if it goes down.
Or you can bring up another server with a blank database very quickly and restore the old one at your leisure.
But, it you have the money- go with clustering.

Good luck
Damon

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