On May 30, 2006, at 9:03 PM, Browning, David wrote:

Stan -

We do MS Exchange clusters here, but since it's fairly new, I'm still learning.

We have a 4 node, soon to be 5 node cluster for our Exchange servers. The servers are named (not real names) EXCH1 - EXCH5. Each node/server has control of its own database. There is another node that can take over if once of the other nodes fail. All of this is on a SAN.

Exch1 - configure as Windows backup, but don't forget to add Exch2, 3, 4, and 5 in the remote access in the Networker GUI.

Exch1 - configure it for MSEXCH: (we default to all databases, you can name them individually if so desired).

Repeat for each node name. However, I'm not sure how you are configured - active/passive, or active/active, so there might be some minor differences. For example, if you have a 2 node client sharing the data, and EXCH1 is the active server, it would backup the EXCHANGE database(s). EXCH2 would only backup the database if it became the active node.

It can be confusing, but once you are used to it, it's pretty straight forward. We just did an Exch5.5 to 2003 upgrade with the cluster, and it went well, all things considered, and having the cluster really helps keep the system up. Of course, I'm not the Exchange guru, we have a group of guys for that, I just make sure they get good backups.

We are going with an active/passive configuration. Thanks.

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