Exchange 2007 Server Setup

Okay, well, I have my two new servers setup. I setup Microsoft Windows Server 2003 R2 SP2 x64 on each system. Now here comes the fun; to cluster, or not to cluster? The thing is, to have a true clustered exchange environment you apparently need three systems. On top of those three systems, you need to have an edge transport server for SMTP handling. I only have two new systems, and one older system for the edge transport. I have to figure out how this has to be taken care of. We need full redundancy and availability – we can’t afford to have exchange go down after it did so for four days.

We would be in hot water if this new system went down in the future.

New Exchange Servers

For those of you that know me, you are aware that my companies Exchange 2003 server went down hard about a week ago.  I was finally able to get Dell to finalize a quote today, and our order is in. 

I configured two Dell PowerEdge 2950 III’s with RAID1/RAID5.  Faster 15k rpm drives for the OS, in a RAID 1 array, and slower 10k rpm drives configured in a RAID 5 array for VSS functions.

We purchased 9 Fibre SCSI hard drives for our Hitachi SAN, operating at 4gbps and with a capacity of 300GB each.  I am going to set these up in RAID 5, and use this array for Exchanges primary edb/log file location. 

The servers local array will be used for Exchange 2007′s VSS.  That is, Exchange can keep shadow copies, and or track changes to the database for recovery operations should the main array fail.  The two PowerEdge 2950 III’s will also be setup in a cluster, both via the OS and Exchange.

I can’t wait…

Purpose

This was in response to one of my professor’s at college, whome I emailed this to later on in the day…

“You asked “Why do we call this chair a chair?”  You then said we call
that chair a chair because of it’s purpose.

You should have asked “What *defines* this as a chair?”

The definition of purpose is the reason why something exists.  It
doesn’t make any sense to say “This chair exists because it is a
chair…”

However, if you said “What defines this as a chair?”, then it would
have made good sense to respond “purpose.”

The best question would have been “What defines this for what it is?”
This way people don’t get stuck on the name, as they should be stuck
on it’s meaning.”

Happiness

The reason people find it so hard to be happy is that they always see the past better than it was, the present worse than it is, and the future less resolved than it will be.

Attitudes

The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life. Attitude, to me, is more important than facts. It is more important than the past, the education, the money, than circumstances, than failure, than successes, than what other people think or say or do. It is more important than appearance, giftedness or skill. It will make or break a company… a church… a home. The remarkable thing is we have a choice everyday regarding the attitude we will embrace for that day. We cannot change our past… we cannot change the fact that people will act in a certain way. We cannot change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude. I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% of how I react to it. And so it is with you… we are in charge of our Attitudes.

Site-5 Hosting

I was using IX-WebHosting for my hosting needs, until one day they lost my data.  I am having dscjax.com rebuilt by my web developer, and it should be done soon.  The domain transfer is still pending, so I can’t really check its progress until that is complete.  I did change the dscjax.com DNS server’s to Site5′s, but that too is a slow moving process.

The Laborant!

Welcome to the laborant.  I have opened a new hosting account with Site5, and registered this domain for blogging, and testing purposes.  I decided that blogging on myspace was pointless, as the features are lacking, and almost no one uses that for blogging.