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…

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.