I need to spec up a pair of servers and a shared disk array to run an Exchange 2007 cluster.

Does anyone here have any experience of this and can recommend some suitable Dell toys?

I know we'll need an advance server licence for each server in the cluster and an exchange server licence for each machine as well.

Any hints and tips from people who have been there and done this?

We have recently bought a Dell Power Edge 1950

Find a Notebook, Desktop, Server, Printer, Software, Service or Monitor at Dell.

I can have a look tommorrow for the paper work if you want to know what we paid and the full spec ?

It's more a case of knowing which of their servers and external disk arrays will work happily together rather than specific prices.

It's more a case of knowing which of their servers and external disk arrays will work happily together rather than specific prices.

:confused::confused:Thats "gobaldy-goup" to me:confused::confused:

Havent a clue sorry.

Slightly OT, but why stick with a traditional cluster and not go CCR on exchange? (if you don't mind me asking)

Slightly OT, but why stick with a traditional cluster and not go CCR on exchange? (if you don't mind me asking)

Because I've not had chance to read anything about exchange 2007 and didn't know such a feature existed

Because I've not had chance to read anything about exchange 2007 and didn't know such a feature existed

ok then want me to send over some info for you Alex, if possible it's the way to go with Exch2K7, the briefest explanation I can give is that it is essentially replicating and replaying transaction log files from server A to server B and vice versa (if needed), both are "live" exchange servers running MB server roles but through CCR maintain copies of each other's mail stores.

There is a lot more to it than that as you can imagine, but that's a quick explanation, it's uncle Bills prefered method for fault tolerance with 2k7. You can do something similar in a single server envirnment with LCR essentially it's database mirroring onto a second set of disks, where as CCR is essentially database mirroring onto a second platform.

Yes , anything you can send over would be handy.

At the mo we have just a single plain Exchange 2003 machine and the people in charge have decide that we should have some redundancy. Obviously I'm happy to spend money on new toys and we masy as well upgrade to the newest Exchange

can you pm me your mail address, I will email a couple of links and bit's and bob's over.

I have some virtual server images of exchange2k7 that are activated and a good tool to play with in the short term if your interested? Will need to be a DVD sent out to you though .... they are a tad large for an attachment

Just as a quicky for you to glance over......

High Availability

Lots of stuff has changed now as I am pretty certain your aware of, it's now using a role based model, 64bit, and there is the powershell, the strange thing is that MS have given 100% admin functionality to the shell and only around 80% top the GUI so if your a good old MS stormtrooper like myself, you find yourself in unfamiliar territory for a while with so much CLI in the shell. But once you get used to it, it is a fantastic addition

At my previous company we used Exchange 2k3 with software called doubletake to provide redundancy and mirroring.. the DBs and logfiles are mirrored at byte level across the LAN.

In a failover situation the secondary server would start all the relevent services, mount the DBs and then re-assign the mailboxes in AD to the new exchange box (as well as taking the IP address for the primary box)

Its almost seamless failing over.. but failing back does require downtime to copy the secondary DBs back over to the primary.. the benifit is you dont need specific shared storage... doubletake was also used to provide mirroring for the NAS and also in HA sql/IIS frontend servers... all of this was done using standard DL360/380 hardware and gbit lan.

Comparitively speaking.. the clusters we use in my new place of employment are ****e and have to be failed over every morning to maintain performance

just my twopenneth as a relative M$ n00b compared to you two

The way I've done it in the past (albeit with HP DL servers) was using a pair of DL380 (360 or 365 would be sufficient) and a MSA5000 RAID storage box which comes with dual SCSI connection - one to each node (fibre is available as an option).

Only thing you need then is at the software level - WS2003 Enterprise to support clustering.

But this CCR does sound like a more advanced and efficient / economical way of doing things

But this CCR does sound like a more advanced and efficient / economical way of doing things

it certainly is mate, and couple that to a 64bit platform and (propaganda hat on) and the advanced scheduling, calendaring and resource management it really is quite special.

It's got to sit on W2K3 (R2 ideally) 64bit edition but it rips along at a fair old pace, is more reliable and less resource intensive than Exchange 2k3................. unlike Vista which is still resembling something that you may find in the litter tray from Bengies cat