Exchange 2003 Cluster or Not

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tmentzel - 15 Nov 2005 20:56 GMT

We have the opportunity to either purchase 2 - 2850 Dell servers to connect
to a fiber SAN and use clustering or go with a larger 6850 Dell server using
the EMC Storage Administrator for Exchange (which has the abilty to move a
Storage Group to another standby 1850 Dell server should the 6850 crash).
We are a small College with about 5000 mailboxes.

What would you do?

Thanks for any input.

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Thomas Mentzel
Systems Administrator
Goucher College

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Bharat Suneja - 15 Nov 2005 22:50 GMT

Depending on what your requirements are....

- Clustering can provide you higher up time, if that's what you're
interested in. In return, it increases the complexity of your environment up
a few notches as far as setup is concerned, but not a whole lot for
operations.
- There will be some learning to do (like don't shut down Exchange services
from the services console... amongst other stuff), but if you want to be
able to do maintenance in the middle of the day without the users (on
Outlook 2003 cached mode) really noticing the 30 seconds - 1 or 2 minutes of
failover time, go for it!
- BTW, EMC Storage Admin for Exchange is not really meant for larger
environments. ("... ideally suited for customers with up to 3000
mailboxes").
- Not sure how long it takes to move Storage Groups to another server, EMC
says it "... takes minutes". I'm fairly certain it'll take longer than a EVS
failover in a cluster.

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Bharat Suneja
MCSE, MCT
www.zenprise.com
blog: www.suneja.com/blog
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> We have the opportunity to either purchase 2 - 2850 Dell servers to
> connect
[quoted text clipped - 7 lines]
>
> Thanks for any input.

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