Setting up an Exchange 2003 cluster

I'm going to be a part of an Exchange 2003 cluster installation soon and I was wondering if anybody had done this themselves in the past? I've got quite a bit of theory in how to implement this, but if somebody could direct me to a step-by-step guide as to how to deploy this properly, that would be great!

From what i've seen so far...

* 2 network cards in each Server. One for heartbeat/cluster transmission, the other for standard Network traffic.

* Enterprise Windows 2003 AND Enterprise Exchange 2003

* Forestprep has to be run if Exchange hasn't been on the domain before?

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mr2nut

Back to my original point of posting, what hardware do you reckomend for a simple 2 node cluster purely for Exchange high availability then? We normally use HP Server (mainly ML350) for small businesses so this is a different step for me now.

If you have a standard setup for quite a small business for this situation, if you could post exactly which Servers and what make/model of shared storage to go for that would be really helpful.

royal

mr2nut wrote:

Back to my original point of posting, what hardware do you reckomend for a simple 2 node cluster purely for Exchange high availability then? We normally use HP Server (mainly ML350) for small businesses so this is a different step for me now.

If you have a standard setup for quite a small business for this situation, if you could post exactly which Servers and what make/model of shared storage to go for that would be really helpful.

If you use CCR you can use internal storage or external DAS on each node. If you use SCC you need to use shared storage which can be external DAS (need to check with manufacturer if it supports shared storage/clustering or it can be SAN.

Whichever you choose to use is based on features, performance, and price.

mr2nut

http://www.eggheadcafe.com/software/aspnet/31590225/exchange-2007--ccr-or-sc.aspx

From reading the above link, CCR is the way to go for a small 2-node setup and it's cheaper, easier to setup. Where in the setup of clustering do you tell it to use CCR over the other ones?

mr2nut

I'm not even sure the company will want to go for this now as they're looking at a fair whack of cash for 2 copies of enterprise windows and exchange, 2 servers and the iSCSI box plus setup costs, it ain't going to be cheap is it!

We were going to use the ML350 HP Servers and according to google, they would work fine for a CCR Exchange Cluster. And I found this iSCSI box, I assume this would be fine?

http://www.bizrate.co.uk/harddrives/oid594052202.html

royal

Need to make sure it supports shared storage.

Check out:
http://www.shudnow.net/2008/04/28/exchange-2007-sp1-scc-using-server-2008-starwind-iscsi-part-4/

You can see the cluster installations steps for Exchange 2007.

ladiesman217

a lot to learn from this post.

I have nothing to say but i need to mark this by replying, I wonder how would i bookmark a thread. Theres a link at the top that says "bookmark" but I can't find that feature.

mr2nut

There certainly is, it's helped me a great deal. Cheers for all the detailed replies guys

dynamik

ladiesman217 wrote:

a lot to learn from this post.

I have nothing to say but i need to mark this by replying, I wonder how would i bookmark a thread. Theres a link at the top that says "bookmark" but I can't find that feature.

Under "New Topic" and "Reply" there's a link to "Bookmark Topic". You can access your bookmarks by following the "Bookmarks" link up at the top, next to "Search" and "Memberlist". You can always just bookmark it in your browser, delicious, etc. It's hard to keep track of a lot of bookmarks with this site's bookmarking feature.

mr2nut

Another question (suprise suprise!)

Do you only need 1 SCSI card in each node, so you have your OS drive on one port, then the RAID disks on the others? Or do you need 2 seperate SCSI cards in each Server, 1 for OS then the other for the cluster RAID?

Also, does this have to be downloaded onto BOTH cluster nodes and installed before starting the whole process if I decide to use iSCSI?

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=12cb3c1a-15d6-4585-b385-befd1319f825&DisplayLang=en

mr2nut

http://computers.pricegrabber.co.uk/network-storage-devices/m/76769069/

Would this iSCSI box cut it also?

dynamik

mr2nut wrote:

Another question (suprise suprise!)

Do you only need 1 SCSI card in each node, so you have your OS drive on one port, then the RAID disks on the others? Or do you need 2 seperate SCSI cards in each Server, 1 for OS then the other for the cluster RAID?

It depends on the card. Most I've seen have internal and external connections, so you could probably get by with one card.

mr2nut wrote:

Also, does this have to be downloaded onto BOTH cluster nodes and installed before starting the whole process if I decide to use iSCSI?

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=12cb3c1a-15d6-4585-b385-befd1319f825&DisplayLang=en

You'll need it to connect to your iSCSI target. I guess you could do whatever you can before you get to that point without it. Why does it matter?

mr2nut wrote:

http://computers.pricegrabber.co.uk/network-storage-devices/m/76769069/

Would this iSCSI box cut it also?

A VM running OpenFiler would probably "cut it" for you. It's up to you to figure out the right balance of performance, cost, etc.

mr2nut

Cool, gotcha. I have now set up a test lab. I understand that the Exchange databases need to be held on the external shared storage, but how do you install Exchange? Do you run Exchange setup from any node in the Cluster, and install the whole lot to the shared storage, or does some of the install go on one of the nodes and just the databases go on the shared storage?

dynamik

You should go back and read that first link I posted. This is one of the subsections: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb123865(EXCHG.65).aspx