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Pending_Shortcu's avatar
Pending_Shortcu
Level 4
14 years ago

EV Design Question with Exchange 2010 DAG running over MAN

 

Hi guys, would like some feedback (pros/cons) of a design I'm putting together for a customer who's going to be having Exchange 2010 run in two geographical locations.
 
They have two physical locations for Exchange 2010 connected by a high-speed MAN (Metro Area Network).  Each site has 4 Exchange mailbox servers for a total of 8 servers - all of which are in the same DAG.  They want to be able to fail an Exchange DB from any server to any other server, even over the MAN.
 
I had originally designed the EV environment with two completely separate directories, one in each location, to archive just the 4 local Exchange servers, and thus generate no traffic over the MAN from archiving or journaling.  The plan was to set up an archiving task for each Exchange server in the local site, but also an archiving task for each Exchange server in the remote site in case a local Exchange database were to fail over the MAN to a remote Exchange server, we could still archive/restore from it. 
 
I then went through the "Setting up Exchange Server Archiving" guide, and saw a blurb in there that all members of a DAG must be archived by EV servers in one EV site.  I wanted to know if we carefully provisioned users in each EV directory (based on their Exchange database), so that no users would be accidentally archived by the remote EV servers in the other directory if it failed over, if we can in fact use two separate directories to process the one DAG that spans the MAN. 
 
I'm concerned that I may be missing or not thinking of a side effect of doing this.  Just wanted to find out why we need to use one EV site as per the guide, as in this case, it will generate a LOT of network traffic if we do have just one EV site processing both the local and remote Exchange servers.  I'd also like to make sure I'm not designing something that won't be supported by Symantec Support.
 
Any and all advice is appreciated.
 
Thanks
 
Dan
Best Practice
Enterprise Vault
Information Governance
IT Consultant Collaboration
  • WiTSend's avatar
    WiTSend
    14 years ago

    Since you are in a single Exchange org, plus a single DAG you really should use just one EV site.  A couple comments:

    1)  Are they using Exchange in the cached mode?  If so, and they should, then user access to archived data would be primarily on the local machine with minimal network traffic.

    2)  Alternatively, you could have a single Directory, but separate archive locations.  Here you would have an archiving server, SQL server (for VS DBs) and storage in each site.  During "normal" operations everything is separated, but in a DAG failover the archive traffice would go from the Exchange server, to the Archiving server (local) then via MSMQ to the server that hosts the respective archive(s) and on to it's index and storage.  You would still have archiving across the network during a failover situation, but not normally.

    I would probably recommend a single site, using cached OL. The amount of date being archived on a nightly basis should be within the MANs usaage levels.

     

    just my 2 cents...

  • Pending_Shortcu's avatar
    Pending_Shortcu
    Level 4
    14 years ago

    Thanks.  Yep, will be running in cached mode and they plan to use Vault Cache.

    I was hoping to design the environment where no traffic or dependencies were on the link between the sites, so option 2 will still require the remote EV servers to communicate over the MAN with the EV Directory, so if the link is down, effectively all archving and journaling stop in one of the locations.  

    Thanks for the feedback, may explore the single site, after calculating some network traffic numbers between EV and the remote Exchange servers and make sure the link can handle it.

  • WiTSend's avatar
    WiTSend
    Level 6
    14 years ago

    Since you are in a single Exchange org, plus a single DAG you really should use just one EV site.  A couple comments:

    1)  Are they using Exchange in the cached mode?  If so, and they should, then user access to archived data would be primarily on the local machine with minimal network traffic.

    2)  Alternatively, you could have a single Directory, but separate archive locations.  Here you would have an archiving server, SQL server (for VS DBs) and storage in each site.  During "normal" operations everything is separated, but in a DAG failover the archive traffice would go from the Exchange server, to the Archiving server (local) then via MSMQ to the server that hosts the respective archive(s) and on to it's index and storage.  You would still have archiving across the network during a failover situation, but not normally.

    I would probably recommend a single site, using cached OL. The amount of date being archived on a nightly basis should be within the MANs usaage levels.

     

    just my 2 cents...