Forum Discussion

Deepak_Kumar's avatar
15 years ago
Solved

EV planning for DR site...

Hi All,

I have installed & configured EV 8.0 environment with Microsoft clustering for Exchange Mailbox & Journaling Archiving & its working fine.
Now I have to install & configure the DR site for that EV.

We are using Exchange 2007 & DR site has already configured with Exchange 2007.

Can someone suggest me what should be my next step for the EV ? Mean I'll have to create new EV site or will use existing site.
While EV configuration which Exchange server need to add in the targets.
How policies will work for that site ?

These are my problem to start this activity. Can some plz provide me any doc which can help me to understand the EV for  DR environment.

Experts please suggest me...


Thanks in advance

Deepak 


  • Seeing as the site is a DR site and I assume it is not LAN connected the best option would be to use Building Blocks which you can find the details of n your Administrators guide.

    Just to note that Building Blocks is not an automatic fail over it requires manual intervention but it is the best solution for DR to a remote location


    If you are lucky enough to have the option of having new hardware that supports FCoE (Fiber Channel over Ethernet) then you could do VCS or MSCS but this tech is so new little hardware supports it to date
  • Hi,

    Thanks for the information.
    But I have a problem that because of the little knowledge of EV I did not created the Alias entry in DNS for both EV servers, I just created Alias entry for the cluster name.
    Is this can be problem for me ?

    Thanks

    Deepak
  • Deepak

    Building Blocks is a process EV uses to perform DR in case of failure. Basically you have an EV server that is idle and in the case of a failure you make a change on your DNS to point the EV server alias to the DR server then the DR server takes over the EV processing.


    Info on this can be found in the Admin guide for EV and also in the installing and configuring guide. Both of which are included in the documentation that is packaged with your EV source files

  • Provided everything was configured using DNS aliases then yes, you can simply repoint the alias and everything should hang together nicely. You might need to recycle the EV services but if you are using Building Blocks then you will need to do that anyway when you run Update Service Location
  • Hi Scanner,

    Thanx for ur valueable reply.

    I don't understand what is the meaning of Building Blocks. Yes you are right it will on WAN.
    Can you please explain me or provide any document regarding building blocks technology ?


    Thanks in advance

    Deepak

  • Back to your question. We are planning on binary only servers for our DR site. So the whole thing would be a n+m setup, where m are the binary only DR servers. At the moment is an active/active setup for production.
  • I'm also curious about this. the way I understand building blocks, all archive storage should be NAS, which would use a DNS alias as well. in our case, this NAS will have its own replication mechanism to the DR location. If using building blocks,  can I just update the NAS alias to point to the DR NAS device?

    I'm really dissapointed at the lack of documentation available for the public with regards of using building blocks. even on these forums...
  • Out of interest - what's everyone doing for a building blocks failover?  Do you have a binary install only server ready for configuration or do you have a semi-configured install but with no actual tasks/Archives created.


    Binary only would seem the better option to minimise upgrade hassle, but semi-configured would at least show that the server is running ok

    Cheers,
    Si
  • Seeing as the site is a DR site and I assume it is not LAN connected the best option would be to use Building Blocks which you can find the details of n your Administrators guide.

    Just to note that Building Blocks is not an automatic fail over it requires manual intervention but it is the best solution for DR to a remote location


    If you are lucky enough to have the option of having new hardware that supports FCoE (Fiber Channel over Ethernet) then you could do VCS or MSCS but this tech is so new little hardware supports it to date