DR for MSCS

[Rocketball]

All -

We are trying to come up with a DR solution for our production EV Cluster (2 + 1) site with Exchange 2010. Our SLA affords us to manually fail over. We have

Site A -

    ServerA - Journaling Server

    ServerB - Archiving Server

     ServerC - Standby Cluster node

Couple of questions -

1. Can we failover only 1 server (Journaling) and not the archiving server to the DR site?

2. If we use the USL (No clustering in DR site), do we just change the alias for Journaling server? Wouldn't it have issues with the MSCS alias names, etc..

What is the best recommended solution?

[Rocketball]

Additional issue which I did not mention with USl is once we want to failback over to the primary site, wouldn't have any an issue if we had non-clustering solution in the DR Site?

I would appreciate any responses - thanks.

[WiTSend · Accepted solution]

Using USL for DR failover is quite common, even with clustered primary servers.  Hopefully your DNS alias is not the same as your cluster node alias, but a CNAME that is pointed to the cluster node.

 Failing back is essentially the same process.  Caution on the failing back would be around ensuring that the data written in the failover state is replicated back to the original storage to maintain integrity of the indexes and vault stores/archives.

[Dushan_Gomez]

Which version of EV is this that supports MSCS Failover clustering technology ?