EV8 In Place Upgrade from Single Server to Cluster

[tiapc]

Does anyone have experience of migrating an EV server from being a single box to a clustered resource?

I have found the following article: http://seer.entsupport.symantec.com/docs/293911.htm which seems to be relatively straightforward, but makes little mention of clustering.

Details of our current setup:

Dell Poweredge 1950. 8Gb RAM, 2Ghz Quad Core Proc. 3,964 Active Archives, 7,730,000 Total Items, Total size 488Gb

This runs fine as it stands, but we wish to gain additional redundancy, and clustering appears to be the best way to do this. We have inherited another companies EV, so the final plan is to merge all Exchange and EV to one site (ours), but for the moment wish to give ourselves a solid system to work with. The other site is of a similiar size.

I realise I can't do an in-place server upgrade (it's running 2003 Std anyway) so plan to setup 2 new servers, with Server 2008R2 and point them at the currently used storage of the current EV server. Any other comments or discoveries from real-word scenarios would be welcome.

[Chai]

Hi tiapc, I don't see any issue with this.. Rather have you the the installation working on 2008R2 as standalone and then do the covert to cluster

[ZeRoC00L]

If you setup the new environment with EV8.0 SP4 or EV9.0 you can use the move archive wizard so you can have your current setup in place and move mailbox archives one by one.

[tiapc]

Thats interesting- I hadn't considered that before. Is there a whitepaper that discusses this process you're aware of? My only concern is what would happen with the EV sitename when its converted.. Could I use the existing one, or would I have to choose a new one once converted? I'm thinking of what changes would have to be rolled out to the clients via Ev policies- and trying to minimise them as far as possible.

Thanks