We have 4 global clusters connecting Production to DR site .
Production site :
- Journaling – 2 nodes (active+Passive) replicating index and EV databases to the DR site (SRDF+Centera)
- FileServer Archiving - 2 nodes (active+Passive) replicating index and EV databases to the DR site (SRDF+Centera)
- Maixbox Archiving – 4 nodes (3+1) replicating index and EV databases to the DR site (SRDF+Centera)
- SQL - 2 nodes (active+Passive) replicating SQL databases to the DR site (SRDF)
DR site :
- Same configuration of Production site
At this point, all Production site solution is already implemented and working fine and we are almost concluding the DR site implementation.
There is one component that is being an extra challenge to us: the EV Journaling Server that was selected to host the Directory Service at the very beginning of this project.
During the clustering process for the other EV components of the solution on the DR site (Mail archiving and FileServer archiving), the Directory service on production site (more specifically in the EV Journaling server) remained online because EV Journaling was online, so when we ran the wizard in order to cluster those EV servers, the Directory service was available and we faced no problem at all.
When doing the intervention on the EV Journaling environment we need to put offline the virtual name and all other resources for EV Journaling on the production site because we have to bring it online on the DR site. As the EV server that is running the directory service will be offline during this process, we were instructed by someone from BCS to change the Site Alias in DNS to point to any of the other Lanman resources, either a FSA or a mailbox archiving server’s alias. In this manner we could leave the Production instances of everything other than journaling up and running, and have not only a Directory service to use when configuring the failover nodes for Journal archiving, but also a machine (any machine) to answer to requests made for the Site Alias, or we could review the local HOSTS file on each EV server to temporarily.
We decided to move forward with the HOSTs file strategy but it did not work as expected. We were not able to conclude the process started by the wizard for the EV cluster agent. We already tried uninstalling and reinstalling EV a dozen of different ways and now we are getting an error saying that the virtual name for the EV Journaling already exists (see file attached).
We would need your assistance to:
- Understand if we are following the right way to redirect the Directory Service reference (using HOSTS file)
- Moving the Directory Service from the Journaling server a FSA server or a Mail Archiving Server.
Thank you very much,
Leandro Dalcero
