Exchange 2007

[faza]

I have a Exchange 2007 server and I would like to implement a system that would backup the server. there is one way by using the backupo facility with server 2003 backing up the first storage group etc...

Would having another server synchronising with the main server be the solution. How would I implement this?

Faza

[zag]

I backup with backupexec. Just select the exchange store.

Do it once a week and seems to work pretty well.

[faza]

We are a split site school. So having the fail over server would be advantageous.

[zag]

I run 2 servers here but keep the second one switched off most of the time. Its ready to be restored from our backupexec jobs if the other one fails.

[Ric_]

@faza: I think that to do what you are after would require some kind of clustering. For failover you might be better off virtualising it and using a solution with HA (e.g. XenServer).

[faza]

How easy would clustering be? Thats what i would like a mirror image of server 1 on server 2.

[Zimmer]

Clustering with Exch2007 is really easy to be honest.

Have you thought about server roles yet? Client Access, Hub Transport and Mailbox servers all need to be taken into consideration.

We currently have our Mailbox servers clustered on Server 2008 Enterprise boxes, four physical servers that form a two cluster environment. One for staff and another for students, with a cluster member in each of the two server rooms with have on site (for maximum fail over).

If your going to cluster Exch2007 consider SAN storage too, and don't forget about dedicated 'heartbeats' between the cluster members.

If your going to go down the Exch2007 route then clustering is the future if you have the budget to do it!

We also use Veritas Backup Exec to backup our mailboxes, not a bad word to say about Backup Exec, we have always been very happy with the product. For the actual mail server OS backup we simply use NT Backup, or as it is called in 2008 now 'Server Backup' to capture the system state.

[IanT]

Backup Exec will do this job, there is a cool feature in 2007 to have the exchange database replicate to another server.....