3 schools 3 exchange servers 1 email address

[spacevortex]

I’m trying to work out if this is possible, and rather than spend hours doing trial and error, I thought the best thing would be to ask for some advice....

 

Here is my scenario

We have 3 schools = 3 domains all with exchange servers and trusts between the sites.

School A = Exchange 2007

School B = Exchange 2007

School C = Exchange 2010

 

A new domain is to be purchased

Example mydomain.net

 

Requirements: All staff on all 3 sites will need to receive the new domain as there new email address. [email protected]

Should I be creating something like a cross forest connector?

I have started halfway down this cross forest solution but then ran into problems that have added doubt that there might be another way, or possibly easier way..

[Netwacky87]

Exchange Cluster? I havent got my test server infront of me but isnt that an option....

[featured_spectre]

Exchange cluster is the way forward...that or setting up so that it doesn't delete the message off the domain server (and just up the space of each inbox, delete messages if they are 3 months old, job done)

[ChrisMiles]

I've done something similar to this recently. Assuming that mail coming in from outside to one of the servers, its easy enough to accomplish with an Internal Relay domain and Send Connectors for each server (on each of the servers).

 

With 3 servers you can create a primary and secondary delivery loop, in case one server is taken down. So...

 

On server1 configure a connector for server2 with a cost of 1 and a connector for server 3 with a cost of 2.

On server2 configure a connector for server3 with a cost of 1 and a connector for server 1 with a cost of 2.

On server3 configure a connector for server1 with a cost of 1 and a connector for server 2 with a cost of 2.

 

This setup will obviously mean that some internal mails must pass through all 3 servers, if for example you sent a mail from server1 to server3 it would go through server2, but this shouldnt be a problem.

 

E-mails sent to addresses that none of the servers recognise will go round in a loop a couple of times and then return to sender with a mail loop error, but thats about the only downside (its a non-issue for me).

[Netwacky87]

If you had an exchange cluster then at least if one mail server was down, people in that school could still access their emails, bit of failover and redundancy. That being said @ChrisMiles I like your work - That will also work.

[spacevortex]

Thanks everyone

Chrismiles your explanation is exactly what I was trying to achieve.

I didn’t want to complicate my post, but to give you the background this is really only a temporary solution as we were in the process of setting up a new domain but with massive amounts of IT hardware to now implement we have had to put our single domain on hold. Once everything has settled down come sometime after November 2012, we will then have our single domain and exchange server 2010 with possible DAG.

this solution allows us to keep the current exchange servers and accounts... thanks

 

question: I may be back with another question shortly, as having tried something similar i did get an error about legacy and it would not setup the email address policy. but i will need to replicate that arror again.....

[sukh]

Internal relay domain would do, but maybe you should host the Exch server for all 3 schools in on location or a DAG across all 3 schools. Confiure a resource deployment of Exch or configure OA for the other schools so they can connect to the main Exch server. Redeuce some costs for hardware required for all 3 schools.