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  Asked: Feb 1 2008   7:38 AM GMT
  Asked by: Mohammed Anwar

Whole IT revamp


Disaster Recovery, Exchange 2003, Exchange 2007, IT architecture

My company is planning to revamp whole IT structure. I request your advice and suggestions on how to go about it.

First let me describe the present IT structure:

country A
Forest Server with Exchange Server 2003 and services on separate servers;
domain name compnay.com

There are number of sites in that country with ADCs connected via VPN.
like dc11.company.com, dc12.company.com...........

Country B (C, D, E and so on)
New Domain Tree in an existing forest and one exchange Server;
company.co.in (co.id, co.kl and so on)

Similarly this country also has number of sites with ADCs connected via VPN / MPLS.
like dc11.company.co.in, dc12.company.co.in..........

All Exchange Servers scattered in different countries are in same Exchange organization (country A).

Now my company is planning to change IT structure as:
Esatblished new ADS in another Country say country Z as companynew.com along with new Exchange 2007 Server.

A Disaster Recover (DR) site in country Y. No more additional exchange Servers like in present scenario.

All the domains will be demoted from existing domains and promoted to new domain.

All mails from different Servers will be merged with new server.

I need advice what could be the best possible way of achieving following:
1. Creation of new site and DR site in different country including failove etc.
2. Merging e-mails from different exchange servers to one server.
3. Interconnectivity
4. Any other things which you want to share in this regard.

Your suggestion will be good for us in our implementation.

Thanks

Regards,

Anwar Zahoor

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Last Answered: Feb 1 2008  7:00 PM GMT  by Golanego




Are all of your Domains going to be under one Forest? I would create a new forest in each country and have it managed by a local LAN team. Keep the exchange servers and all critical data at Company Headquarters and have it administered by a WAN team. Have all other countries connect to the main site for email and setup VLAN VPN connections to all information stored at the HQ. Then use a SAN soultion for storage of all data. Setup a tapeless deduplication backup solution and replicate to an offsite location. Check out Netapp or EMC for SAN DR soultions. Replicate your entire Company Headquarters data center to an offsite location. As far as consolidating email...that can be tricky. Test it out in a virtual enviroment first.

Redundancy Redundancy Redundancy..
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Mohammed Anwar  |   Feb 4 2008  10:26AM GMT

Yes, there will be only one Forest. All countries will have ADCs. We are looking at a solution where secondary site will become active if there is any problem to primary site plus backup. (this is primarily for mailing and other databases)

Exchange Server will be hosted at main site, but user data will be on respective site server. To replicate those data to main site we will be using Riverbed’s Steelhead devices.

I am looking at best possible (economical) solution for having secondary site; redundacy.

 

Golanego  |   Feb 12 2008  2:54PM GMT

Depending on if your using Linux or Windows you have some options. First you need to establish a cluster (heartbeat) and aquire some kind of TCP failover software that will detect when a site goes down and automatically kick in the secondary site. EMC and Netapp have good solutions. Other companies offer out of the box cluster/failover/replication solutions. check out google and see what fits.

I would also recommed that you setup Round Robin DNS so that you can have multiple incomming connections accessing all of the hosts in your cluster. That way if one server goes down, or one site goes down, your clients wont notice….accept for performance. Establish static routes with encrypted VLANS to all of your sites and use Round Robin and clustering. I believe that would be the most economical. A CCNA should be able to configure that without any problems.

 

Mohammed Anwar  |   Mar 13 2008  4:20AM GMT

Thanks Golanego. I understood your suggestion, but I am not a CCNA.

That is the server and network part. Now:
How to merge all e-mails (from different Exchange 2003 Servers) in to a new exchange 2007 Server?
Is there a better way of uplinking all PCs to new domain keeping current profile intact? We have around 2000 PCs (profiles) per country. If not then it will be a daunting task.

 

Buddyfarr  |   Mar 13 2008  5:20PM GMT

if you setup connections between your existing exchange servers and the new one you should be able to migrate the mailboxes over to the new server with no issues.

 

Mohammed Anwar  |   Apr 7 2008  6:11PM GMT

Buddyfarr, I am not sure how both the exchange can be connected. New Exchange will be in a new domain with new organization name and I don’t know how both can talk on AD level. May be by establishing forest trust, but I am sorry I have not done it before. Can someone put some light on after forest trusting how to establish exchange level conection for mailbox transfer?