Dear all,
I try to describe the given situation and the desired outcome as clearly as possible.
We made a transition from Exchange 2003 to 2010. Now we got one physical machine with all roles including the Anti-Spam features but w/o edge role installed. 130 mailboxes on it. Everything is running smoothly.
We have purchased a second machine one year later now to get some redundancy. The ideal output would be a 'clone' of the current system. Manual DNS switching in case of a failure would be just fine - no need for auto failover. No need to load balance CAS. No need for any kind of load balancing solutions (HLB, WNLB etc.) All we want is an active/passive scenario in case something goes wrong with the active machine.
I have read everything i found so far and the more i read the more questions arise. One guy ran into issues installing the second Exchange because the new machine took over the CAS role and mails got stuck in the queue because of a missing connector (pls. keep in mind that we are talking about a production system with de facto 24/7 operations).
My questions:
1) Is this desired scenario given the current situation even realistic?
2) I want to avoid renaming the first machine which I had to if I wanted a CAS Array to have the name of the first server in order to have all clients still connecting properly to the newly created array. (Am I missing something here?)
3) Setting up the DAG then should be quite straight forward?
Many thanks in advance!
Martin
