I believe that clusters, whether active-active or active-passive, provide poor business value. I truly believe that clusters actually reduce availability for most users; the posts in this form help confirm that. The reported list of problems are long but the list of those who believe a cluster has "saved their bacon" (an Ed Woodrick term) is tiny. Those who are considered "experts" on this list, its companion lists, and newsgroups (and take that moniker for whaterver it's worth) nearly unanimously (if not fully unanimously--I can't recall an MVP who thinks they're worth the effort, but there may be one) agree with me.
With two-way clusters, why bother with an active-active at all? You have to scale each machine so that it can handle all of the users, so what do you get by running each node at half capacity? You're just buying two machines where one will do. You should buy the most internally redundant system you can and consider it to be a single-node cluster. Properly configured, Exchange really does fail very rarely, and clusters provide no protection from most, failure points. For example, clusters do nothing to reduce any problems related to corruption or disk space management since they share the same database and log files. What does a cluster protect you against versus an internally redundant single-node system? Not much more than a failure of a motherboard. And how often does that happen? Does it justify more than doubling the system cost? Just about everything else can be made redundant. One of the pimary arguments I hear for clustering is that it allows an organization to make its service level agreements. Frankly, if an SLA is written such that the business cost of a planned outage on, say, one Sunday morning a month makes it cost-effective to deploy a cluster, then the business value of the SLA needs to be revisited. Ed Crowley MCSE+Internet MVP Freelance E-Mail Philosopher Protecting the world from PSTs and Bricked Backups!T -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Microsoft Exchange List Server Sent: Monday, June 14, 2004 4:12 PM To: Exchange Discussions Subject: Exchange2003 cluster Hi all I have an AD with 200 mailboxes exchange2000 server, I want to build an Exchange2003 cluster to replace the exchange2000. Any good/bad comments about exchange2003 cluster. Please do you have any document on how to build the exhcnage2003 cluster and move the mailboxes from the existent Exchange2000 to the exchange2003 cluster. The cluster will be in the same AD. thx _________________________________________________________________ List posting FAQ: http://www.swinc.com/resource/exch_faq.htm Web Interface: http://intm-dl.sparklist.com/cgi-bin/lyris.pl?enter=exchange&text_mode=&lang =english To unsubscribe send a blank email to %%email.unsub%% Exchange List admin: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe via postal mail, please contact us at: Jupitermedia Corp. Attn: Discussion List Management 475 Park Avenue South New York, NY 10016 Please include the email address which you have been contacted with. _________________________________________________________________ List posting FAQ: http://www.swinc.com/resource/exch_faq.htm Web Interface: http://intm-dl.sparklist.com/cgi-bin/lyris.pl?enter=exchange&text_mode=&lang=english To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Exchange List admin: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe via postal mail, please contact us at: Jupitermedia Corp. Attn: Discussion List Management 475 Park Avenue South New York, NY 10016 Please include the email address which you have been contacted with.
