What s New

What's New

Clustering in Exchange 2003 leverages the clustering technology provided with Windows 2000 Server and Windows Server 2003, enabling Exchange administrators to create high-availability, fault-tolerant messaging architectures.

Although there are no "hard" numbers on uptime and availability of a clustered Exchange 2003 implementation, benchmarking from Exchange 2000 indicates that clustering is instrumental in moving availability toward 98% uptime and beyond. With improvements to both the underlying clustering technology in the operating system and improvements to Exchange 2003, this should push the reliability and availability to optimum levels.

If you had already clustered your existing Exchange 2000 implementation, you will find that the cluster configuration required for Exchange 2003 is similar. The main difference in clustering between releases is the number of nodes that the underlying operating system supports. With the introduction of Windows Server 2003, you can now have up to eight nodes within a single cluster.

This chapter explores some of the new clustering features and implementation methods, as well as the prerequisites for clustering, how to install and configure an Exchange 2003 cluster, and how to upgrade from an existing Exchange 2000 cluster.