Chapter 7 -- Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server in Clustered Environments

Chapter 7

About This Chapter

Digital Equipment Corporation and Microsoft developed their first popular Microsoft Windows NT clustering products in the mid-1990s—Digital Clusters for Windows NT and Microsoft Cluster Server 1.0. The earliest version of Exchange Server offering true clustering support was Microsoft Exchange Server 5.5 Enterprise Edition. With Windows 2000 Advanced Server and Windows 2000 Datacenter Server, clustering is supported in the form of the Cluster service. Of course, Exchange 2000 Enterprise Server also supports clustering, giving you a complete, mission-critical messaging solution. Clustering support is not available with the Exchange 2000 Standard Server.

Clustering is an advanced technology that allows you to design high availability solutions for your enterprise-level applications. It is a complex technology, yet straightforward to handle and worth evaluating. Together with proper hardware and system management, clustering can help you to improve the availability of your systems. Clustering is often brought into play in business-critical services such as messaging in an enterprise environment.

This chapter focuses on the installation of Exchange 2000 Server in a clustered Windows 2000 environment. Lesson 1 provides a brief introduction to the clustering technology. With an eye on Exchange 2000 resources, Lesson 2 then covers important load-balancing concepts, such as active/active clustering and failover procedures. In Lesson 3, you can read about the actual installation of Exchange 2000 Server into clusters that consist of up to four nodes.

Before You Begin

To complete this chapter:

• Prepare your test environment according to the descriptions given in the "About This Book" section.
• Be familiar with the components of Exchange 2000 Server, as explained in Chapter 3, "Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server Architecture."
• Have a general understanding and practical experience with the Windows 2000 Cluster service.