Chapter 15: Reliability and Availability 101

Overview

Picking a single most important responsibility for an Exchange server administrator is tough to do. Arguably, we would have to say that the biggest responsibility is actually a tie between making sure your company's information is backed up and making sure you are providing access to that information when a user requires said data.

If you attend any Windows or networking conferences, the disaster recovery and high-availability sessions are always the ones that are standing room only. Apparently, then, providing good availability and having the ability to recover from a serious outage are universally though of as important.

In this chapter we are going to cover steps that you need to take in order to provide your users with better availability. As you will quickly learn, a lot of the things you need to do to improve the availability of Exchange are common sense and technologies that you already understand.

Experienced Exchange server administrators and consultants will tell you that some of the most important things that you do to improve availability are all procedural rather than technical. They will also tell you that much of the unplanned downtime they have been exposed to has been due to something really simple that no one thought of.

Topics in this chapter include the following:

• Understanding the basics of high availability

• Building redundancy and fault tolerance

• An introduction to clustering