Installing Exchange 2007 with Continuous Cluster Replication

Posted by DynamicVB

December 29, 2007

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I finally got around to installing Exchange 2007 for our domain. Every since we migrated from Domino/ Lotus Note sot Exchange I’ve missed the replication features built into Domino. When Exchange 2007 came out with this feature I was very excited as this gives another level of redundancy to your email system. Exchange 2007 is not really as robust as the solution available in Domino, but I think it will do.

Overall the installation was fairly painless. I did make a couple of mistakes so I’ll post those gotchas here in hopes that it may help someone else avoid them.

The first mistake was that we set up a test box to look at the features. Ideally i would have put the test in its own domain, but did not. I always figured I could just un-install it when we went to production, but that did not work out as planned. The main reason was that the public store was replicated from Exchange 2003 and then I could not remove it. Finally wound up fdisking the test install machine, but since the remnants of the Test install was left in AD, this required going into ASDIEdit and manually removing it. I don’t really like doing things in there, but sometimes its required.

Something to keep in mind when setting up a CCR topology with Exchange is to set up your clustered server’s prior to installing Exchange 2007. This is a requirement as you won’t be able to select your active and passive mailbox clusters when you install Exchange 2007 unless you have this setup on the machines.

I set my system up as follows. 2 Clustered Dell 2950’s with 8 gigs of Ram in each and one 1950, for the Hub Transport and Client Access roles. I have not set up Unified messaging yet, but I will probably do that on another machine if i decide we need that functionality.

Really the only bad issue I ran into was getting Exchange 2003 and Exchange 2007 to pass mail back and forth properly. There was not a lot of information out on the web about this, but we finally got a hold of it. A couple of the problems preventing mail form working properly were:

1. Ensure you do not have a smart host set up to forward all outgoing mail form exchange 2003. This caused an issues where mail would go fine from Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2003, but would not go to Exchange 2007 from Exchange 2003 or outside mail accounts. Makes sense once you think about it. The Exchange 2003 server does not have a mail account for the particular user so it send it to the smart host( usually a spam filter or virus wall application) which inturn forwards it back to Exchange since that is where the domain mail is configured to be delivered. This creates a loop.

Another issue I had was multiple NIC’s in my HubTransport. Having two nics enabled was causing a DNS routing issue where mail destined for outside email address could not have the DNS resolved. This really seems like a bug to me as it should have picked up the active card and I selected the active NIC in the HubTransport Internal DNS properties it started forwarding mail correctly.

Once I got this issues corrected then mail started passing correctly and it seems to be fairly stable. I’ve started moving some of my users over to the new box and exploring the many new features. One issue I do have is where to enter the license data for the Enterprise Client Access licenses I purchased. Several features are disabled without adding the licenses I purchased, but I can’t seem to find a location to add them in yet. I guess I’ll have to do some more research in this area.