Design? on 2 sites, 1 in USA and the other in Africa.

[tdoma]

We have a sister organization that has an office in DC and will be establishing an office in Uganda (Africa). I am not sure what kind of bandwidth is available to the internet in Africa (Uganda). I was wondering whether it is possible to setup an Exchange 2003 infrastructure that has 2 email servers 1 each in each location, be part of one forest, share the same domain suffix (abcd.com)? Would such a setup be feasible or recommeneded? Are there any pros and cons on such a setup? What would other people recommend? Would replication cause issues in such a scenerio? What kind of routing group setup would be recommended in such a situation? Would it be better to create a child domain for Uganda location? I am open to suggestions.
Thank U in advance.

 

[fs483]

Hello tdoma,

I hope you are sitting confortably

I manage a couple of networks remotely that are in Africa and any permanent link between those remote sites to my North American sites is nearly impossible. I have networks in Guinea, Niger and Burkina Faso. The Internet connections are far from good. We use VSAT to all Internet access for/to the African sites. There's also good old dial-ups using good hardware USR modems and then again, you are lucky to connect at 30Kb/s or above. The VSAT links range between 64Kb to 256Kb and if you have a lot of users that use the net, then it will come down to a crawl. The 256Kb links are VERY EXPENSIVE. We use also VOIP. We have MS Exchange setup at 2 of the sites and we put in a Proxy (soon to be upgraded to ISA) server to allow website caching and control Internet access. We also need to limit Internet usage for IM to off peak hours... Each of the sites have a separate domain because replication between North America and Africa is too slow and unstable. We also installed Citrix to allow the users in Africa to access applications in North America. VPN works but is VERY slow. Managing the servers from North America is painfully slow but we have no choice. We are in the process of setting up 2 more networks (Mana and somewhere else) for the year to come and more headaches (euh fun to come). Don't forget, there's also about 5 hours difference between Eastern Time and GMT - Casablanca time so plan on having techs wake up very early ! We have a tech online starting about 4am EST... If the network is medium sized (2 servers for redundancy + 10 or more workstations), plan on having an onsite tech to help you out. My networks have between 10 to 40 or so workstations and each one has an onsite tech to take care of the workstations and report back to us. The servers are managed all by us. Don't forget good anti-virus software. It's amazing the number of viruses (computer)they can get infected with. We had workstations that were infected with over 50 viruses ! If you plan on doing an onsite visit, make sure you have all your vaccinations ! My collegue does all the travelling but I still got my vaccinations. You never know when you need to fly out overnight because of a major problem.

Good luck
akwong

 

[fs483]

Hello tdoma,

I hope you are sitting confortably

I manage a couple of networks remotely that are in Africa and any permanent link between those remote sites to my North American sites is nearly impossible. I have networks in Guinea, Niger and Burkina Faso. The Internet connections are far from good. We use VSAT to all Internet access for/to the African sites. There's also good old dial-ups using good hardware USR modems and then again, you are lucky to connect at 30Kb/s or above. The VSAT links range between 64Kb to 256Kb and if you have a lot of users that use the net, then it will come down to a crawl. The 256Kb links are VERY EXPENSIVE. We use also VOIP. We have MS Exchange setup at 2 of the sites and we put in a Proxy (soon to be upgraded to ISA) server to allow website caching and control Internet access. We also need to limit Internet usage for IM to off peak hours... Each of the sites have a separate domain because replication between North America and Africa is too slow and unstable. We also installed Citrix to allow the users in Africa to access applications in North America. VPN works but is VERY slow. Managing the servers from North America is painfully slow but we have no choice. We are in the process of setting up 2 more networks (Mana and somewhere else) for the year to come and more headaches (euh fun to come). Don't forget, there's also about 5 hours difference between Eastern Time and GMT - Casablanca time so plan on having techs wake up very early ! We have a tech online starting about 4am EST... If the network is medium sized (2 servers for redundancy + 10 or more workstations), plan on having an onsite tech to help you out. My networks have between 10 to 40 or so workstations and each one has an onsite tech to take care of the workstations and report back to us. The servers are managed all by us. Don't forget good anti-virus software. It's amazing the number of viruses (computer)they can get infected with. We had workstations that were infected with over 50 viruses ! If you plan on doing an onsite visit, make sure you have all your vaccinations ! My collegue does all the travelling but I still got my vaccinations. You never know when you need to fly out overnight because of a major problem.

Good luck
akwong

 

[fs483]

Sorry for the double post, the page originally returned an error.