Exchange 2003 DSaccess

[jvandebogert]

I have read through the exchange server 2003 technical reference guide and learned a lot about DSAccess. I have two DC's. One that is a GC and has all FSMO roles and another as a backup DC with GC on it as well. My goal here is to have exchange server run without a hiccup if the main DC with the FSMO roles goes down. I see that if I reboot the main DC after some time it does recognize the other DC as all the directory acess roles. However, that is a problem because then exchange is down for a bit. So should I simply turn off automatically discover servers and manually enter them? I am not sure of the correct way to do this.

 

[ntinlin]

As far as I know XC doesn't really care about the FSMO roles for its day to day running, only GC availability.
It does need a DC for config info. but a GC is of course a DC as well.


Although I have seen other queries in the forum about problems when the PDC emulator DC goes down.

 

[silentsam33]

We have had this issue as well. Exchange always needs to be in contact with a GC, so to have 2 in the local LAN is a good idea. When we need to do maintenence on our main DC (which has most roles) we do switch the Exchange server to point to the other GC manually. Then switch back to auto when the server comes back on.
One thing I have noticed when the auto configured DC does go down, that Exchange does not switch smoothly. It likes to do DNS lookups to only the first listed DNS server (in NIC properties) and does not like to switch to the other DC/GC server. I have seen this behaviour on our old Exchange 2000 server and our new Exchange 2003 server.

Has anyone gotten GC and DNS round robin working with an Exchange server in case of a DNS or DC server goes down?