Exchange fault tolerance? Can I be proactive?

[adriann]

Is there any way to have a more fault tolerant exchange environment than just a single raid 0/1 server and Veritas backup with the Exchange add on doing nightly backups? Everything I read here seems to indicate a mad scramble when a mail server goes down and there seem to be several different methods of restoration all of which are plagued with issues eg; The DS must be older than the IS. This is an Exchange 5.5/NT 4.0 server on a single domain with 200 Outlook 2000 users.

 

[Gafer]

There is no simple or cheap way especially for a small setup. Even if you added a second server and moved some of your clients to that, if the other server goes down then the clients that are on that server will be without mail services until you sort it out. Possibly the only thing you can do is to have a "standby" server that is held offline until you need it but you are still going to have to do a restore and of course you have hardware sitting there doing nothing most of the time. Whilst things are better under Exchange2K to get good tolerance means spending the dosh. Ah the joys of Exchange ;-}