Rebuilding Exchange 2000

[micon55]

I have 2 back end servers in our domain which both work successfully. Unfortunately, the hard drive space on these boxes is too small. I would like to rebuild these 2 boxes with larger capacity.
Has anyone tried this before? Do I need to do anything to my domain? Am I asking for trouble?

Many Thanks.
Mike

 

[AdmanOK]

Are you replacing it with a new server, or just reinstalling to add more disks? If you are replacing with a new server I would install the new box along side the old server and move the mailboxes over to it... very painless, and the Outlook clients will even automatically rehome to the new server!

 

[micon55]

Thanks for that. I will be using the same server for the new disks.
I'm not that bothered about having to re-install Exchange from scratch, but am slightly concerned about the existing Exchange information within our domain.

Thanks

 

[wallst32]

micron55 - Do you have the option of adding the new disks to the existing systems? Or is this not desired, or will not fit due to system case?

If you can add the disks, you can simply move the database files to the new disks (unmount, copy the database to the new drives, repoint the store the new path, remount).

If you need to replace the disks, it gets more tricky. Maybe you could temporarily move everyone to one server (put some of that new drive space in the this server if you have to). Then you could decommision the other server and reinstall it with the new larger drives. Move everyone to this new server, and repeat the process for the other system. Yes a lot of work. But this keeps uptime high.

If availability is not an issue, you could just exmerge data out of the existing server, reinstall, and exmerge back in, and do the same for the other.

 

[Mark192]

Has anybody setup exchange 2000 on two seperate boxes to provide mirroring and high availability?

I have two servers a gig's worth of bandwidth between them, currently all clients connect to one exchange sever from both buildings, however I need to setup so that both sites carry the data in the case of the link or the server goes down.

Any help welcome without spending a fortune on Veritas solutions!