Hi Guys, I'm in the process of designing a Exchange 2007 Sp1 Environment and need some help. We want the highest possible form of redundancy available. Right now we are running a single Exchange 2003 server (HP DL380 G4) in production which replicates to our DR site using Double Take. Our new design will utilize Vmware ESX3.5 on a EMC SAN and HP Blade 460c Servers. ESX3.5 will be installed on the HP blades, 32 gigs of ram 4 core 3.0ghz. We will create Virtual servers that RESIDE ON THE EMC SAN. The resources for the servers will be coming from the HP Blades and the actual vmdk files for the servers will be hosted on the SAN, the exchange servers will be on the Fiber Channel LUNS. We have 1 forest, 1 domain with multiple DC's in 4 seperate sites. All 2003 Servers in our environment, some SP1, DC's are SP2. I have a few questions which i hope you guys can help me answer. 1 - Are there any advantages/disadvantages for Exchange if we upgrade our Domain Controllers to Server 2008?2 - Are there any advantages/disadvantages for Exchange if we install Exchange 2007 on Server 2008? Redundancy design: We intially were going to use CCR but i'm taking an Exchange class and i'm starting to think SCC for local replication and SCR for remote replication is also a possiblity. Do you guys agree or should i still be considering CCR locally? We only have 1 Raid Group for the Fiber Channel Storage so the two Exchange Servers will be on this Single Raid Group, within this Raid Group we have just 1 LUN. In my mind two copies of the same database using CCR on the same LUN/Raid Group wouldn't be effective. The only way I see CCR effective is if there is a delay in replication like SCR so if one of my databases gets corrupted it will failover to the passive database that does not have the corrupted change. Is I/O going to kill my SAN if i'm using CCR to write to two databases on the same LUN? For offsite replication we want to use SCR to our DR site. If we use CCR in production and use SCR to replicate over the WAN to another site will we need to have two servers in the DR site (one for each of the passive and active CCR cluster) or just 1 that will host the data? We will definatley have a seperate Client Access Server with just this Exchange role. Can this server run CCR locally and how difficult is it to bring this server back to life if it crashes, is it worth it to have another standby CAS server? There is also the SAN replication software from EMC called MirrorView that we can use to replicate our Exchange info across to the DR site rather than using SCR but i won't get into that yet as we can speak to the EMC vendor regarding their recommendations on Mirrorview and Exchange. I hope i made sense and you guys could help me out.

joker3333 wrote: 1 - Are there any advantages/disadvantages for Exchange if we upgrade our Domain Controllers to Server 2008?There are no Exchange-specific benefits to 2008 Active Directory. Some could argue the benefits help the overall environment, which includes Exchange, but nothing "Exchange-Specific". joker3333 wrote: 2 - Are there any advantages/disadvantages for Exchange if we install Exchange 2007 on Server 2008?Yes, see this article:http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2007/08/16/446709.aspx and more importantly, this one:http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2008/03/05/448338.aspx joker3333 wrote: i'm starting to think SCC for local replication and SCR for remote replication is also a possiblity. Do you guys agree or should i still be considering CCR locally? made sense and you guys could help me out.You may have misspoken, but SCC includes no replication. this is where multiple servers access the same shared storage. LCR is not a cluster technology, but this maintains another database copy on the same server that can be manually activated in a primary database failure. CCR requires 2 servers and it copies the database from one to another. if a database or entire server fails the other wakes up.Also, CCR is between two windows clustered servers. You cannot include a client access server in the mix. I'm afraid you've got a lot of your facts and assumptions wrong about the different technologies. Dont worry, it is pretty complicated, but perhaps email me directly to continue this discussion offline.