Hello All

I'm about to embark on a project of getting our Exchange all configured for Disaster Recovery (Site Resilience).

Currently, we have two multi-mode Exchange 2013 servers running on top of Windows Server 2012 R2 (a little over 700 mailboxes (user, resource, etc...)).

One of the servers is at our primary data center and the other is for a non-company owned COLO (Co-Location).

We are basically split into three AD sites, our primary, the COLO, and our DR site.

I forget the name of the company and system; however, our Disaster Recovery works actually by taking VMWare snapshots of systems hourly, then if a system outage occurs the VMWare system is spun up.  Apparently, the company only allows one system to be spun up 24/7 and that is a domain controller.

So, with our DR site having that rule about only having one system spun up at a time, and that system being a domain controller - Am I pretty much out of luck for the notion of having automatic data center failover?  Where my best solution would be to have one File Share Witness at the primary data center and an alternate at the COLO?

There's no reason to do DR that way.  Use Exchange's native re