Hi We have two main offices - one in the US and one in the UK. Both have datacentres of equal size. Our domain is company.com and at the moment, the MX record points to an 2007 Edge server in the US. This is obviously a single point of failure, not just in terms of there being one gateway, but also if we lost the US datacentre. We are planning to build more Edge servers Gateways so that we have two in the US and two in London. What we'd like - i. External inbound mail from Europe is sent to the UK Edge servers ii. External inbound mail from US and Asia is sent to the US Edge servers iii. If we lose either UK or US, then all mail is sent to the remaining datacentre iv. Within each datacentre, inbound mail is split evenly between the two Edge servers. Does anyone know how to achieve this using MX records and costs etc?

Hi, I don't think there is a way to control mails comming from different regions/countries to a specific Exchange site. To my knowledge you have to create 2 MX records, one points to the primary site (you choose either London or the US site) and the other to the secondary site. I.e MX 10 - mydomain.com - IP of London edge server MX 20 - Mydomain.com - IP of US edge server If you loose one of the sites the other will take over with the settings above. Of course you need to configure the edge server to accept the mails for the domain and so on. If you want more edge servers at each site you can export the settings from one server to make a clone of it. There is a good article here about how to do it: http://www.msexchange.org/articles_tutorials/exchange-server-2007/high-availability-recovery/exchange-server-2007-edge-server-backup-cloning.html To create the subscription for the edge transport server to the hub transport servers you can read up on the process here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb125236(EXCHG.80).aspx Hope you will find some of the info useful /MartinExchange is a passion not just a collaboration software.

On Sat, 13 Nov 2010 21:17:31 +0000, mracket wrote: > > >Hi, > >I don't think there is a way to control mails comming from different regions/countries to a specific Exchange site. To my knowledge you have to create 2 MX records, one points to the primary site (you choose either London or the US site) and the other to the secondary site. I.e > >MX 10 - mydomain.com - IP of London edge server > >MX 20 - Mydomain.com - IP of US edge server I'd just make both MX equal in preference. I did that when I worked for a multi-national company and it worked well with data centers in NL and US. As an alternative you could use subdomains (us.company.com and uk.company.com -- or company.com and company.co.uk, which would be more familiar to European users). Then have the primary MX for the US point the server in the US and the secondary to the server in the UK. Do the same thing for the other domain. --- Rich Matheisen MCSE+I, Exchange MVP --- Rich Matheisen MCSE+I, Exchange MVP

Thanks both. A query - let's say all MX records are equal preference. One MX per Edge server. An Edge server for the UK is UKEdge1.domain.com An external user from London sends an email to user1@domain.com Now - theoritically, this could go to any of the four Edge servers. But the number of hops to the Edge servers in the UK is lower...so would there be a preference to send the message there?

On Sat, 13 Nov 2010 22:51:46 +0000, Smith1974 wrote: >A query - let's say all MX records are equal preference. One MX per Edge server. > >An Edge server for the UK is UKEdge1.domain.com > >An external user from London sends an email to user1@domain.com > >Now - theoritically, this could go to any of the four Edge servers. But the number of hops to the Edge servers in the UK is lower...so would there be a preference to send the message there? From the Internet there's no way to know how messages are routed internally. That's why I offered the suggestion to use different domains. Honestly, unless you're running tremendously busy servers the extra hops won't add more than a few seconds delay. --- Rich Matheisen MCSE+I, Exchange MVP --- Rich Matheisen MCSE+I, Exchange MVP

Agree with Rich on this. If you do want to be sure that European mails goes to the London datacenter you have to start using subdomains in the E-mails. But also as Rich writes the delay and pressure on the traffic between the datacenters shouldn't be that much of a problem. /MartinExchange is a passion not just a collaboration software.