We have an interesting issue,We are moving to a single domain across two sites with an HP EVA with CA and CLX at each site. Bothsites already have Exchange Setups on their own/old domains (one in exchange 2000 andthe otherin Exchange 2003) we want to move to a single ExchangeOrganization but each site stilladministrates their own exchange data/Mailboxes. We have two Servers at each site to run the Mailbox Servers. Also we want each site to be able to failover to the other site in a disaster situation. How would you suggest organizing this? Regards Mr. Confused

We need to break out your requirements to individual objectives. Let me see if I understand (correct me if i'm wrong):You have two active directory domains, each with ExchangeYou want to combine the domains into oneonce combined, you want mailboxes to stay local to the existing sitesyou wish to delegate administration so that half the mailboxes are managed by team 1 and the other half by team 2once the final solution is in place, you want each site to failover to the opposite site in the event of a failure of a single siteDo I have all of that right? if so, here are my responses to each item:Super. Exchange "Organizations" and Active Directory "forests" require a 1:1 ratiowe pick one existing domain to be a "master" domain and move objects into this domain. or we create a 3rd forest and move both into forest #3. the later would be ideal when both domains 1 and 2 are sketchy and we dont trust the config of either.this can be done by keeping exchange servers in each site as they are today. but the server will have to be rebuilt if we move it to a new domain. we can backup the mail, rebuild the server for use with the new domain, install exchange as a 2nd server in "new" forest then re-import exmerge backups. This will also likely require an outlook reconfiguration for each end-userthis gets tricky. You can break up exchange administration to some extent but generally you need to trust your exchange admins to leave the other "side" alone. you can sort of work this out by creating a secure OU structure for each "side"Here is the biggest challenge. Exchange 2003 does not have very flexible clustering (fail-over) options. you would have to build two clusters (one for each side) and have the passive node for each reside on the inverse network. you would then need expensive SAN replication and a stretched vlan with low latency. in short - i would not attempt this.If these are all real requirements, i would consider the following:Create forest #3 using Exchange 2007.move content from both existing forests into this new environmentExchange 2007 has a much more flexible archicteture. place "mailbox" servers in each site.configure SCR targets in each inverse site - another new feature with Exchange 2007deploy all of this on Windows 2008I realize this is a lot of info, so please look at it all and rephrase your question if you still need additional information. Keep in mind, this is a pretty complex task, and unless everything i just said makes perfect sense to you, i'd consider bringing in an expert. Mike Crowley: MCT, MCSE, MCTS, MCITP: Enterprise Administrator / Messaging Administrator

Thanks for your answer Mike,we are going to use Exchange 2007 and Windows 2008 in the new domain and I should have mentioned thesetwo Physicalsites are located over a 150 miles apart with a 100MB link between them. I have been doing some looking into the different options with clustering in Exchange 2007. I still have an issue with only having one node at each site and a target/Backup Node at the opposite site as when rebooting the mailbox server would result in failover and using the target node while dragging all e-mail traffic down the 100MB line, how easy is it in exchange to move control between the nodes. Just to make things more complicated we have a third remote site (Linked with 100MB link 120 miles from site A) on a third subnet that will be joining the new domain and putting in Exchange 2007. SiteA will not need to failover to the third site(C) but siteC will need a failover/target node at site A. what is the best way to use Exchange 2007 in this scenario. Once again thanks for your feedback Matt

Your options are:SCC with SAN replicationCCRSCRI think option 3 would be the most flexible in your situation. It lets you put sources and targets pretty much wherever you want to. http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2007/06/28/445538.aspxMike Crowley: MCT, MCSE, MCTS, MCITP: Enterprise Administrator / Messaging Administrator