Hi folks. We've got an isolated dev environment that includes carbon-copies of our DC's, SQL and file servers. We are now moving towards developping against Exchange. For the VERY obvious reasons, I don't want the developpers tinkering with the live environment. Here's the question: Would I be better off cloning one of the existing Exchange servers (all 4 roles) and bringing it into the isolated network and smash it over the head so that it works without the DAG? Or would I be better of building from scratch and kill myself making sure the dev environment is identical to the production environment? Thoughts? Thanks! -P

Cloning it will save you headache, if you build from scratch, keep in mind since you cloned your DCs, your DCs already have the exchange configuration container for the exchange servers. If you rebuild from scratch you won't be actually rebuilding from scratch but actually doing a recovery. James Chong MCITP | EA | EMA; MCSE | M+, S+ Security+, Project+, ITIL msexchangetips.blogspot.com

Cloning it will save you headache, if you build from scratch, keep in mind since you cloned your DCs, your DCs already have the exchange configuration container for the exchange servers. If you rebuild from scratch you won't be actually rebuilding from scratch but actually doing a recovery. James Chong MCITP | EA | EMA; MCSE | M+, S+ Security+, Project+, ITIL msexchangetips.blogspot.com