I have one DC locatedin site A(head office) and additional domain forA installed in site B (new branch) Can you just tell me what is the best scenario to do the installation of Ms Exchangeinsite B Where the mailbox of site B are stored? If a user in site B sends email to user in B, does the email flow to A then back to B? If A went down, can the mailbox be restored at B without loss of data? thanks--------------Hello Team Would you help me in this scenario? I have Site A (head office) where DC is installed and exchange is there I am doing the installation of 2 new branch sites B and C as additional DCs (connected through VPN) The enquiries are: 1-Tohave a backup for exchange A in site B and C 2-For best performance: The installationshould meet this: If a user in B sends a mail to another user in B, the mail should stay in B and not flow to A then back to B...Same scenario should happen forA and C In addition: what happens if site A goes down? Is there any automated replication process for mailboxes? Or I should restore the backup of the previous day on B or C...so there is a loss of data?? can you guide me with this scenario? Appriciate your help:)

there is only one solution for this case. first of all you need to know that exchange is talking the ad sites languge so for example if you keep the mail box in the mailbox server which is in the site B it will query the domain controller of the site B even if you placed it over a wan linked site. talking about Best senario, the best of the best is to keep exchange in the AD site acompanied by 2 global catalogedomain controllers. but if you don't have servers just one is enough . so what is the solution for your case , actually it's costly solution as it needs min. 10 servers to be acheaved but looking to your requirment of hi availability you can decide if it's worth or not. you a 2 CCR's Streatshed over wan which is the design i am dealing with in my own environment. this will gurentee site redundancy and also serverredundancy. you will need to have cas-hub-edge in every physical site. just if the concept is ok for you tell me to give you the full details about this design. other wise givving you another solution. thanks Alaa Elmahdy

Hello AlaaI appreciate your quick and detailed answerhowever, i wont ask for 10 servers.....it isnt the best timing for that :P:P:P seems you want me to get fired??so can you give me some details about --the best of the best is to keep exchange in the AD site accompanied by 2 global catalogue domain controllers.-- and it would be very helpful if you msg me privately your email addressthanks Goodnight fornow:)

Given your budget crunch, what is the speed of the wires between the sites? It's a bit confusing to have your first question for Site A then B but then Site A, B, and C. I guess I would approach this as key for centralized or a distributed Exchange 2007. If you have budget concerns and you have a good pipe between your org you could look at doing a centralized deployment in Site A where you have a Mailbox Server with either CCR or SCC for redundency and then two Hub/CAS servers (on the same box) with the CAS role being NLB. You could then enable outlook anywhere and allow users to use the internet or the internal WAN as a way to access their mailbox and leverage cache mode.The problem with this is that your servers in site A need to be fast along with your data connections.If you need to have your servers spread out through your organization you could do an Exchange server in site A with MBX/H/C and then the same in Site B.For DR you would need to use SCR (if you're using clustering) or you could use a Replication like Snap Mirror or what ever it's called.What about a Virtual environment? Do you have ESX or HyperV in house? That could help reduce the hardware cost. Can you explain a bit more around the budget and what mgmt wants? You should always have two GCs in the same AD site as an Exchange Server. BP

hi again, As Bardaponysaid, If you post your Budjet we can scale the design to it . other wise we will just giving you some thing which we suggest that you have an open budget for it. in the case you don't have enough budjet then virtualization is the best if you need to have alot of servers over one in site but again for any senario mailbox virtualization is not recommended and you need to desing it well performance wise. Regarding your quistion about Global catalog , In every ActiveDirectory directory service site where you plan to installExchange2007, you must have at least one global catalog server that is running WindowsServer2003 SP1 or a later version. This is for the following reasons: WindowsServer2003 SP1 supports Exchange2007 service notifications. When a configuration change occurs in ActiveDirectory, a notification is sent to the service. Several Exchange2007 services use this notification. The notification mechanism in WindowsServer2003 SP1 is an improvement over the notification mechanism in Microsoft Windows2000Server. WindowsServer2003 SP1 and later versions allow users to browse the address book in Microsoft OutlookWebAccess. WindowsServer2003 SP1 and later versions provide the ability to look up distribution list membership in a more efficient manner than in Windows2000Server. then why good no. is two? because the Exchange is storing a lot of it's data in the active directory so it's heavily querying the active directory for this data often so you can't rely on just one DC " for sure you can when no budget" because exchange will fail if this DC Failed so it's a single point of failure. before you deploy Exchange server 2007 you need to have a look on this article in technet. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa996719.aspx Thanks Alaa Elmahdy.