I am working on a difficult situation. One of my clients was running *sigh* SBS. They had a fialure and one thing led to another, and they are now running on a half-working OS. I am setting them up with a second server. They are wanting 100% replication between the 2 servers. If one server goes down, they don't want any downtime before the second server picks up the load. They are running their IIS web, Exchange, and their AD off their ccurrent setup. What I plan to do is setup the new server with 2003 & Exchange. Once I get it setup with the same files and setup as the current SBS, I am gonna blow away SBS and install 2003 on it as well. What would you folks recommend for the up-to-the-minute redundancy? Thanks all! You can't be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline--it helps if you have some kind of football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer. ~Frank Zappa

With 2 servers, how can you have "complete redundancy" while properly designing things? When you go full blown Exchange and Active Directory, you do not want two domain controllers running Exchange. Horrible idea. You would need a total of four servers. With the DC's, make the second DC a Global Catalog server. With the two Exchange servers, you're going to need Windows 2003 Enterprise as well as Exchange Enterprise, shared storage, and then use Microsoft Clustering Services. All that is a hard sell for a company that sounds like they're small since they were running SBS. I suppose you could load up two servers with a virtualization product such as VMWare or Virtual Server Enterprise, and create 4 Virtual Machines (2DC's, 2 Exchange servers on shared storage), but I don't think it would be up to the minute redundancy with 0 downtime you're looking for. SBS is attractive because it was designed to handle all that load for 75 users or less. No redundancy is something Small Businesses must recognize just financially unavoidable. What failure did it suffer? What may be more economically feasible is ensure the hardware is redundant and fault tolerant as possible. Does the server have redundant power supplies? NIC's? Most importantly, are the disks setup in RAID arrays that are fault tolerant (RAID1, 5)? Please help survivors of Hurricane Katrina! www.redcross.org