Exch 2003 on W2K cluster and DR plan advice

[gqma0]

Hi.

I'm no Exchange experts and I need your advice. I have a project to demonstrate to one of our customers using our replication product.
Our software is a data migration/replication at the block level and the customer would like us to demo the product with Exchange 2K3 on a Cluster running W2KSP4.

I've installed and setup Exchange Virtual server with one storage group only and it fails over properly, I created new accounts and I'm using OWA as the client to test mail exchanges.

I know how to migrate data within a cluster as we only switchover the drive letters to complete the migration with ClusterRecovery.exe.

The problem is that the customer wishes to replicate the data between a cluster and a stdalone server (different name) and be able to switchover to the new server in a DR situation.
I know you will ask questions why they want to do this and not use other alternatives (GDC). They want to see it happen and I don't argue.

I don't have the knowledge to accomplish this task so if you could point me in the right direction or lead me through the steps, that would save me a lot of time.

I understand the "move mailboxes" is the 1st choice of migration for Exchange admins but this is a DR scenario and we need to have a plan of actions for when the cluster is totally unavailable.
Thanks in advance

Gaetan

 

[gqma0]

Hi.

Please, does anybody know what best practices to accomplish the task ?

Surely, I guess there are Exchange servers within a SAN and the possibility to rezone the storage to another server in case of disaster ?

What's the plan when the server goes down and storage is intact ? Tape restore will take a while. Does anyone have data replication in place ? How do they switchover ?

Thanks again
Gaetan