Looking for Input on Multi Site Exchange

[spazman]

I need to put in a multi site exchange site.

The Client requires significant uptime. they already utitize MXLogic for Spam and availability of email delivery.

They have two main sites. Their Co-location and Head Office. All branch offices VPN into the COLO. COLO has 100mb internet connection up and down and Headoffice has 100 down 10 up.

I was thinking that I would deploy 2 Edge Transport servers one in the COLO one in Head Office, DMZ. That way If either site went down, email delivery from MXLogic would continue, as would outbound email delivery.

Then deploy one CAS, Hub Transport Server (Shared Role server) this would reside in the Colo. And A DAG for the Mailbox database on two servers, one in the COlo one in Head Office. Round trip latency average is 14 ms, max is 60 ms.

Not being an Exchange expert, this design might be completely out to lunch. I recognize that if the CAS fails they are down. But in the research I have done this may be cost prohibitive. They are a not for profit organization. I could use Hyper-V Failover for the CA/HT roles, as there are two Hyper-V server in the Colo already.

Exchange experts and like your critism and thoughts are welcome.

 

[58sniper]

You have to look at what's going to happen when a specific site goes "down". If just the WAN link goes down, but internal systems are up, what do you want to happen? What threshold will cause a failover to the other site? If you want mail delivery to one site if the other site goes down, you need Hub Transports in both sites. Edge only delivers to Hub.

Your design would fail if the colo failed. You wouldn't have enough voting members to bring the DAG up in the head office.

There is a LOT of planning around site resiliency.

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