As discussed in our post Exchange 2010 & Virtualization: Enabling ‘Always On’ Email we reviewed the many benefits of Exchange 2010 and virtualization and the opportunities they create for small and large companies alike to achieve ‘Always On’ email that is not only affordable, but can be implemented quickly and effectively.
To expand upon this topic, the following design represents a ‘Real World’ example of a deployment scheduled to start this month:
Before reviewing some of the finer points of this design, a note about the client: They have already invested in a Disaster Recovery Site, a good amount of bandwidth dedicated to that site, and a VMware Infrastructure, including SAN replication and Site Recovery Manager. However, to my point in the previous blog, a recent outage resulted in the conclusion that a 2-4 hour recovery window for Email was not acceptable; they wanted Email to be ‘Always On’.
Now, onto the design notes:
- All components will be installed on their existing VMware Infrastructure, which means that all Servers will be able to take advantage of features like HA and vMotion that protect against planned or unplanned hardware downtime.
- The environment is designed to provide multiple levels of redundancy – there is no Single Point of Failure.
- If a single physical server fails, VMware will provide redundancy.
- If a single Virtual Machine fails, Exchange replication or Windows Network Load Balancing will provide redundancy.
- If an entire Site fails, Email will automatically be rerouted to the remaining site via the Hosted Email Filter (McAfee SaaS, formerly MX Logic, is our provider of choice).
- If both sites fail, incoming Email will be queued up by McAfee SaaS and be made available to users over the Internet.
A decade ago, implementing an Email environment that could truly provide this level of High Availability could have taken six months to 1 year and cost in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Today, we estimate this deployment to take less than a month and cost in the $15,000-$40,000 range, including software and services, making Always On email a reality for even our smallest customers.
