Question:
I found out about a software suite around eight months ago that would allow me to mirror my production server on the fly and that would make the mirror act as a fail-over server in case the primary failed. I can’t seem to find the software anymore and I didn’t bother to document where it was that I found it (what an idiot, huh?).
Do you know of any software that will do this? I’m not looking for load balancing or performance boosting, just fail-over redundancy. My current solution is to do a nightly backup of the data store and have a backup server sitting close by that is configured exactly as the production one (it even has the same server name and IP address). This has been successful, but it takes about four hours to restore the database and we lose all the e-mail that has come and gone since the last backup.
Any advice you may have on this would be greatly appreciated.
Answer:
There are a few options, but the tried-and-true option (and the one best supported by Exchange) is Microsoft Cluster server. It doesn’t do any load balancing and it’s an Active-Passive cluster, but it will give you the fail-over capability you want.
