Exchange 2000 Active/Passive Clusters
I was onsite with a customer the other day where they have been experiencing some cluster issues. Overall, the cluster was fine, just some minor configuration issues which needed to be addressed. This is by no means an in-depth list, and I highly recommend that you read the "Deploying Microsoft Exchange 2000 Clusters" whitepaper (this can be found here ) if you wish to deploy a cluster in the first instance, however if you have already implemented a cluster and are experiencing some niggly behaviour, ensure that:
- Anti-Virus exclusions are set, so that any .EDB; .STM; .CHK; .LOG; .EML are not being scanned.
- Ensure that the Exchange IFS drive (M:) is fully excluded. Better still, hide this drive completely! You can find out how to do this here.
- If you are having mail performance issues, check that your transaction logs, mailbox & public stores and mail root are on separate spindles.
- The cluster heartbeat (private interconnect) if running over teamed NIC's is an unsupported configuration. Check out this for more information.
The guys have been working really hard and announced this week the release of Exchange Best Practices Analyzer 2.0 (ExBPA)....If you've not downloaded it yet, I highly recommend that you do! You can get it from here.
