Exchange Server High Availability
Why would you consider implementing Exchange Server High Availability (HA)? One of the answers is pretty simple, the Exchange Server needs to stay up and running. In this article, you will have an understanding of the Exchange Server HA. Did you know that High Availability is one of the most used terms in the IT world? It’s all about staying online.
Why choosing for High Availability in Exchange?
There are two High Availability configurations in Exchange Server. One of them is to have the Exchange Server in HA. The other is having the mailbox databases in HA. I recommend configuring both. Note: You can’t configure HA when you don’t have more than one Exchange Server.
For example, you have an Exchange Server running. The organization needs to send and receive emails 24/7. You should ask yourself the following questions:
- What if the Exchange Server will crash?
- What if you are planning maintenance on the Exchange Server?
If you don’t have HA configured and the Exchange Server crashes, email service will stop working. This means that the organization can’t send or receive emails. That is when High Availability comes into play. When a server goes offline, there will be no downtime. Another Exchange Server will take it all from there.
Exchange Servers High Availability
You can configure High Availability with Round-Robin DNS or with a Load Balancer. An article about HA with Round-Robin will follow. An article about HA with a Load Balancer will follow.
Exchange Database Availability Group (DAG)
You can have the mailbox databases in High Availability. You will make use of the Database Availability Group. An article about configuring DAG will follow.
Percentage High Availability
What does it mean when a company grants you a 99,99% percent uptime guarantee? This means that the downtime is only 52.60 minutes a year. You need to have a good understanding of the HA in percentages. A great list that you can use for uptime guarantees.
Conclusion
In this article, you learned about Exchange Server High Availability. HA is not something that you only configure on the Exchange Server level. You can apply it to other IT-related hardware/software configurations. I hope that this article was informative to you. Did you enjoy this article? You may like Check which .NET Framework versions are installed. Don’t forget to follow us and share this article.
